In many places around the world, both north and south, efforts to promote coexistence between humans and the rest of nature often run up against deeply engrained forms of spatial injustice. Related often to historical patterns of accumulation and dispossession, spatial injustices result when the institutional, ownership and power structures of terrestrial and marine resource management reproduce forms of inequality in space (Thakholi and Büscher, 2022). Often the only way to break through these engrained injustices is when disruptions happen that unsettle the status quo and open up space – in all its dimensions – for imagining change. We understand disruptive politics as forms of political action that combine these two elements: politics that seeks to disrupt the status quo while actively promoting imaginative alternatives. In relation to biodiversity conservation, such politics are often rare, but they are not uncommon either. All around the world, many communities and individuals resist forms of land, marine and resource dispossession while challenging forms of spatial injustice that explicitly include human-nonhuman relationships. Examples include environmental defenders, frontline indigenous and other communities, urban movements and many others. The convivial conservation initiative aims to tap into, learn from and support and extend such struggles for challenging various forms of (blue, green, social and other) forms of spatial injustice that take biodiversity conservation seriously (Jentoft et al, in press). This panel aims to convene papers that speak to the intersections between biodiversity conservation, disruptive politics and (challenging) spatial injustice.

TITLE: Rural Labor vs. Rentiers: The Concepts and Politics of Payments for Ecological Services

ABSTRACT: Payments for ecosystem services (PES) have gained academic attention because they promise global environmental benefits and finance for those protecting tropical forests. On the other hand, these schemes commodify nature by reducing it to the abstract carbon value. Since the 1990s, donor initiatives, peasant-driven public policies, and market-based projects have promoted different versions of support schemes for sustainable production in the Brazilian Amazon. Small project funds from the G7’s Pilot Program for the Conservation of Brazilian Rainforests (PPG7, 1995-2008) inspired two contrary concepts: On the one hand, peasant movements proposed the public Program for the Sustainable Development of Rural Family Production in the Amazon (Proambiente, 2000-2008), which would compensate practices such as agroforestry based on the cost of labor, through rural extension, credit, and technical assistance. On the other hand, market-based PES projects, many funded by the Amazon Fund (2008-2019), based on a carbon price and restrictions to land use. Drawing on feminist ecology and ecological Marxist theory and over 120 expert interviews and archival documents, this paper traces the evolution of these PES concepts. It argues that the green economy paradigm and mechanisms such as REDD+ promote an anti-production rentier logic of PES, prioritize income and conservation, but risk cooptation by landowners, “low-carbon agriculture,” and plantation conservation. By contrast, social movements have continuously challenged the conservationist logic, including proposing and implementing public policy alternatives to strengthen autonomy, food security and recognize the ancestral ecosystem-based relationship between peoples and territories.

KEYWORDS: payments for ecological services, rural development