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.