Conservation basic income: A non-market mechanism to support convivial conservation
Introduction
Conservationists have increasingly questioned the efficacy of neoliberal conservation strategies centred on promotion of market-based instruments (MBIs). Whereas a decade ago these were seen as the most sensible and realistic conservation policies by mainstream conservation organizations, this aura is now gone. Some conservationists even assert that market-based conservation will not get us out of the current environmental and extinction crisis (Cafaro et al. 2017). Based on our own research, we too have suggested that conservationists might “begin taking the market out of conservation altogether and moving toward redistribution” instead (Fletcher et al., 2016: 675). Few scholars and practitioners, however, have seriously conceptualized what this means and what concrete steps might be taken to transition towards a different strategy for financing conservation. In this article, we propose one potential mechanism that could help trigger such a broader transition: a conservation basic income (CBI). We situate this proposal within an overarching approach to transforming biodiversity policy and practice globally that we call convivial conservation (see Büscher and Fletcher, 2019; 2020). Convivial conservation is “a vision, a politics and a set of governance principles that… proposes a post-capitalist approach to conservation that promotes radical equity, structural transformation and environmental justice” (Büscher and Fletcher, 2019: 283). The approach seeks to challenge and transcend both reliance on neoliberal capitalist markets and the strict separation between humans and nonhuman nature via protected areas (PAs) in pursuit of conservation policy and programming that foregrounds principles of justice and equity.
We detail our convivial conservation proposal in great depth elsewhere (see Büscher and Fletcher, 2019; 2020). There we also briefly advanced CBI as a concrete means of operationalizing part of the approach. Here, we seek to outline this potential funding mechanism in in greater detail and specificity as the basis for future research and experimentation concerning its possible implementation in conservation-critical areas.
This proposal is timely in multiple ways. First, it builds on growing discussion concerning the potential to implement universal basic income (UBI), a discussion that builds on the rapidly growing operationalization of cash transfer programs (CTPs). Challenging bureaucratic, top-down interventions, CTPs and UBI aim to ensure a basic, decent living for all and so create conditions for bottom-up forms of pro-poor development. CTPs have been widely implemented worldwide in various forms while despite some partial operationalization UBI remains largely hypothetical. Within these discussions, however, attention to environmental issues including biodiversity conservation has been largely absent thus far. We believe CBI can rectify this omission, by bringing discussion of CTPs and UBI into dialogue with a parallel stream of research concerning payments for environmental or ecosystem services (PES) and REDD+ (reduced emissions through avoided deforestation and land degradation) schemes that have spread throughout the world to promote conservation specifically.
While these latter programs originated, and continue to be promoted, as quintessential MBIs, in practice most have instead become forms of (primarily state-based) resource appropriation and redistribution or “results-based aid” (Angelsen, 2017). Even so they have largely failed in their aim to achieve significant biodiversity conservation while also reducing poverty. We therefore explore how this experience of ‘actually existing’ MBIs might be integrated with UBI to create novel forms of CBI. Conceptualized in this way, we believe that CBI can help move conservation policy beyond MBIs that are currently still dominant but failing to both conserve biodiversity and challenge unsustainable forms of development.
We begin by outlining the rationale for CBI, charting the disappointing performance of conservation MBIs over the past several decades. We then synthesize the research exploring CTPs and UBI, followed by an explanation of how PES and REDD+ have evolved to become de facto redistribution mechanisms. We show how integrating the different mechanisms could provide the basis for a synthetic CBI instrument that would go beyond currently existing conservation funding schemes in potentially interesting and productive ways. We conclude by briefly outlining what such a CBI might look like in practice as part of a broader transition towards convivial conservation.
Section snippets
The problem
Over the past several decades, the global conservation movement has increasingly embraced MBIs as the basis for interventions in pursuit of biodiversity protection (McAfee, 1999; Büscher et al., 2014; Corson et al., 2014). Common MBIs include bioprospecting, ecotourism, biodiversity offsetting, and wetlands banking, in addition to PES and REDD+. While the specifics of MBIs vary widely (Pirard, 2012), they tend to share a common logic: to harness economic markets as a means to attach sufficient
Cash transfer programs
According to the World Bank, as of 2014, cash transfer programs – in which currency is given directly to recipients to spend on goods and services – encompassed 720 million people in 130 countries (World Bank, 2015). CTPs are commonly distinguished between ‘conditional’ programs, in which payment requires recipients to comply with some type of behavioral expectation (typically health care visits or school attendance), and ‘unconditional’ ones, with no requirements. As of 2014, approximately 60
Universal basic income
A particular variant of unconditional CTP is commonly termed universal basic income. Similar approaches come under a variety of different labels, including ‘unconditional basic income,’ ‘basic income grant,’ ‘citizen's income’ and ‘social dividend,’ while related mechanisms have received other monikers, including a ‘negative income tax,’ ‘capital grant’ and ‘participation income’ (see Standing, 2017 for an overview). Here, we focus on UBI defined as universal basic income since this approach is
Payment for ecosystem services
The same period during which CTPs proliferated has seen rapid expansion of PES programs, in which landowners are paid to conserve biodiversity. Currently more than 550 such programs operate throughout the world with annual payments totaling more than US$36 billion (Salzman et al., 2018). PES was originally envisioned as an MBI (esp. Pagiola et al., 2002). As an external evaluation of Costa Rica's program - widely considered to have “pioneered the nation-wide PES scheme in the developing world” (
Comparing PES and CTPs
Despite differences in how the two mechanisms are financed and payments distributed, in implementation PES and CTPs may be quite similar. While often framed in neoliberal terms, as noted earlier, in practice CTPs – even conditional ones – are still essentially forms of redistribution, usually administered by the national government via taxation (Hanlon et al., 2010). Consequently, they can be seen to operate quite similar to how PES and REDD+ tend to also function in practice. While Ferguson
Conservation basic income
Building on the different bodies of research outlined above, we propose a fully unconditional payment scheme able to cover recipients' basic needs – a conservation basic income. This would combine the social benefits of UBI with PES's focus on environmental protection and hence address shortcomings present in both mechanisms operating independently. Important questions remain regarding exactly what CBI would look like in practice, but many of these can already be addressed to a degree by
Conclusion
Notwithstanding persistent attempts to develop a global market for generating finance, in practice conservation funding has come to increasingly rely on (often covert) forms of redistribution. This is true, we have shown, of many PES and REDD+ programs. In their recent review of the global experience of neoliberal conservation, Dempsey and Suarez (2016) demonstrate this pattern more generally. In line with PES research, they show that despite widespread promotion of measures to incentivize
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Robert Fletcher: Conceptualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Bram Büscher: Conceptualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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2022, Current BiologyCitation Excerpt :Equitable ways forward include promoting alternative models to strict PAs in conservation priority areas, such as “territories of life” where communities retain their land ownership and tenure rights and actively govern their lands for conservation and community well-being.18 Conservation could also move toward providing funding support through mechanisms such as a conservation basic income, buffering the economic pressures of industrial extractivism,60 and co-establishing conservation plans with communities, such as in Pastaza, Ecuador.61 Further information and requests for information should be directed to and will be fulfilled by the lead contact, Jocelyne S. Sze ([email protected]).