Geography, environmental governance, and ecological equity      My work brings a human-geographic perspective to the study of environmental change and the relations between nature, economy, and society. I analyze how these relations are reshaped by globalization and new institutions for environmental governance, and how these institutions are affected by new social movements and by the political economics of international trade and development. My current projects examine the changing policies, land-use practices, and new varieties of environmentalism that are arising in this context, primarily in Latin America. A related theme of my research is the international politics of biotechnology and conservation of genetic resources.      My doctoral work in economic geography at the University of California at Berkeley focused on environmental and social-justice dimensions of economic development and globalization. My dissertation explored the origins and contradictions of multilateral environmental governance. The dissertation and a 1999 article introduced the concept of green developmentalism: the application of environmental economics to global environmental problems and to the management of natural resources in the global South.     This approach has been promoted by the World Bank and influential private environmental organizations and is applied by the Global Environment Facility and the Conventions on Biological Diversity and Climate Change. Under the rubric of “payment for environmental services,” it is being extended to the monetary pricing and transnational trading of ecosystem functions such as carbon sequestration and watershed maintenance.    Green developmentalism relies on market-based valuation and exchange of environmental assets, with the aim of helping nature to pay its own way in the global marketplace. It adheres to the central premise of ecological modernization: that environmental greening and economic growth can be made compatible through limited environmental regulation and the rational application of new technologies. From this perspective, sustainable development requires neither substantial redistribution of resources nor structural social change.     In much of the global South, however, these premises are confounded by trajectories of globalization and growth that are socially polarizing as well as environmentally damaging. As I have found in Northern South America and Southern Mexico and as scholars have observed in other regions, conservation laws and projects frequently fail in the face of increased pressures on resources by displaced or impoverished people, local resistance, elite opposition, and unsustainable mineral and timber extraction. Often these obstacles to greening arise from policies that are intended to foster development.     These apparent environment-development contradictions pose challenges for regional and global governance institutions. These agencies face conservationist calls for stronger environmental requirements but resistance to the same by many Southern governments. They also face demands by civil-society movements, transnational activists, and urban, agrarian, and indigenous organizations of the poor for more equitable and locally appropriate policies.     These tensions are reflected in environmental treaties such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Provisions for further integrating nature and knowledge into international circuits of capital—for example, by means of globalized intellectual property rights and markets in carbon and genes—sit uneasily alongside other CBD provisions for sharing the benefits of biodiversity and for protecting the interests of low-income countries and the rights of local and indigenous communities.      Efforts to integrate these disparate aims have created new political openings, new actors, and new environmentalisms at the local, national, and global levels. My latest research focuses on these new environmentalisms: how multilateral agencies, non-government organizations, indigenous and agrarian social movements, and state and municipal authorities are reshaping their identities and practices in their efforts to combine conservation and social goals.      For instance: Many Mexican ejidos and indigenous communes, with ambivalent support from federal officials, are reconstructing their strategies for material and cultural survival to take advantage of new discourses and instruments for eco-development aid. Programs such as payments for environmental services (PES), funded by the Global Environment Facility, the Mexican state, and public and private consumers, are meant to achieve both environmental and economic-development objectives. They are designed to provide landscape amenities and biodiversity conservation, but also local and national revenues from trade in watershed services, genetic resources, carbon sequestration, and sustainably-harvested forest products.      Such programs are becoming the dominant model as global environmentalism is forced to abandon the myth of wilderness and face up to the failures of the “parks without people” paradigm in much of the global South. But the new approach of benefit sharing and “selling nature to save it” raises important theoretical and practical challenges:      From whom and to whom do these resource benefits and incomes actually flow? Is integrated eco-development fostered or impeded by traditional property arrangements and new policies for private property rights? Is trade in ecosystem services a true market exchange or a disguised subsidy? (I have found that the latter applies when genetic resources and intellectual property rights are “sold” through bioprospecting contracts.)      By whose standards are the values of ecosystem services, biodiversity, and other forms of natural capital calculated? Universal criteria such as “global-quality” biodiversity, carbon-equivalence units, and dollar prices abstract nature from its ecological and social contexts: can they take account of the place-specific values of resources and landscapes—use values, exchange values, and intangible values—that are important to local peoples and livelihoods?      Does the commodification of ecosystem functions tend to redistribute resources upward (toward classes and enterprises with greater purchasing power) and away (toward distant sites of capital accumulation and regional growth poles) as markets of other sorts have often done? Under what circumstance can PES and similar models result in “win-win” eco-development policies, the elusive grail of green developmentalism and of ecological modernization more generally?      Green developmentalism thus far has separated nature and society conceptually, treating ecological factors as externalities that are unrelated to social relations. In contrast, new environmental movements of the poor contend that sustainable development requires social justice and closer integration of environmental and economic projects, as suggested by the axiom: “no ecology without equity; no equity without ecology”.      My work in the 1990s asked whether nature can earn its own right to exist in the global marketplace, as green developmentalism proposes. My new work asks how, in a reformed, globally-greened marketplace, can ecosystems and communities create the ability to coexist?     These are all quintessentially geographical questions: they concern human transformations of landscapes, the spatial organization of productive (and destructive) activities at multiple scales, and the mutual construction of culture and nature. They are also crucial questions for environmentalists because climate-change mitigation and conservation will fail unless national governments and local resource users come to have shared interests in their success.  back to top