ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the opening of conservation governance to include a wider range of approaches and, correspondingly, a wider set of actors which includes the private sector. It overviews the rationale for incentive and market-based approaches to conservation governance, including payments for ecosystem services, green consumerism and biodiversity offsets. Then, the chapter considers two main types of concern about market-based conservation: one that market-based incentives undermine other forms of motivation to care for nature; and the other that markets enable powerful actors to dispossess others of their control over natural resources. Case studies from Bolivia, China and Rwanda provide a flavour of the differences in the interventions themselves and in the ways that interventions play out locally. In doing so, two main arguments emerge. Firstly, market-based approaches can have both positive and negative effects locally, depending on contextual conditions. Secondly, the chapter argues that whilst justice and effectiveness are competing objectives, they are in fact interdependent.
