Name: Biodiversity conservation beyond market-based instruments?
Start: 2025-03-20T14:00:00+01:00
Location: Jekteviksbakken 31, 5006 Bergen, Norway

Biodiversity conservation beyond market-based instruments?

Rob Fletcher
Professor, Wageningen University
This presentation introduces and outlines a proposal for conservation basic income (CBI) as a novel strategy for funding biodiversity conservation that moves beyond widely promoted market-based instruments (MBIs).
This CBI proposal responds to two important empirical developments. The first concerns growing discussions around cash transfer programs (CTPs) and universal basic income (UBI). These are increasingly implemented or piloted yet do not usually consider environmental issues including biodiversity conservation. The second relates to MBIs like payments for ecosystem services (PES) and REDD+ (reduced emissions through avoided deforestation and forest degradation).
In practice, these programs have not only commonly failed to halt biodiversity loss and alleviate poverty but have also largely abandoned their market-based origins, leading to calls for moving beyond market-based conservation entirely. The CBI proposal aims to integrate and transcend these existing mechanisms as part of a broader paradigm shift towards convivial conservation that foregrounds concern for social justice and equity.
Potential and pitfalls of the concept are illustrated through discussion of a new initiative intended to implement aspects of CBI in communities near two national parks in Rwanda.
Not in Bergen? Join os on Zoom: https://uib.zoom.us/j/62068066771?pwd=kPRBMyolXfarV3i6dDRoJJ6jlbxbca.1
This is a joint seminar between Conservation Labour (CONLAB) and Conflict Enclosures.
Rob Fletcher
Professor, Wageningen University
Rob Fletcher is an environmental anthropologist with research interests in conservation, development, ecotourism, globalisation, climate change, social and resistance movements, and non-state forms of governance.
Rob Fletcher uses a political ecology approach to explore how culturally-specific understandings of human-nonhuman relations and political economic structures intersect to inform patterns of natural resource use and conflict. Most of his research has been conducted in Latin America (particularly Costa Rica and Chile) but also in East Africa.
Discussant:
Aled Williams
Senior Researcher, CMI
Aled Williams is a political scientist focused on policy effectiveness, anti-corruption, and the politics of resource extraction, using political economy and political ecology approaches.
Williams’ main research interest is in the uneven politics of natural resource-driven economic development, particularly corruption, neoliberal environmentalism, hypercapitalist growth, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, green energy transitions and inequality. Geographically, his primary focus is on Indonesia and Southeast Asia, but he has also had assignments across Africa and Latin America.