Entangled Neoliberal Natures:
Payments for Ecosystem Services as Sites of Contestation, Hybridization and Transformation
Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG)
New Orleans, Louisiana
April 10-14, 2018
Session Organizers: Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza (Duke University), Gert Van Hecken (University of Antwerp), Pamela McElwee (Rutgers University), and Esteve Corbera (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
The concept of payments for ecosystem services (PES), through which financial incentives are provided to landowners for management practices thought to produce environmental benefits (i.e. carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, or cleaner and/or greater quantities of water downstream), initially emerged in the late 1980s and have since become a ubiquitous approach to environmental conservation. As a market-based environmental approach based on a neoclassical economic model intended to increase both the efficiency and effectiveness of environmental initiatives through voluntary, direct, market-like agreements between users and providers of environmental services (Wunder 2005), the PES approach matched well with and was bolstered by the neoliberal ideology that was then on the ascendency (Engel et al., 2008; Gomez-Baggethun et al. 2010, Norgaard 2010).
Accordingly, much of the critical scholarship on PES has been based on the framework of “neoliberal natures” (Heynen et al. 2007), with claims that imposing the structure of market logics and capitalist rationales on the conservation of nature is akin to allowing the lion to guard the lamb (Sullivan 2009; Norgaard 2010; McAfee 2012; Fletcher and Buscher 2017). However, although the original neoclassical economic model of PES largely continues to be upheld as the ideal by those who promote and fund PES, from multilateral lending institutions to international environmental NGOs, few if any initiatives conform to its constructs (Muradian et al. 2010; Kolinjivadi et al., 2017; Kosoy and Corbera 2010; Vatn 2010; Pirard 2012; Singh 2015; Van Hecken et al. 2015a). However, more recent, empirically grounded studies that both build on and push back against this body of critique, have explored these initiatives as “actually-existing neoliberalisms” (Bakker 2010, p 720), describing the nuanced processes through which the structure of neoliberal ideology at the foundation of PES is contested, transformed and hybridized through the agency of actors in the sites of implementation, from states, to social movements, to agrarian smallholders (McElwee 2012; Mahanty et al. 2012; Milne 2012; Shapiro-Garza 2013a; Shapiro-Garza 2013b; McElwee et al. 2014; Bétrisey and Mager 2015; Van Hecken et al. 2015b; vonHedeman and Osborne 2016; Kolinjivadi et al. 2016; Almeida-Leñero et al. 2017; Osborne and Shapiro-Garza 2017).
We are interested bringing together a collection of empirically grounded, theoretically informed presentations that explore the many ways in which the neoclassicial economic assumptions of a model of PES are or are not contested, hybridized and/or transformed by the grounded political, economic, socio-cultural dynamics of the sites of implementation. Some of the themes we are interested in exploring include the ways in which the following factors work to entangle the neoliberal logics of these initiatives to, successfully or not, through:
● Historical trajectories in the sites of implementation that run counter to neoliberal constructs;
● Alternative values held for the socio-natural systems;
● Dynamics of power and inequality;
● Institutional structures and constructs.
We are also interested in papers that include a more explicit discussion of the methods or theoretical frameworks that allow for the study of these processes.
Please send a title and an abstract of no more than 250 words by October 20, 2018 to Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza (elizabeth[dot]shapiro[at]duke
References
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