Abstract
While many of the concerns over the economic valuation of nature have gained broad exposure, justice concerns remain largely peripheral. Within both scholarly debate and actual valuation exercises, the emphasis is most often on reconciling cultural and monetary valuation. Increasingly, as the valuation of nature gains momentum, proponents of the trend seek to relieve apprehensions by suggesting that economic valuation is entirely compatible with intrinsic and esthetic values. This attempt to mollify skeptics, however, misses the mark; regardless of whether or not nature may be valued simultaneously in cultural and economic terms, the social and environmental justice implications of monetary valuation remain. The purpose of this commentary is to clarify that much of the resistance to the economic valuation of nature is motivated by these justice concerns and that reassurances about the cultural value of nature do little to quell them. Several of the justice reasons to remain cautious of the economic valuation of nature are also elaborated.
Highlights
While many of the concerns over the economic valuation of nature have gained broad exposure, justice concerns remain largely peripheral
Questions of justice remain peripheral to most scholarly debates and valuation exercises
The acceptance of economic valuation is often a strategic calculation, but it is one that is rarely made in full consideration of its social and environmental justice implications
Summary
Foremost, conventional assessments of the ecosystem services concept fail to consider the implications of treating nature in such a way that it can come to hold an exchange value. When nature is abstracted into service commodities “that are adequate to bear value in capitalist circulation” (Robertson 2012) – that is, when complex ecosystem functions are reduced, for example, into tradeable tCO2e offsets and circulated in markets – new opportunities for accumulation emerge. Surplus value can increasingly be extracted by traders in speculative markets as nature comes to be “something always already encountered in the commodity form”. When such mechanisms are developed to capitalize on nature, it fundamentally alters the rationale for why conservation is undertaken. As nature is increasingly “subsumed” by the logic of such a system, conservation itself becomes an “accumulation strategy” (Smith 2007)
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