Conservation basic income: A non-market mechanism to support convivial conservation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2020.108520Get rights and content

Abstract

This article advances 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 take into account 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. We conclude that the time is right to integrate and transcend these existing mechanisms to develop conservation basic income as part of a broader paradigm shift towards convivial conservation that foregrounds concerns for social justice and equity.

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.

References (84)

  • J. Alix-Garcia

    The ecological footprint of poverty alleviation: evidence from Mexico’s Oportunidades Program

    Rev. Econ. Stat.

    (2013)
  • A. Angelsen

    REDD+ as result-based aid: general lessons and bilateral agreements of Norway

    Rev. Dev. Econ.

    (2017)
  • R.Y. Bakkegaard et al.

    Bolsa Floresta, Brazil

  • F. Bastagli

    Cash Transfers: What Does the Evidence Say?

    (2016)
  • N. Benhassine

    Turning a shove into a nudge? A “labeled cash transfer” for education

    Am. Econ. J. Econ. Pol.

    (2015)
  • R. Bregman

    Utopia for realists: And how we can get there

    (2017)
  • N. Brenner et al.

    After neoliberalization?

    Globalizations

    (2010)
  • B. Büscher et al.

    Accumulation by conservation

    New Political Economy

    (2015)
  • B. Büscher et al.

    Towards convivial conservation

    Conserv. Soc.

    (2019)
  • B. Büscher et al.

    The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature Beyond the Anthropocene

    (2020)
  • B. Büscher et al.

    Towards a synthesized critique of neoliberal biodiversity conservation

    Capital. Nat. Social.

    (2012)
  • Cafaro, P., T. Butler, E. Crist, P. Cryer, et al (2017). If we want a Whole Earth, Nature needs Half: a Response to...
  • J. Caron et al.

    Per Capita Income, Consumption Patterns, and CO2 Emissions (No. w24923)

    (2018)
  • N. Castree

    Neoliberalism and the biophysical environment: a synthesis and evaluation of the research

    Environ. Soc. Adv. Res.

    (2010)
  • K. Chan et al.

    When agendas collide: human welfare and biological conservation

    Conserv. Biol.

    (2007)
  • M. Child

    The Thoreau ideal as a unifying thread in the conservation movement

    Conserv. Biol.

    (2009)
  • J. Clarke

    The Neoliberal Writing on the Wall: Ontario’s Basic Income Experiment. The Bullet

    (2017)
  • A. Coote et al.

    Universal Basic Income - A Report for Unions

    (2019)
  • A. Coote et al.

    Universal Basic Services: Theory and Practice; A Literature Review

    (2019)
  • C. Corson et al.

    Capturing the Personal in Politics: Ethnographies of Global Environmental Governance

    Global Environmental Politics

    (2014)
  • J. Dempsey et al.

    Arrested development? The promises and paradoxes of “selling nature to save it”

    Annals of the American Association of Geographers

    (2016)
  • M. Dowie

    Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native Peoples

    (2009)
  • A. Dunlap et al.

    A faultline in neoliberal environmental governance scholarship? Or, why accumulation-by-alienation matters

    Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

    (2019)
  • D. Ehrenfeld

    Neoliberalization of conservation

    Conserv. Biol.

    (2008)
  • J. Ferguson

    The uses of neoliberalism

    Antipode

    (2010)
  • J. Ferguson

    Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution

    (2015)
  • R. Fletcher et al.

    Questioning REDD+ and the future of market-based conservation

    Conserv. Biol.

    (2016)
  • M. Friedman

    Capitalism and Freedom

    (1962)
  • J. Hanlon et al.

    Just Give Money to the Poor: The Development Revolution From the Global South

    (2010)
  • D. Harvey

    A Brief History of Neoliberalism

    (2005)
  • F.A. Hayek

    Law, Legislation and Liberty: A New Statement of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy, Vol. III: The Political Order of a Free People

    (1979)
  • Cited by (32)

    • Indigenous lands in protected areas have high forest integrity across the tropics

      2022, Current Biology
      Citation 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]).

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text