Rethinking biodiversity: from goods and services to "living with"

Since the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, counting and mapping have come to dominate international debates around biodiversity protection. With the emergence of the Ecosystem Services concept, these counting and mapping efforts are increasingly imbued with an economic logic that argues that...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Conservation letters Vol. 6; no. 3; pp. 154 - 161
Main Authors: Turnhout, Esther, Waterton, Claire, Neves, Katja, Buizer, Marleen
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Washington Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01-06-2013
John Wiley & Sons, Inc
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Summary:Since the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, counting and mapping have come to dominate international debates around biodiversity protection. With the emergence of the Ecosystem Services concept, these counting and mapping efforts are increasingly imbued with an economic logic that argues that to save biodiversity, its goods and services must be given monetary value. This article offers a critical engagement with the Ecosystem Services discourse and the way it translates the diversity of nature into a single measure—a “currency”—to be included in systems of exchange. We argue that this conception of biodiversity is too narrow and potentially detrimental because it reduces biodiversity to a series of quantifiable fragmented parts that become liable to counting, mapping, and utilitarian use, and because it reduces social–natural relations to market transactions. Subsequently, we outline possibilities for conceiving and living with biodiversity that go beyond relations of counting, mapping, and commodification. It is important that biodiversity knowledge organizations, such as the recently sanctioned Intergovernmental science‐policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), take these into account. Conserving a diversity of life requires acknowledging a diversity of values, knowledge and framings of biodiversity, and fostering a diversity of social–natural relations.
Bibliography:ark:/67375/WNG-5XSNMDHL-3
ArticleID:CONL307
istex:66AB2DA147FB7F4FFF762A1E47B0939791AA00F4
Editor
Prof. Ashwini Chhatre
ObjectType-Article-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
content type line 23
ISSN:1755-263X
1755-263X
DOI:10.1111/j.1755-263X.2012.00307.x