UC Berkeley

This dissertation investigates the rising influence of “ecosystem services” (ES) ideas in biodiversity conservation. Once an esoteric neologism, ES now refers to the conceptual framework and burgeoning field of research and practice dedicated to analyzing in measurable, often monetary terms the various “services” provided by nature to people. Over the past two decades, diverse communities of practitioners around the world have increasingly come to accept, and even to embrace, the policy discourse formed around ES. In this dissertation, I explain how the concept of ES has come to gain such widespread currency among conservationists, what is at stake in re-envisioning biodiversity in this manner, and what the contemporary embrace of ecosystem services can tell us about the changing politics of conservation.

I explore these questions through sustained, close-quarters engagements with some of the idea’s core champions. I provide a thickly-described account of the politics of ES through the experiences and perspectives of those now working at the forefront of efforts to “mainstream” its tenets across diverse contexts of environmental governance. My analysis draws on engagements with ES practitioners operating through two prominent initiatives: (a) the Natural Capital Project, and (b) the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Through organizational-ethnographic research embedded with ES experts, I examine concerted efforts to institutionalize ES in conservation (and beyond) as the prevailing framework for making sense of, advocating for, and ostensibly saving nature.

I describe a campaign seeking to re-assert conservation’s viability by aligning it to ‘fit’ more neatly within dominant discursive, institutional, and political-economic orders. In this context, ES provides an important operational means for producing these re-alignments. I portray the organizational dynamics, representational practices, and expert subjects constitutive of these efforts and draw on these findings to develop three main lines of argument: (1) the micro-social practices associated with ES are deeply implicated in producing pronounced institutional shifts in contemporary conservation; (2) one of the most major consequences arising from ES relates to how it shapes the political subjectivities of those who practice it, in part by internalizing a depoliticized theory of change; and (3) ES remains a contingent site of struggle, amenable to re-negotiation, with the demonstrated potential to impede, but also perhaps to contribute, to more transformative, liberatory purposes than those now enrolling it.