The Dasgupta Review - (Janet Fisher)

The past decades have seen the rise to dominance of the ecosystem services framework, a worldview and scientific practice that sees the processes of the biosphere through a lens of how they prop up human activities. Within academic circles, the concept is hotly contested. Some see valuing nature with the language of neoclassical economics as the only way to motivate governments and corporate actors into doing responsible environmental action. Others see concepts of ecosystem services and natural capital as the inevitable deepening of predatory capitalist relations extending into new environmental domains.  Dr Janet Fisher, an environmental social scientist at the University of Edinburgh, joins the podcast to discuss the newly published Dasgupta Report, an independent review of the relationship between the economy and biodiversity commissioned by the UK Treasury. The report made headlines when it asserted that we should treat nature like an asset and manage it like any other financial portfolio. We discuss how the report is evidence of a rise to dominance of applying economic thinking into the domain of ecology and environmental conservation and what that means for scholars working on landscape science.

Links to items mentioned in the episode

• The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

• Dempsey, J., & Suarez, D. C. (2016). Arrested development? The promises and paradoxes of “selling nature to save it”. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 106(3), 653-671.

• The Future of Conservation Project

• Westman, W. E. (1977). How much are nature's services worth?. Science, 197(4307), 960-964.

• Ehrlich, P. R. (1968). The population bomb. New York, 72-80.

• Mark Carney, UN special envoy for climate’s plan for a $100 billion carbon market

• The Natural Capital Project’s InVEST software

• Kareiva, P., & Marvier, M. (2012). What is conservation science?. BioScience, 62(11), 962-969.

• Final Report - The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review

• The relationship between ecosystem services and human-wellbeing from the MEA.

• Norgaard, R. B. (2010). Ecosystem services: From eye-opening metaphor to complexity blinder. Ecological economics, 69(6), 1219-1227.

• Fletcher, R., & Büscher, B. (2017). The PES conceit: revisiting the relationship between payments for environmental services and neoliberal conservation. Ecological Economics, 132, 224-231.

  and response:

• Van Hecken, G., Kolinjivadi, V., Windey, C., McElwee, P., Shapiro-Garza, E., Huybrechs, F., & Bastiaensen, J. (2018). Silencing agency in payments for ecosystem services (PES) by essentializing a neoliberal ‘monster’into being: a response to Fletcher & Büscher's ‘PES conceit’. Ecological Economics, 144, 314-318.

  And rejoinder!

• Fletcher, R., & Büscher, B. (2019). Neoliberalism in Denial in Actor-oriented PES Research? A Rejoinder to Van Hecken et al.(2018) and a Call for Justice. Ecological Economics, 156, 420-423.

• The UK’s Environmental land management schemes: overview

• Assetization :Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism

• Fletcher R., (2021) “Review of Partha Dasgupta. 2021. The economics of biodiversity: the Dasgupta review.”, Journal of Political Ecology 28(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.2289

Additional research provided by Scott Herrett for this episode.