The Nature That Capital Can See: Science, State, and Market in the Commodification of Ecosystem Services

By M. Robertson. 2006

480 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/211467506e630b34cc3d8f0e00e7b98c14ca89bb

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Global and Planetary Change

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

Citations in the corpus

‘Measurementality’ in Biodiversity Governance: Knowledge, Transparency, and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (Ipbes) (2014, background): “” Thus, it is clear that IPBES has committed itself to creating science-based and user-friendly assessments that work for neoliberal policies and strategies (Robertson, 2006).”
Ecosystem services as technology of globalization: On articulating values in urban nature (2013, background): “Amorecomprehensivecritiqueargues thatinsteadofenhanc-ing nature's values, the ESS approach will degrade nature to the mundane and crass reality of demand and supply consumerism (Robertson,2000, 2004, 2006), effectively becominga vehicle to expand capitalism into ecosystems (Castree, 2008a,b).”
Payments for ecosystem services as neoliberal conservation: (Reinterpreting) evidence from the Maloti-Drakensberg, South Africa (2012, background): “As with many other PES initiatives (see Muradian et al. 2010), the MDTP report is highly reductionist by focusing solely on describing “a nature that capital can ‘see’—that has an uncontroversial measure—in order for trade to occur” (Robertson 2006: 367).”
In markets we trust? Setting the boundaries of Market-Based Instruments in ecosystem services governance (2015, background): “(2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2015.03.016 supply in the United Kingdom and Robertson (2006) in relation to wetland banking schemes in the United States.”
Payments for ecosystem services as commodity fetishism (2010, background): “In one of his latest works, Robertson (2006) points out the trade-offs scientists facewhenpolicy-makers encourage them to quantify and value wetlands characteristics and functions so that these can become tradable commodities.”
Data colonialism through accumulation by dispossession: New metaphors for daily data (2015, unknown): “This is the individual that capital can see through big data (Robertson, 2004): an individual dispossessed and alienated from the very data they generate, one who has been reduced to a set of data points created through technology use that places users within abstracted, aggregate identities.”
Strengthening conceptual foundations: Analysing frameworks for ecosystem services and poverty alleviation research (2013, background): “Furthermore, the impetus to convert knowledge in these fields to the (contested) (McCauley, 2006; Robertson, 2006) terminology of ‘services’ is unlikely to have been strong.”
Life for Sale? The Politics of Lively Commodities (2013, background): “The preoccupation with new sites of capital accumulation can leave older, ongoing forms of nature’s commodification—the nature that capital can already see very well, as opposed to the nature that capital struggles to see (Robertson, 2006)—to fall by the wayside.”
The mirror of consumption: Celebritization, developmental consumption and the shifting cultural politics of fair trade (2010, background): “Braun and Castree, 1998, passim; McAfee, 1999; Robertson, 2006, Price, 1995; Smith, 1996).”
The political ecology of ecosystem services (2015, background): “Therefore, political ecologists have, among others, shown that the metrics used for such services lay on instable values and uncertainties that compromise the possibility of the commodification of nature on stable metrics (Robertson, 2006; Barnaud, 2010; Ernston and Sörling, 2012).”
Payments for ecosystem services: From local to global (2010, background): “The third perspective largely rejects PES, and even the notion of ecosystem services, as the improper commodification of nature (Kosoy and Corbera, 2010; McCauley, 2006; Robertson, 2006).”
Economic valuation and the commodification of ecosystem services (2011, methodology): “Although processes involving the commodification of nature have been documented at least since the late 19th century (Polanyi, 1944/ 1957), since the 1980s the commodity frontier has expanded towards entirely new types of ecosystem services (Robertson, 2006).”
Market Masquerades: Uncovering the Politics of Community-level Payments for Environmental Services in Cambodia (2012, background): “This kind of injustice is endemic in Cambodia, and by no means unique to PES, but it does demonstrate how social justice can be undermined when diverse and conflicted groups of people are forced to function as single entities.”
Payments for environmental services as neoliberal market-based forest conservation in Vietnam: Panacea or problem? (2012, background): “Robertson (2006) has noted how difficult it is to assign values to ecological complexes involving many different species and relationships; he writes that ‘‘markets in wetland credits are quantified using complex algorithms that measure habitat value, contribution toward water quality,…”