Global environmental justice and biodiversity conservation

Abstract

This paper explores the potential for an environmental justice framing to shed new light on conservation controversies. We argue that, in order to make such progress, environmental justice analysis will need to provide a 'difference-friendly' conception of justice and that this will necessarily involve moving beyond dominant liberal conceptions of distributional fairness. We are largely welcoming of global deployments of distributive justice principles. However, we also explore the dangers of focusing on distribution alone, questioning the assumption of positive relationships between benefit sharing and more culturally defined dimensions of justice such as recognition. The limits of access and benefit sharing for delivering justice writ large is that it can disenfranchise people who are less well equipped or less willing to navigate its prevailing system of knowledge. We argue that, especially in the context of resource poverty, efforts to improve distribution can require potential beneficiaries to assimilate to dominant discourses of society and nature. Such conditionality can contract the opportunities for local and autonomous constructions of 'different' ways of knowing nature, and in doing so may also contract possibilities for flourishing biodiversities. © 2013 The Authors. The Geographical Journal © 2013 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)

Nets and frames, losses and gains: Value struggles in engagements with biodiversity offsetting policy in England

“…England is being watched closely by varied interest groups in Europe and beyond, due to its welladvanced formulation of BDO policy as well as DEFRA's development of a standardised BDO metric as a key, if controversial, calculative device (cf. Callon and Muneisa, 2005) on which BDO exchanges might be based (DEFRA 2012b; see discussion in Hannis and Sullivan 2012;Knights et al 2013;Sullivan 2013). …”

“…Such antagonisms arise from divergent values and ontologies (cf. Descola, 2013;Sullivan 2013): proposed by Boltanksi and Thévenot (2006) as orders or economies of worth that give rise to incommensurable principles of collective agreement and create discord when one set of principles or 'rules of law' is insisted to be universal 16 . Divergent values, ontologies and orders of worth mean that 'difference makes a difference' (paraphrased from Bateson 1972, also Chakrabarty 2007Kohn 2013).…”

“…Divergent values, ontologies and orders of worth mean that 'difference makes a difference' (paraphrased from Bateson 1972, also Chakrabarty 2007Kohn 2013). This may be particularly so when recognition of divergences is precluded by the terms and frames within which deliberation is set (Martin et al, 2013), when people do not share the same principles that determine equivalence of worth (Boltanksi and Thévenot, 2006: 33), and when technical proposals and procedures are incorrectly assumed to be devoid of normative principles (ibid. : 29).…”

1. Forests, Trees and Landscapes for Food Security and Nutrition

“…Such new forms of valuation provide legitimacy to particular forms of governance such as state regulation to protect downstream and global citizens, or public-private partnerships to market forest carbon offsets. However, the incorporation of new, global values as drivers of forest governance also pose risks, with some stakeholders under threat of losing control over previous ways of valuing and governing forests (Hunsberger et al, 2014;Martin et al, 2013b;Pascual et al, 2014).…”

Applying the system viability framework for cross-scalar governance of nested social-ecological systems in the Guiana Shield, South America

“…The integrative model building process therefore needs to involve all stakeholders, but particularly the most marginalized sectors of society (Blom et al 2010). Marginalized communities, such as indigenous peoples, are usually the ones that have the most direct contact with the environment, yet have the most to lose from environmental degradation (e.g., Martin et al 2013) while at the same time are least able to engage with decision-making processes occurring at national and international levels (Taylor 2006, Nakashima et al 2012). Nevertheless, we need to recognize that there is no one reliable source of knowledge; there is a politics of scale on which actors with different knowledge claims will try to leave their mark on how issues are analyzed and addressed (Buizer et al 2011).…”