The Rise of Ecosystem Services in Biodiversity Conservation

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General Audience Summary This doctoral dissertation project investigates how the concept of ecosystem services has gained widespread currency among conservationists over the last two decades. It will shed light on what explains its expanding influence, what is at stake in re-representing biodiversity in this manner, and what the use of this term tell us about conservation, including its constitutive politics and what it means for those who take part in it. The project will focus on the experiences of core champions of the framework who have been instrumental to its propagation. It will use qualitative social science methods, including interviews, participant observation, and embedded organizational ethnography among conservation practitioners in British Columbia, with the Natural Capital Project, and inside the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. In addition to seeking to analyze struggles to define ecosystem services discourse, it will intervene in that conversation by developing teaching modules, delivering lectures, and collaborating with research assistants. Findings will be disseminated through publications, conferences, a weblog hosting discussion of ecosystem services issues, editorials for popular press, and volunteer assistance to pertinent environmental organizations.Technical Summary This project extends theoretical frameworks from science and technology studies, political ecology, and institutional theory to understand the rise of ecosystem services. While research has emerged analyzing particular sites where policies inspired by ecosystem services have been introduced, this project seeks to understand the networked actors that connect across these sites and push for those kinds of policies. This project refocuses analysis from individual ecosystem services programs to the upstream epistemic struggles that precipitate them. It will contribute to academic debates exploring the increased intertwining of market logics with environmentalism; the cultural politics of neo-liberalization and commodification; how agents of change negotiate the promise and perils of radical versus reformist politics; the capacity of ideas and transnational epistemic networks to effect institutional change; and the power relations arising from and structuring each of these dynamics. This project will contribute novel insights into the mechanisms and conditions that allow discourses to institutionalize into policy and practice, and will generate new knowledge about the ways ecosystem services are being envisioned and enacted by its adherents.