Neoliberalism, Environmental Justice, and the Convention on Biological Diversity: How Problematizing the Commodification of Nature Affects Regime Effectiveness

Kemi Fuentes-George
Additional contact information
Kemi Fuentes-George: Kemi Fuentes-George is an assistant professor in political science and environmental studies at Middlebury College.

Global Environmental Politics, 2013, vol. 13, issue 4, 144-163

Abstract: Payment for ecosystem services (PES) is becoming a dominant approach in generating political and societal support for conservation of globally important biodiversity. PES assumes that corporate actors and policymakers will be more likely to support environmental action if convinced of the economic rationale of doing so. However, by process-tracing two biodiversity projects funded by the Global Environment Facility in Jamaica and Mexico, I argue that linking biodiversity conservation to neoliberal economics reifies a short-term, exploitative view of the environment. Economic calculations about biodiversity will not persuade corporate actors and policymakers to abandon short-term exploitation. Moreover, commodifying nature under the neoliberal paradigm undermines other perspectives on the value of nature, notably those rooted in cultural, historic, subsistence and aesthetic paradigms. In turn, this restricts the ability of populations not integrated into major economic markets to participate in governance and influence what “effective” regime implementation looks like at the local level. © 2013 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keywords: environmental justice; biodiversity; conservation; global environmental governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q57 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GLEP_a_00202 link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:glenvp:v:13:y:2013:i:4:p:144-163

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1526-3800

Access Statistics for this article

Global Environmental Politics is currently edited by Steven Bernstein, Matthew Hoffmann and Erika Weinthal

More articles in Global Environmental Politics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().