Biodiversity and the Contradictions of Green Developmentalism
Table of Contents and Abstract

a dissertation submitted for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy In Geography
in the GRADUATE DIVISION of the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY
Committee in charge:
Professor Michael J. Watts, Chair, Professor Gillian Hart, Professor Percy C. Hintzen

List of Figures iv
Preface v
Acknowledgments xvi
Curriculum Vitae xviii
Chapter 1 Introduction: Theorizing Green Developmentalism 1
Chapter 2 Origins and Evolution of the New Environmental Institutions 59
Chapter 3 The Construction of Green Developmentalist Theory and
Practice in the Greening of the World Bank 92
Chapter 4 The Deployment of Green Developmentalism by the Global
Environment Facility 157
Chapter 5 The Biodiversity Convention and the Commoditization of
Genetic Resources 223
Chapter 6 The Failure of Green Developmentalism in Guyana 277
Chapter 7 Conclusion 339
References 359

Biodiversity and the Contradictions of Green Developmentalism

    New, supranational environmental institutions for the international management of environmental resources rely increasingly on an approach I call "green developmentalism. This study traces the origins, theory, and practices of green developmentalism in the World Bank, the Global Environment Facility, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and in internationally-sponsored biodiversity conservation projects in Guyana. It reveals the common roots of the failures of green developmentalism and neoliberal development policies.

    Green developmentalism promises market solutions to environmental problems, based on privatization and monetary pricing of nature. Nature is expected to earn its own means of survival through international trade in ecosystem services, access to tourism and research sites, and exports of timber, minerals, and intellectual property rights to genetic information. In international environmental negotiations, green developmentalism constructs biodiversity as a new world currency. It conceptualizes ecosystems as C02 sinks and as warehouses of genetic resources for biotechnology.

   By valuing local resources in relation to international markets—at the expense of local and regional use, exchange, and symbolic values—green developmentalism reinforces the claims of the economically strong to the greatest share of the earth's resources. By mistaking one useful policy tool—monetary pricing—for the decision-making process itself, it obscures the need to address urgent economic, political, and cultural factors that affect the fate of natural resources. This approach fosters the false dualism that separates nature and society. At the same time, it conflates disparate interests of social groups as "global" common interests. The danger is that this will undermine prospects for eco-social sustainability.

    This study identifies contradictions between these universalizing abstractions of green developmentalism and the place-specificity of living nature and the human communities with which nature co-evolves. These contradictions pose obstacles to green developmentalist practices applied to particular nature in specific sites, e.g., in biodiversity conservation projects. They resurface in international treaty disputes, e.g., as a refusal by cash-poor, gene-rich states to endorse what they see as claims on their biological patrimony asserted by "Northern" states and transnational firms.

   In contrast, international alliances of civil society organizations—increasingly active in multilateral environmental fora—reject the reductionist discourse of green developmentalism. Some NGOs have denounced "biopiracy" and the inequitable consequences of green developmentalist programs. Local movements of indigenous peoples and small-scale farmers call attention to the particular countries, classes, and corporations that contribute to and benefit from environmental degradation. Thus, they expose the private accumulation agendas than can be hidden behind the purported efficiency of neoliberal environmental economism and the supposed neutrality of "global" environmental institutions. By resituating nature in social and ecological space and time, they repoliticize international environmental discourse.