Format/Structure

Paper presentation.

Long Abstract

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) have been proposed, particularly by Western scholars and practitioners, as necessary interventions that work with ecosystem functions to manage and respond to ecological crises while improving human well-being. However, until now, NbS has been shaped both by a predominant economic valuation of nature and within structures of capital accumulation and “green” developmentalism. This framing redirects attention from the structural and historical roots of ecological crises, largely ignoring how power relations shape nature as extractive frontiers for capital, whether for elite conservation value or discardable biomass for industrial supply chains. In this regard, NbS tends to reinforce historical uneven distributions of environmental and social harm both between Global North proponents holding the purse strings of projects and project recipients in the Global South, but also introduces new power constellations within communities identified as “providers” of NbS. This panel highlights early findings from a global project tracking macro-level asymmetries in financial flows for research on NbS (namely, payments for ecosystem services) to how NbS projects are designed and implemented on the ground. In this regard, NbS interventions can be understood as a “spatial fix” that normalizes broader regimes of surveillance and control over territories. Through NbS experiences in South Africa, Brazil, India and beyond, we highlight power asymmetries in project conception, financial support, and implementation. In this panel, we invite contributions that critically engage with NbS project experiences in the Global South and/or in the Global North intending to establish a set of strategic guidelines, tips, and tools for (re)appropriating these projects that strengthen legitimacy, accountability, and autonomy. In particular, we focus attention on those most marginalized from the asymmetries of financial or social capital embedded in NbS projects and to pre-empt attempts to map, catalogue, and prefigure territories for capital.

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