ABSTRACT
Members of Re:Common speak of the growing interest of corporations in the financialization of protected natures via market-based mechanisms. Corporations involved in extractive industries, industrial agriculture and construction of large-scale infrastructure, International Financial Institutions such as the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, international conservation NGOs and a growing number of governments are increasingly employing a strategy known as “biodiversity offsetting”‘’. They claim that this will help protect biological diversity because for every hectare of land that is destroyed through their operations, the biodiversity related to another hectare of land will be protected or restored elsewhere. Re:Common argue that most offset projects have, as direct consequence, the restriction of local access and use of the land, with the underlying reason that projects’ developers have to demonstrate that there’s an improvement in the way that land is being used, and that this improvement is solely due to the offset project. Presenting a case in Madagascar, they explain which new forms of eviction and dispossession lay on the ground of biodiversity offsetting projects and, once again, return to the role of the state as a key instrument that impedes the organization of local resistances to these new ‘ “green”‘ forms of capital accumulation. One key issue that they introduce in their analysis is the debate around the economic valuation of nature, which is a key component of biodiversity offsetting plans and an instrument to undermine environmental justice demands.
