Doctoral Dissertation Research: Ecosystem Commodification Through Commercial Wetland Mitigation Banking Practice in the United States

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Commercial wetland mitigation banking is a market-based environmental policy that has developed in the United States since 1992. The policy allows individuals to fulfill the requirements of Section 404 of the Clean Water Act by purchasing credits from a wetland bank rather than building their own wetland restoration to mitigate their proposed impact to a wetland. Commercial wetland banks are large tracts of restored wetland created by private developers in anticipation of credit demand. The general objectives of this doctoral dissertation research project are to clarify the unique problems of creating a market for wetlands, conceived of as a bundle of ecosystem services, in contrast with the now-common markets for units of individual air or water pollutants. This research will use ecological fieldwork, key informant interviews, documentary histories, and spatial analysis to investigate the process by which a market in wetland functions has been created and stabilized over the past decade. It will focus on two regions that adopted banking practices early, but in sharply contrasting ways: the state of Minnesota and the Chicago District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. While wetland mitigation banking is a very promising policy tool with a number of enthusiastic supporters, both its ecological and economic features are largely assumed rather than investigated. This project will examine these related features together. This project will be both quantitative and qualitative in nature The investigation will be composed of a regional study and an extended case study of a single transaction and a single bank in each region. The regional study will describe broadly the development of social networks, technologies, landscape functional changes, and business strategies that have accompanied the rise of a wetland mitigation banking industry in both the Chicago area and in Minnesota. Documentary research and interview-based work will map the social and political networks between regulators, private capital, and wetland scientists that have created, spread, and institutionalized the conventions of banking. GIS-based spatial analysis will provide information on the structural and functional changes in the wetland landscape of the region. The case study of a single transaction is intended to give practical content to the broad outlines sketched by the regional study. Research activities will closely examine the process of "moving" wetland functions from the site of impact to the bank site. Metrics of landscape analysis, hydrologic modeling, and fieldwork-based comparison with reference sites will be used to explore the physical basis for the creation of "equivalence" between the impact and mitigation sites of the transaction.Results of this research will indicate the potential for banking practices to create a stable market for wetland functions within the larger trend in United States environmental policy towards using market forces to create private interests in public goods such as clean air and clean water. The project will make a timely contribution to a very active and ongoing debate about the future of wetlands policy in the United States. Recent years have seen the expansion of "pollution credits trading" to a broad range of air and water pollutants, and an expansion across national borders as trade agreements guide the expansion of market relations into the domain of ecosystem services, which have usually been conceived of as public non-market goods. The current Administration recently reinforced its commitment to establishing market-based policy tools as the primary way of resolving environmental policy problems. In general, such policies are a departure from the historical trends of environmental management in the United States, and their successful implementation requires a thorough understanding of the process of creating markets in ecosystem services. Specifically, the results of this study will be of interest to the large population of regulators involved in Clean Water Act administration, many of whom have only recently encountered banking practices. Because banking is a complex regulatory arrangement that has not yet attracted a great deal of attention from the public or from non-profit environmental groups, the results of this study will be disseminated among these groups to foster an understanding of the features of banking policy. Furthermore, wetland mitigation banking has received little scholarly attention. This project will be one of the first to examine banking using integrated approaches of the social and natural sciences. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.