RT Journal Article
SR 00
ID 10.1016/j.ecoser.2014.10.010
A1 Froger, Géraldine
A1 Lapeyre, Renaud
A1 Hrabanski, Marie
T1 Biodiversity offsets as market-based instruments for ecosystem services ? From discourses to practices
JF Ecosystem Services
YR 2014
FD 2014-12-04
VO 15
SP 125
OP 133
K1 Biodiversity offsets
K1 Policy arrangements
K1 New institutional economics
K1 Transaction costs
K1 Market governance
K1 Hybrid governance
AB Building on the analytical frameworks of policy arrangements and new institutional economics, this article introduces the special issue on biodiversity offsets as market-based instruments (MBIs) for ecosystem services, deconstructing discourses and exploring practices on the ground. The idea of compensating environmental damages from development emerged in the 1970s in the USA and Europe. From the beginning of the century, as the international community became increasingly interested in MBIs as allegedly efficient mechanisms for environmental management, MBIs have rapidly gained traction within the biodiversity compensation policy arena. Terms of compensatory mitigation, biodiversity offsets, mitigation banking, habitat banking, species banking, wetlands mitigation, etc., have therefore widely spread as policy tools around the globe. In this context, academics, practitioners and decision-makers have most often characterized those schemes theoretically as an MBI and frequently grouped them all under the umbrella term of ‘biodiversity offsets’. Building on contributions from the special issue, this article contends that biodiversity offset programs are on the contrary mainly characterized as a variety of different heterogeneous policy and institutional arrangements with limited features of market governance. Furthermore, hybrid structures, through long-term bilateral agreements with specific assets and between parties whose identity is crucial, are the rule rather than the exception.
PB Elsevier
SN 2212-0416
LK https://publications.ut-capitole.fr/id/eprint/21716/