Financialization of mother earth. Do offsets and payments or right-based approaches provide for better conservationist approaches?

Abstract

Five different regimes or approaches to nature conservation are analyzed: Carbon markets, Payments for Environmental Services (PES), Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), human rights, and rights of nature (Mother Earth). The climate change mitigation efforts is the policy context for studying these approaches. The still dominant approach involves payments and offsets, with social and environmental safeguard mechanisms being increasingly applied, influenced by substantive human rights requirements. REDD projects stand out from PES projects by being performance-based, while the Mother Earth approach has so far not had a decisive influence on policy-making. Keohane and Daniel G. Victor’s six evaluative criteria to assess regime complexes are applied to assess these regimes or approaches: (i) coherence; (ii) accountability; (iii) determinacy; (iv) sustainability; (v) epistemic embedding; and (vi) fairness. The article finds that the evaluative criteria indeed have a role to play in identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the various regimes and approaches, and that the human rights regime has a underutilized potential in guiding conservationist approaches in the context of climate change.