Shifting baselines: From austerity to additionality in the mangrove forest

Audrey Irvine-Broque
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Audrey Irvine-Broque: Department of Geography, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Environment and Planning A, 2025, vol. 57, issue 8, 1169-1189

Abstract: Across the field of biodiversity conservation, talk of the ‘finance gap’ for nature – the shortfall of money needed to meet global targets to halt extinction and ecological collapse – abounds. This paper asks how the finance gap, and its assumption of limited state capacity and funding, inform what solutions for ecosystem conservation and restoration are pursued. By analyzing a leading ‘nature-based solution’ – the mangrove forest – this paper examines how the consensus that government budgets are, and will be, insufficient for ecosystem restoration is foundational to the rationale and social license of carbon crediting projects. Putting the history of mangrove degradation into conversation with current efforts for mangrove restoration reveals how both degraded natures and degraded state capacity are rendered dependent on private finance for their restoration – an outlook Bigger and Nelson term ‘austerity natures’. Drawing from critical scholarship on filling ‘finance gaps’ left by state austerity, this paper puts the mangrove forest, and other efforts to make markets out of degraded ecosystems, into conversation with this broader reorientation of state capacity towards enticing private finance into funding societal objectives.

Keywords: biodiversity finance; carbon offsets; blue carbon; nature-based solutions; conservation finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:57:y:2025:i:8:p:1169-1189

DOI: 10.1177/0308518X251380086

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