Paying for environmental services: can we afford to lose a cultural basis for conservation?

Abstract

In summary, the alliance between economists and conservationists has been driven by two main strands of experience: the first is the limitations of existing conservation approaches; the second is the believed need to find incentive structures that more genuinely integrate the objectives of conservation and development. This new, the so-called ‘market-based’model for conservation is not without its critics. Myers (1996) suggested that conservation biologists would do well to stick to more traditional arguments for conservation. He thought it was dangerous to encourage a situation where arguments for biodiversity conservation had to be based on proof that biodiversity as a land-use offers higher economic returns than competing land-uses such as agriculture. Ten years later, McCauley (2006) made much the same call, arguing that we are ‘selling out on nature’ and that ‘nature conservation must be framed as a moral issue and argued as such to policy makers’. But such voices have been all but swamped as the mighty climate change agenda rolls on, with the CBD in the political hinterland compared with the UNFCCC. In the excitement of finding apparent synergies between the interests of different disciplines and agendas, it appears all too easy to lose sight of the lessons of history: in particular, that the motivation and incentives behind actions really domatter. The danger is that conservationists have shifted their alliance, away from social scientists who emphasise equity and legitimacy, to carbon economists who emphasise efficiency. And yet, right from the start of the conservation story, it has been apparent that objectives such as equity and efficiency cannot substitute for each other indefinitely; ultimately they are co-dependent. In conclusion, this is not a call for a negative response to payments for environmental services. There are some real compatibilities and it is worth noting that the young conservationist who spent time trying to encourage a cultural basis for conservation in Rwanda, also went on to encourage a profit-driven motive for conservation based on a tourismindustry. The interplay between such motives, played out in a host of practical issues, is something that an emerging interdisciplinary conservation science is increasingly capable of investigating.