Abstract
The growth economy imposes multiple crises on humanity and the natural world. To challenge this economic growth imperative, the degrowth movement emerges as a dissident response. Although within an economic growth perspective, payments for ecosystem services (PES) have also been proposed to attenuate the negative impacts of capitalism, as a redistributive mechanism that is claimed to deliver equitable conservation and sustainability. Degrowth has notably similar concerns, although it is inclined to argue against PES traditional ideologies and practices, which lead conservation to perceive nature within economic growth and market ideologies, diminishing the relationship between humans and nature. In spite of that, PES are becoming a strong trend in environmental governance. This paper attempts to examine whether PES are, and how they could be suitable for degrowth, through the lens of its main sources. In order to integrate PES and degrowth, it could require a PES reconceptualization. Although we assert that PES are not the most appropriate instrument for conservation, we argue that maybe PES could contribute to degrowth as a transition instrument toward fostering better practices. However, it is important to elucidate how they can be used and under which circumstances they could be appropriate.
Highlights
Since the concern with global environmental changes arose within economic growth, new conservation approaches have been developed [1]
We argued in this paper that payments for ecosystem services (PES) are aligned with the neoliberalization of nature, which is built on the logic of economic development growth
PES are conceptualized as commodity fetishism and reproduce the idea of natural capital to represent what once was perceived as nature
Summary
Since the concern with global environmental changes arose within economic growth, new conservation approaches have been developed [1]. The idea of ES has opened the possibility of understanding nature within market ideologies and recognizing environmental destruction and its effects on human well-being. Following this logic, among other projects, payments for ecosystem services (PES) have emerged and have been fostered with much enthusiasm [10,11]. This paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents some fundamental ideas of degrowth as a response to the misleading way that humans perceive nature under economic growth.
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