Valuing Species: The Continuities between Non-Market and Market Valuations in Biodiversity Conservation

Abstract

This article explores how the rise of new markets for biodiversity has been facilitated by existing, non-market-based valuation practices within the field of biodiversity conservation. Where others have considered biodiversity markets in terms of capitalist and/or neoliberal expansion, I argue that the abstraction of the value of living things in markets is made easier by the existing valuation practices of species-based biodiversity conservation. After briefly contextualising the terms 'species' and 'biodiversity' within the history of Western conservation, the article shows how biodiversity conservation-as science, policy and practice-subordinates the value of individual living organisms and emplaced ecologies to the abstract categories of species and habitat types. This conceptual move performs a condition of ethical commensurability between individual organisms and places, thereby prefiguring the equivalence of value between units of the same category needed to establish new markets for biodiversity. The article considers this link between the valuation practices of species-based biodiversity conservation and new markets for biodiversity as an instance of performative continuity. The article concludes by reflecting on the critical use of attending to the links between existing valuation practices in biodiversity conservation and new biodiversity markets.

Reassembling disaster risk: towards a more self-reflexive and enabling geography

“…Indeed, economics has a long-standing history of studying the presumed rational behaviour of individuals in the presence of hypothesized risks. The strong focus on data in physical geography, moreover make it possible to reach the levels of abstraction that are necessary for economization (Callon and Muniesa, 2005;Fredriksen, 2017). Of course, this is not to say that any project on landslide disasters in the Rwenzori would necessarily have led to further studies in the domains of physical geography or economics.…”

‘It’s not like any survey I’ve ever seen before’: Discrete Choice Experiments as a Valuation Technology

“…Its common usage reveals how comfortable we already are in abstracting certain species away from the ecosystems they are entangled with, making some good and some bad. As Fredriksen has argued, conservation biology itself is part of a performance of removing individual organisms from their lifeworlds in complex ecosystems to understand them instead as units in categories of life which can then be compared (Fredriksen 2017).…”

Materialising reform: how conservation encounters collection practises in zoos

“…The desire to link in-situ and ex-situ work introduces the inequalities among animals in international conservation more broadly into the zoo. The bias towards cute or scary furry mammals has been wellestablished in international conservation (Feldhamer et al 2002, Lorimer 2007, Fredriksen 2017, Krause and Robinson 2017. Curators, like conservation managers in NGOs, refer to 'flagship species,' whose appeal is used to narrate key messages about zoo priorities or used as an anchor to generate funding for conservation projects.…”