Bringing Liquidity to Life: Markets for Ecosystem Services and the New Political Economy of Extinction

Research Gate

January 2016

by Jeremy Walker

 

John_Gledhill_painting_21

The Last Rhino. Artist John Gledhill [Source]

Abstract

This chapter attempts to situate the rise of market-based conservation policy, and its associated theoretical and policy frameworks such The Economics of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services within a wider history of what might be termed financialisation. Outlining a new chapter in the long history of ontological adjustment of ecological science to dominant accounts of political economy, this chapter explores the emergence of a novel political economy of extinction. This can be analysed in the transformations of theory: the reframing of the sixth extinction crisis within the neoliberal idiom of ‘natural capital’ and ‘ecosystem services’ reflects a history of the reprocessing of political and scientific ecological discourse in order to better accommodate it to reigning economic doctrines. TEEB and other articulations of market-based conservation do little to question the dominant economic theory that has licensed the financialisation of social, political and economic life and led to our current global economic crisis. As a species of power, it can also be analysed in the social connections of the corporate boardroom: where the professional authority, executive expertise, epistemic frameworks and political projects of senior conservation ecologists increasingly converge with those of the worlds most powerful bankers.

Bringing Liquidity to Life: Markets for Ecosystem Services and the New Political Economy of Extinction

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[Jeremy Walker is Lecturer in Environment, Culture and Society in the Social and Political Sciences Program. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts  from  the University of New South Wales,  a BA Communications (Social Inquiry, Hons) from UTS, and a PhD (History and Philosophy of Science) from UTS. Prior to his appointment at UTS he taught at the Dept. of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney.]