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- Convenor:
-
Pamela McElwee
(Rutgers University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Market-based instruments for conservation, like payments for ecosystem services, biodiversity offsets, and tradable permits, will be discussed in relation to resources managed by Indigenous Peoples, and the challenges regarding valuation of nature and equitable distribution of benefits.
Long Abstract:
In recent years, market-based instruments (MBIs) have become a major tool of conservation. These MBIs range widely in focus and scope, but share in common a goal of using economic incentives, either for promoting positive environmental services like habitat preservation or for discouraging negative environmental costs like carbon emissions, in the hopes that the market provides a more efficient, less expensive policy outcome than traditional regulation. MBIs for conservation policy have included subsidies to farmers for refraining from use of sensitive lands, tradable permits and quotas for harvestable commodities such as fish, and payments for ecosystem services (PES) and biodiversity offsets. MBIs that include compensation and/or incentives assume that in one way or another, a monetary value can be established for nature's value, and that this valuation can be used to leverage positive conservation behavior. Yet how MBIs have intersected with lands and resources managed or claimed by Indigenous Peoples (IPs) are not yet well understood. Many IPs have objected to monetary valuation of natural resources as a violation of cultural and ontological beliefs relating nature-human relations, while scholars have raised questions about the distributional and equity impacts of MBIs. Submitted papers are encouraged to address one or more MBIs in any part of the world that have been implemented on Indigenous lands or with IPs input and design, or which have have impacted IPs in some way, as well as papers that focus on alternatives to MBIs that have been proposed by IPs.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Research shows that payment for environmental services (PES) schemes are increasingly common but often viewed as incompatible with indigenous worldviews. Using Costa Rica as a case study, this paper examines how indigenous groups leverage consultations to reimagine Indigenous PES in the country.
Paper long abstract:
Costa Rica is often lauded as a pioneer in market-based conservation initiatives. Many view the country's payment for environmental services program, known as Pago por Servicios Ambientales (PSA), as an exemplary model. Proponents credit it for reversing the nation’s deforestation rates over the past 25 years. Given this success, the PSA is a vital component of the country's national Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) strategy. However, at the same time, others criticize the application of PSA in indigenous territories, asserting that the program restricts forest use, disregards customary land tenure and governance structures, and contributes to conflict. This has led to a call to reconceptualize the state's PSA program. Drawing upon ongoing doctoral fieldwork, this paper examines how indigenous stakeholders have leveraged recent REDD+ consultations to advance their demands and reimagine the PSA as an Indigenous modality. In doing so, it seeks to understand how Indigenous PSA/REDD+ might operate in practice, illuminating lessons learned and the potential obstacles and challenges that remain.
Paper short abstract:
This ethnography of conservations' market-based instruments (MBIs) in Leuser Ecosystem, Indonesia, interrogates the common binaries in understanding MBIs, such as regulation vs market, Conservation and Development (ICDP) vs MBIs, conservation vs indigenous people (IPs), market values vs IPs belief.
Paper long abstract:
Leuser Ecosystem is a buffer zone to the Gunung Leuser National Park (GLNP), located in Aceh and Northern Sumatra, Indonesia. Based on archival research and 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this research found that market-based instruments (MBIs) for conservation has been implemented during the ICDP (Integrated Conservation and Development) era in 1990s. Instead of being an alternative to the traditional regulatory schemes for conservation, most MBIs has been enabled by and being channelled within government regulations and institutions. Meanwhile, the Indigenous People (IP) have been integrated in market-based way of life. Hence, instead of being objected by IPs, MBIs had to adjust with rural class dynamics and the existing market relations of IPs. This paper will examine from the ground up how MBIs has actually worked and intersected with the life and values of IPs in Leuser Ecosystem. It found that MBIs were channelled to agricultural middlemen to support the development of cacao smallholder farming; to wealthy farmers who own rice fields while criminalizing landless IPs who depend on fishing; to local mayor and his political allies who created an ecotourism park in the form of palm oil estate in which he acted as an absentee landowner; and to rural creditor to increase the participation of IPs in the debt market. This paper also highlights the significant effect of 1998 Asian financial crisis to the monetary values of conservation funds’ foreign exchange rate which facilitate irreversible inequities of IPs particularly in the inaccessibility of the skyrocketing price of rural land.
Paper short abstract:
Mining companies have adopted “biodiversity offsets" to create a so-called "net positive impact." Offsets, however, legitimize a contradictory and paradoxical process: through destroying biodiversity, mining companies can “save” biodiversity. I discuss impacts of mining and offsets in Madagascar.
Paper long abstract:
Recent partnerships between multinational mining companies and international conservation NGOs centre around common agreement over ‘biodiversity offsets’ that allegedly achieve a “net positive impact” (Anstee 2007). Premised upon commodification of nature through the ‘green economy’, biodiversity offsets allow industry to destroy biodiversity in one location while conserving it in another. This in turn creates opportunities for mining companies operating in “biodiversity hotspots,” such as Madagascar, where Canadian-based Sherritt International, in cooperation with conservation NGOs, and Rio Tinto, working through its Quebec subsidiary, are implementing biodiversity offset projects that will, they assert, set a global standard for “green mining” and simultaneously encourage sustainable development in local communities. In so doing, however, they are destroying many sites of biodiversity, traditional access to which is of critical importance to the livelihoods, social relations and ancestral beliefs of local Malagasy people. This research project analyses the impact of the ‘biodiversity offset’ nexus of mining and conservation in Madagascar, focusing on (a) global land access and legitimization strategies and (b) local perceptions, impacts and stakeholder configurations. Drawing on political ecology and theories of mediation, biopolitics and theories on aesthetics, this project will critically analyze the valuation processes currently shaping biodiversity offsets in relation to local perceptions of land, labour, wealth, and heritage. As complex social and environmental phenomena become encapsulated in broader capitalist modes of production and commodification (Castree 2008), with even culture itself exchangeable through ‘cultural heritage offsets’ (Rio Tinto 2011), it is essential that the “offset ideology” be scrutinized, theoretically and ethnographically.
Paper short abstract:
An attempt is being made to implement a market-based instrument in the territory of the Kamëntsá people, which has generated social and internal conflicts because the development of this project has been shady, contrasts with the indigenous worldview and threatens the rights of the Kamëntsá people.
Paper long abstract:
The notions of territory and good living of the Kamëntsá people are interrelated with their culture, language and worldview. Therefore, there is a relationship of reciprocity and intimacy between nature and the community. As Kamëntsá elders point out, “the territory begins with oneself”. Consequently, any approach to conservation must first ensure that these elements are maintained.
The Kamëntsá people have resisted different forms of colonization and exploitation of their territory in recent years: from single-crop farming and GMOs, deforestation from livestock and illegal logging, mineral extraction and construction of a military base, trafficking of native species and the appropriation of traditional and medicinal knowledge. More recently, the so-called “nature-based solutions” have emerged as a REDD+ project which tried to take advantage of the socioeconomic status of the Kamëntsá people for the benefit of others. This proposal reinforces a colonialist perspective towards Indigenous Peoples and is evidenced in the statement of the company: “this is the most serious possibility for indigenous peoples to conserve nature, according to their culture, and at the same time generate resources for the needs that the modern world and the dominant society, have and are generating for them.”
Together with Kamëntsá researchers and activists, we have advanced several processes against such neocolonial projects and, at the same time, of conservation of the territory and environment based on the indigenous worldview. This can only be achieved with the empowerment of young people, with the valorization of traditional knowledge and the revitalization of the Kamëntsá language and culture.