Valuing Development, Environment and Conservation

Creating Values that Matter

Sarah Bracking, Aurora Fredriksen, Sian Sullivan, Philip Woodhouse, Sarah Bracking, Aurora Fredriksen, Sian Sullivan, Philip Woodhouse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138080515
• eBook ISBN: 9781351625104
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Policy-makers are increasingly trying to assign economic values to areas such as ecologies, the atmosphere, even human lives. These new values, assigned to areas previously considered outside of economic systems, often act to qualify, alter or replace former non-pecuniary values. Valuing Development, Environment and Conservation looks to explore the complex interdependencies, contradictions and trade-offs that can take place between economic values and the social, environmental, political and ethical systems that inform non-monetary valuation processes.

Using rich empirical material, the book explores the processes of valuation, their components, calculative technologies, and outcomes in different social, ecological and conservation domains. The book gives reasons for why economic calculation tends to dominate in practice, but also presents new insights on how the disobedient materiality of things and the ingenuity of human and non-human agencies can combine and frustrate the dominant economic models within calculative processes.

This book highlights the tension between, on the one hand, a dominant model that emphasises technical and 'universalising' criteria, and on the other hand, valuation practice in specific local contexts which is more likely to negotiate criteria that are plural, incommensurable and political. This book is perfect for researchers and students within development studies, environment, geography, politics, sociology and anthropology who are looking for new insights into how processes of valuation take place in the 21st century, and with what consequential outcomes.

1 Introducing values that matter

Sarah Bracking, Aurora Fredriksen, Sian Sullivan and Philip Woodhouse

Introduction

In 2010 the UK government mandated that all government spending demonstrate ‘value for money’, a valuation practice that took on particular salience in the Department for International Development (DfID) and has since been taken up by other big donors as a means for valuing international development aid. In 2015 a contract for a biodiversity offset package in England was priced at £120,000 for 25.52 biodiversity units, including 6.36 units of biodiversity value contributed by football pitches and their margins. In the same year, in South Africa, the Minister of Tourism was keen to promote rhinoceros conservation in terms of these animals ‘paying to stay’. Simultaneously, multiple new coal mines in Somkhele used the iMfolozi watershed for the washing of millions of tonnes of coal, despite perennial water shortages in neighbouring Mpukunyoni communities and the needs of wildlife – including rhinoceroses – in the adjacent Hluhluwe-iMfolozi national heritage park. The ensuing damage to the watershed was to be ‘offset’ by a Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) holding assigned to the local political elite. In the following year the exchange value of carbon credits – Certified Emission Reduction (CER) units tradable through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) with the aim of encouraging reduced carbon emissions globally – had fallen from a high of €16.8/tCO₂e in 2008 to almost nothing. Nonetheless, by mid-2017, the newly created flagship Green Climate Fund (GCF) calculated that 128 million persons globally were ‘anticipated’ to have ‘increased resilience’ because it was generating 978 million tonnes of avoided CO₂ emissions from its USD10 billion in planned and on-going investments (GCF 2017).

As the above examples suggest, new markets and commodities are being created in a number of key policy arenas that are monetising, and thereby imputing a particular type of value to, a number of previously unpriced, but not necessarily unvalued, things. Carbon, ‘ecosystem services’, commonly held land, and human lives are being (re)valued in economic terms. Assigning prices to units of beyond-human nature so as to make these ‘count’ – either as ‘ecosystem services’ or in other market or market-like schemes for valuing living entities and ecological processes – has been a particularly visible arena for the rise of economic valuations (e.g. Lohmann 2009; Adler 2013; Helm 2015; ten Kate and Crowe 2014). But this is not the only place where newly economic values are on the rise. New markets for land in the global South evidence the spread of existing market valuation practices to different geographic areas, while the rise of water markets across the globe look with varying degrees of success (Bakker 2003) for ways of framing and making water as a privatised commodity. Even in international development and public health, areas where economic value has long been an essential measure of worth, we are seeing new uses of economic valuation as a tool for demonstrating the worth of what would have previously been left to the (non-economic) judgements of experts, namely: programming, spending decisions and human lives.

Simultaneously, however, an intensification of pricing practices to indicate values that will incentivise particular decisions is mirrored by proliferating critique on ethical grounds. Popularised recently through texts such as philosopher Michael Sandel’s (2013) What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, a diversity of views consider that multiple social and ecological choices should not be left to market valuation alone, that intrinsic values cannot be revealed through price mechanisms, and that modern market preferences frequently are unable to recognise prior value practices that confer care (see, for example, Foster 1997; O’Neill 2007; Martin et al. 2013). These perspectives echo Oscar Wilde’s (2005[1892]) pithy observation of the late 1800s that a cynic ‘knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’. Marketisation processes can also suggest an interchangeability of assets or notional offsets, assuming, for example, that losses of specific emplaced populations or habitats can be easily restored or provided for elsewhere. This assumption obscures the uniqueness of each location and ignores the reality that scope for restitutions of a like kind is shrinking. With only two estuarine river sandbanks left in the Republic of South Africa for spawning frogs and fish, for example, the company behind a proposed port expansion in Durban argued that it could destroy one of these remaining sites because lost populations and habitats could be compensated for with an offset site somewhere else. That the particularly affected species would have to travel around the Cape to get to the proposed offset site was ignored. Nevertheless, it seems that the fetishised power of value as capital – usually a synonym for money – even has many self-avowed radicals convinced that ecological justice can arise as a consequence of the clarifications of ‘wealth’ afforded by such calculations (e.g. Bond 2013).

Ethically and cross-culturally grounded critiques of the increasing hegemony of economic valuations in decision-making provide a much-needed counter to narratives positing that ‘there is no alternative’ to the progressive economisation of societal interactions. At the same time, such critiques tend to accept economic value on its own terms: as a type of value that can be rationally assessed and assigned, however detrimentally or unethically. In short, economic valuation is seen to confer meaning to the distribution, protection and disposal of things and people without reflective or normative thinking being in much evidence. This is either around the ethics of the assignment and its consequences or, more foundationally, about the ability of economic valuation to be rational, accurate or relevant in the first place. The situation reflects the power of economics, statistics and numeric judgements more generally to confer an appearance of robustness, fixity and certainty (e.g. Poovey 1998; Power 1997, 2003; Porter 1995). That the public is so accepting of economic forms of valuation demonstrates the domineering power of the field of economics vis-à-vis other knowledge paradigms in modern culture (Kjellberg et al. 2013). Indeed, money and finance hold an almost mythic status as measures of value (Guyer 2004), despite the many complexities they remove from view.

The works collected in this volume instead challenge the dominance of the economic as the measure of all value. They do this by examining how economic valuation technologies are designed and enacted in varied policy domains in practice, so as to consider how economic value is produced and circulated in specific empirical settings. The chapters that follow explore the production of markets and prices, as well as more general economic framings of value, in domains where value(s) were previously framed in non-economic terms. In exploring the emergence of newly economic values in a variety of case studies, the authors thereby also attend to the calculation and quantification of value, legitimacy and care, as well as to the implications of this quantification of value on human and beyond-human worlds. In conclusion, we consider some of the limits, hazards and consequences of the intensifications of economisation processes illustrated in our case research.

Context

This book builds on research conducted through a project designed in response to a call from the UK’s Leverhulme Trust for research focusing on ‘value’. It brings together a range of case studies carried out by PhD students, post-doctoral researchers and senior academics through the Leverhulme Centre for the Study of Value (www.thestudyofvalue.org). It also combines shared conceptual work that was carried out to simultaneously build a research protocol for case research, and to create alignment (where possible) in understanding the overlaps and differences exhibited by the Centre’s diverse empirical research.

Our starting point is that at the heart of human life and social change is a profound uncertainty around the frontiers of current economic valuation practices. Neoclassical economics tends to pose as a complete and unified system of thought and pragmatics, but this posturing is, we feel, inaccurate and ultimately unhelpful in approaching the multiple socio-ecological challenges of the contemporary moment.

One often-observed problem is that there are frontiers to this utilitarian valuation system beyond which, in classical economic terms, lie ‘externalities’ rendered effectively valueless. The composition of the ‘valueless’ changes historically according to moral, social and economic forces, but there is little explicit research on how social change and social struggles affect valuation frontiers, and vice versa (although on ‘value struggles’ see De Angelis 2007). Humanitarian and development efforts, for example, have reduced (but not eliminated) allowable deaths from famine, poverty, climate change, disease and war. Despite the human rights discourse however, a value of life for all has not yet been reached. We see this daily in struggles over the value of life of/for immigrants, refugees and other categories of people effectively treated as ‘extras’ on the stage of global capital and geopolitical contestation (cf. Mbembe 2003; Banerjee 2008; Sassen 2010; Gržinic and Tatlić 2014). More recently, loss of life in Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan is normalising a state of war and restoring the ‘other’ as terrorist, a condition exacerbated by Donald Trump’s accession to the US presidency and his push for government endorsed xenophobia. Indeed, intolerance appears to be on the rise in many parts of the globe, rebuilding the number of abjected persons who are not deemed to be valuable. Development practice has instead generated various proxies such as ‘quality-adjusted life years’ and ‘value for money’ expenditure, which assume from the start that not every potential beneficiary of aid is equal (as liberal theory would suggest) or saveable.

Simultaneously, the efforts of social movements concerned with environmental and climate justice have brought more of the beyond-human world into economic calculations of value. An idea that has increasingly gained traction is that ‘externalities’ that become degraded because they are priced at zero by current economic structures will only be valued if incorporated with higher values through pricing mechanisms. As consumption of planetary resources is argued to approach finite limits (cf. Rockström et al. 2009; UNEP 2011), attempts to insist morally on intrinsic values of nature and other species have become set against work that quantitatively calculates, economises, marketises and sometimes financialises these natures (Robertson 2006; Pawliczek and Sullivan 2011; Sullivan 2013). This is the case, for example, in market arrangements for carbon offsetting and other ‘environmental services’, for marketised units of some species through species banking in the US, and for some habitats via REDD+¹ and through biodiversity offsetting instruments. Paradoxically, however, and against the avowed intent of those designing and implementing new calculative valuation practices, the quantitatively valued entities which emerge often appear to lose their earlier intrinsic value, emerging as more substitutable – and therefore more disposable – than ever.

Indeed, ‘externalities’ conventionally accorded zero-value in relation to market prices can offer new potential for capture and accumulation as they become calculated economically and priced. As such, newly calculated economic values for previously unpriced externalities can appear to become part of what anthropologist Anna Tsing (2015) describes as the relentless capture that continually engulfs the edges of formalised exchange relations, such that evermore entities and relations become co-opted to capitalism’s ethos of monetary and profit-oriented value-making (see discussion in Sullivan 2018). This concern with how values are transformed so as to serve the interests of a particular political economic system echoes a Marxian sense of ‘primitive accumulation’ (Marx 1974[1867], 668) as the ontological, as opposed to historical, condition of capitalist production and value-making (De Angelis 2001; also Luxemburg 2003[1913]); Harvey 2010). A concern is that such value transformations work against possibilities for refraction of the mode of valuation that only sees ‘that which is capital and that which might become capital’ (Williams 2011, 30).

Such paradoxes of value and valuation are our focus in this book. The chapters in this volume explore a number of separate experiments in the articulation and calculation of value in the interconnected fields of policy and governance regarding development, environment and conservation. Most of the chapters engage with the development and application of specific ‘calculative devices’ (Callon 2007), i.e. new techniques and tools of quantification either working alongside traditional balance-sheet cost accounting at the firm level, or being used to influence social outcomes by public and private actors. Following Callon and colleagues (e.g. Çalışkan and Callon 2009, 2010; Callon and Muniesa 2005; Callon 2006), we argue that calculative devices are best understood in the context of the assemblage through which they are enacted, including the institutional setting and overall discursive framing and ideological representation of those involved. Calculative devices, institutional assemblages and discursive framing together form the three nodes of our research process for each empirical setting, as described in more detail in Chapter 2. Each of the ensuing chapters thus engages to varying degrees with these different nodes in the making of values that have come to matter in our cases. In working through empirical and textual detail in each of our cases our focus is to understand how a valuation process proceeds, and how, as a consequence of this process, a newly calculated and valued entity may be made and begin to act in the world.

In our emphasis on how valuation processes are enacted and their outcomes, we draw on the performative economics tradition with its focus on understanding how ‘the economic’ is made or ‘performed’, rather than simply describing a pre-existing economic reality (Çalışkan and Callon 2009, 2010; Callon 2007; MacKenzie 2006). In contrast with classical economic theory, which depicts ‘the economy’ as if it is a realm autonomous from human agency through the workings of an ‘invisible hand’ (e.g. Smith 2010[1759]; for critique see Polanyi 2001[1944]), performative economics theorises and explores the actions, knowledges, institutions and calculative technologies through which markets and marketed entities are created and maintained. As we unpack in the next chapter, Callon’s concept of the ‘socio- technical agencement’ or arrangement (STA) as a configuration of people, institutions and technologies that makes and performs markets, can assist with identifying how economic value is made in practice (Callon 2007; Çalışkan and Callon 2010). The calculative devices within an STA effectively price and value entities for exchange, as demonstrated in studies on, for example, sulphur, greenhouse gas emissions, and fish (see Ellerman et al. 2000; MacKenzie 2009; Holm and Neilsen 2007), but the ways in which they do this are often infused with uncertainty, indeterminacy and contingency. This performative approach encourages observation of how economic performances take shape in practice, and thereby sheds light on the calculative and other machinations underscoring the exchange values that become visible in variously marketised structures of action and decision-making.

Our emphasis on how economic value is made thus assists with making visible some of the practices of assemblage that bring together multiple actors, materials, organisations, institutions, calculative devices, etc., that otherwise are mystified in the appearance and exchange of the commodity as an economically valued entity. The Marxian labour theory of value (LToV) similarly unmasks the fetish of value residing in the objectified commodity, by drawing attention to the labour and life captured or alienated in the making of commodities for generalised exchange (discussed further in Chapter 2). At the same time, Marxist value theory can take us only so far with regard to understanding how exactly new economised values are made in today’s policy domains of development, environment and conservation. Analytical approaches are needed that both recognise the immeasurable contribution of Marx’s critique of political economy and extend this contribution so as t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing values that matter
• 2 Value(s) and valuation in development, conservation and environment
• Part 1 Development
• Part 2 Conservation
• Part 3 Environment
• Index