Description
Amid accelerating global ecological degradation, financial incentive-based conservation has gained prominence in policy and research, mobilising billions in investments annually. One key instrument of global climate finance under the UN Paris Agreement framework are payments for ecosystem services (PES). Promoted as a flagship solution to pay for the provision of ‘nature’s services’, the evidence of its effectiveness remains sparse while social equity and justice concerns persist. Debates on social equity and justice in PES, however, focus on the reproduction and subversion of neoliberal capitalist environmentalism – and neglect the ways in which PES are shaped by Western colonial heteropatriarchal ideas that uphold neoliberal capitalism. If justice is a central concern of critical scholars examining ideologies and power structures underlying as well as micro-practices subverting neoliberal logics within PES, then I contend that these critiques need to consider the conditions of social and environmental reproduction within PES. Drawing on materialist ecofeminist theory and (eco)feminist political economy, I argue that current critical debates on PES overlook three important issues: the issue of Western dualisms, the issue of gendered and racialised labour, and the issue of capitalist crisis as a crisis of social-ecological reproduction. Extending existing critiques of PES, ecofeminisms reveal how incentive-based conservation governance reproduces the conditions of possibility for ecological destruction it aims to solve, since it is based on a contradiction between capitalist environmentalism and the conditions of social and ecological reproduction. A sustained and serious engagement with ecofeminist arguments is needed to envision forms of conservation that are socially and ecologically just.
