Payments for ecosystem services as neoliberal conservation: (Reinterpreting) evidence from the Maloti-Drakensberg, South Africa

By Bram Büscher. 2012

115 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Payments for ecosystem/environmental services (PES) interventions aim to subject ecosystem conservation to market dynamics and are often posited as win-win solutions to contemporary ecological, developmental and economic quagmires. This paper aims to contribute to the heated debate on PES by giving contrasting evidence from the Maloti-Drakensberg area, a crucial site for water and biodiversity resources in southern Africa. Several PES initiatives and studies, especially those associated with the Maloti-Drakensberg Transfrontier Project (MDTP), claim that an 'ecosystem services' market in the area is feasible and desirable. Based on empirical research in the area between 2003 and 2008, the paper challenges these assertions. It argues that the internationally popular PES trend provided an expedient way for the MDTP implementers to deal with the immense socio-political and institutional pressures they faced. Following and in spite of, tenuous assumptions and one-sided evidence, PES was marketed as a 'success' by the MDTP and associated epistemic communities that are implicated in and dependent on, this 'success'. The paper concludes that PES and the process by which it was marketed are both inherent to 'neoliberal conservation'-the paradoxical idea that capitalist markets are the answer to their own ecological contradictions.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a17c2b29a6b28caf447af7e8158b7abad9896110

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

1. Bram Büscher
2. E. Corbera
3. R. Fletcher
4. E. Gómez‐Baggethun
5. R. Muradian
6. A. Vatn
7. R. Norgaard
8. G. Hecken

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

1. R. Fletcher
2. Bram Büscher
3. E. Gómez‐Baggethun
4. R. Muradian
5. E. Corbera
6. R. Norgaard
7. Nicolás Kosoy
8. G. Hecken

In Soil Science

1. R. Fletcher
2. E. Gómez‐Baggethun
3. R. Muradian
4. E. Corbera
5. J. Gowdy
6. A. Vatn
7. B. Agarwal
8. Cheryl R. Doss

Citations in the corpus

• Accumulation by Conservation (2014, background): “…this recognition entails a great contradiction, namely that capitalism is now seen as the grand saviour of its own negative ecological contradictions (Büscher 2012), that is, the disjuncture between an economic system predicated on continual growth and the reality of finite natural resources…”
• Payments for ecosystem services and the fatal attraction of win‐win solutions (2013, background): “2008) or as instruments of neoliberal conservation (Büscher 2012), in practice very few existing PES can be considered as pure markets.”
• The PES Conceit: Revisiting the Relationship between Payments for Environmental Services and Neoliberal Conservation (2017, background): “These literatures examined how environmental governance around the world has increasingly adopted key neoliberal principles of privatization, marketization and commodification, among others, in challenging a previous emphasis on so-called ‘command-and-control’ mechanisms advocating direct state legi”
• In markets we trust? Setting the boundaries of Market-Based Instruments in ecosystem services governance (2015, background): “…to provide public goods, whereas some opponents from different streams of thought often took this market-like framing for granted and responded by portraying PES as instruments of “neoliberal conservation” (Büscher, 2012; Wynne-Jones, 2012), contributing to expand market mythology around PES.”