Biodiversity and the contradictions of green developmentalism.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

New, supranational environmental institutions for “globalized” management of environmental resources rely increasingly on an approach I call green developmentalism. This study traces its construction and deployment in the World Bank, Global Environment Facility, Convention on Biological Diversity, and internationally-sponsored biodiversity conservation projects in Guyana. It reveals the common roots of the failures of green developmentalism and neoliberal development policy.
Green developmentalism promises market solutions to environmental problems, based on privatization and monetary pricing of nature. It constructs biodiversity as a new world currency and recodes ecosystems as carbon sinks and warehouses of genetic resources for biotechnology. Nature is expected to earn its means of survival through international trade in ecosystem services, access to tourism and research sites, and exports of timber, minerals, and intellectual property rights.
Green developmentalism fosters the false dualism that separates “nature” and “society” and the false unitarianism that conflates disparate interests of social groups as “global” common interests. By valuing local resources in relation to international markets, at the expense of local and regional use, exchange, and symbolic values, it reinforces the claims of elites to the greatest share of the earth's resources and undermines prospects for eco-social sustainability.
This study identifies contradictions between green developmentalism's universalizing discourse and the place-specificity of living nature and the human communities with which nature co-evolves. These contradictions pose obstacles to green developmentalist practices applied to particular nature in specific sites. They also resurface in international treaty regimes, e.g., as a refusal by cash-poor, gene-rich states to endorse claims upon their biodiversity asserted by “Northern” states and multinational firms.
Transnational NGO alliances active in multilateral environmental for “biopiracy” and the inequitable consequences of green developmentalist programs, and call attention to the particular countries, classes, and corporations that contribute to and benefit from environmental degradation. They expose the private accumulation agendas and institutional Power maneuvers hidden behind the purported efficiency of environmental economism and the claimed neutrality of “global” environmental institutions. By resituating nature in social and ecological space and time, they repoliticize international environmental discourse.