La compensation écologique : marché ou marchandage ?

During the last decade, conservation banks have emerged, at least in environmental discourse, as new market instruments for promoting biodiversity conservation. Compensation has already been provided for in environmental law in many countries since the 1970s as the last step of the mitigation hierarchy, but biodiversity compensatory mitigation devices have been reshaped as market-based instruments (MBIs). The promarket narrative featuring biodiversity banking systems as market-like arrangements and their denunciation as instances of the commodification of nature tend to obscure their actual characteristics and to produce and convey a biased and selective representation of these institutional devices. The purpose of this paper is to describe conservation banks, adopting an explicitly analytical stance on these complex institutional arrangements and their economic status. While most environmental policy instruments are labelled as MBIs nowadays, this category is ill defined from an analytical point of view. Describing an environmental policy instrument as market based reveals the cost-efficiency expectations attached to its adoption rather than its objective characteristics. It is an ideological rather than a theoretical statement. The concept of MBI therefore has a limited heuristic value and cannot lead to the definition of criteria to assess real-life institutional arrangements. Building on categories and concepts developed in economic sociology and radical geography, several steps of the economization process at stake in conservation banking devices can be identified. Biodiversity can be turned into a set of tradable entities through a sequence of operations: individuation, reification, abstraction, measurement, and quantification. The assessment of biodiversity banking can be conducted based on the latter, and on the example of the US experience. In the United States, conservation banks are established, used, and operated within the boundaries of the Endangered Species Act. Conservation banks are permanently protected lands devoted to the conservation of one or several listed, endangered, or threatened species. Eligible conservation activities are diverse; they may include the acquisition of high-quality habitat, the restoration of a degraded habitat, buffering of protected areas, or connecting separated habitats. They must be established on nonfederal lands but might be managed by, for instance, local authorities. The bankers must set up a ?conservation banking agreement? indicating a management plan for the bank property, a description of the service area, the number and kind of conservation credits within the bank, and the performance standards that it should meet. They must in addition convey a permanent conservation easement over the bank property and provide assurance of long-term funding for the perpetual management of the property. The location of the bank and its management plan are subject to the approval of the environmental authority, and credits are awarded based on conservation outcomes. On the demand side, if a land development project may result in an ?incidental taking? of a protected species, an administrative procedure is launched. The land developer must provide an ecological impact assessment of the project, estimate the potential biodiversity loss and habitat destruction that might be induced by the project, and propose measures to mitigate these damages in a Habitat Conservation Plan. This plan is assessed by the environmental authority?most of the time the US Fish and Wildlife Service?that delivers a permit and prescribes compensatory measures, possibly including the specification and nature of the credits that the developer should buy. Biodiversity banking is therefore organized through bundles of contracts, agreements, and binding planning documents, involving many stakeholders over the long term. There is a distinct type of credit for each species and each habitat type, and for each of them different ecological assessment methods can be used. The credits are not fungible, and each transaction is unique and embedded in a particular context from which it cannot be abstracted. The purchase of credits cannot be depicted as a voluntary transaction and it is not an exchange of property rights either, since it does not involve any transfer of formal rights. Indeed, offsetting requirements are a matter of personal obligation that cannot be transferred. In fact, the economization of endangered species and their habitats could be interpreted as part of a land-sparing strategy, guided by managerial rather than commodification objectives. Far from the market narrative supporting its development, conservation banking is perceived by environmental authorities as instrumental in rationalizing and reinforcing their control over conservation activities and their location. Rather than market-based instruments, conservation banks could be defined as technologies of the market?that is, technologies of power in the Foucauldian sense.