Selling Nature to Save It? Biodiversity and the Rise of Green Developmentalism pdf download Abstract:      New, supranational environmental institutions, including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the "green" World Bank, reflect attempts to regulate international flows of "natural capital" by means of an approach I call green developmentalism. These institutions are sources of eco-development dollars and of a new "global" discourse, a postneoliberal environmental-economic paradigm. By its logic, nature is constructed as a world currency and ecosystems are re-coded as warehouses of genetic resources for biotechnology industries. Nature would earn its own right to survive through international trade in ecosystem services and permits to pollute, access to tourism and research sites, and exports of timber, minerals, and intellectual property rights to traditional crop varieties and shamans' recipes.      Green developmentalism, with its promise of market solutions to environmental problems, is blunting the North-South disputes that have embroiled international environmental institutions. But by valuing local nature in relation to international markets—denominating diversity in dollars, euros or yen—green developmentalism abstracts nature from its spatial and social contexts and reinforces the claims of global elites to the greatest share of the earth's biomass and all it contains. Meanwhile, the CBD has become a gathering ground for transnational coalitions of indigenous, peasant, and NGO opponents of "biopiracy" and the patenting of living things, and advocates of international environmental justice, who have begun to put forward counter-discourses and alternative practices to those of green developmentalism.