This article compares two contrasting cases of a widely used market-based conservation policy, namely private single conservation banks and habitat exchanges as two economic mechanisms for the ...production and circulation of species credits. The analysis of their economic morphologies reveals differences regarding regulatory pressure, organizational configuration, type of metric and robustness. Despite common objectives, these two policy instruments essentially differ in terms of the type of constitutive agreement they employ: private single conservation banks, as local and confined economic exchanges, are based on an agreement about exchange with little attention to metrics and credit definition. Habitat exchanges on the other hand tend to be wider and inclusive centralized marketplaces within which agreement is settled in terms of metric and credit harmonization. The reliance on distinct metrics establishes varying forms of accountability within these policy instruments and raises questions about the need to regulate metrological processes.
•Species credits are produced to cope with ESA mitigation obligation.•Metrics for species habitat quantification range from simple to complex.•Mandatory mitigation favors simple and easy-to-implement metrics.•Voluntary mitigation relies on complex metrics.•This has major implication on public accountability.
In the USA, endangered species are federally protected under the Endangered Species Act. Yet they can be harmed under the condition that impacts on their habitats are mitigated. This is known as the ...no-net loss principle. To do so, public regulators acknowledge conservation banks and endangered species credit production as the most robust policy instruments, as they allow for ecological restoration ahead of impacts. The aim of this paper is to show how endangered species credits, as 'environmental intangibles,' are designed and produced so as to meet two diverging objectives, that is, ensuring permanent conservation and attracting private investors. Permanent conservation is ensured through financial insurances, which tie environmental intangibles to a very tangible asset, land. Therefore, environmental credit-making is not only a matter of scientific measurement; as commodities crafted out of government regulation, environmental intangibles also need to be legally stabilized, including through the use of property and financial tools. This securement entails important production costs that limit investors' profits. Environmental field-level bureaucrats play a central role in understanding this tension, as they organize trade-offs between finance and conservation temporality so as to ensure the production of environmental intangibles permanently linked to land and ecosystems.
Competition for land use is a severe problem in peri-urban areas where available land is scarce and is also targeted for different purposes such as construction, local food systems, recreational ...areas, and biodiversity offsets. In this context, mitigation policies can be considered like innovative planning regulations, in order to neutralize land development impacts and sustain ecosystem restoration and conservation. The policies may lead to the production of biodiversity offsets, which are secured pieces of land where ecological restoration is carried out as a way to compensate for impacts. In this way, biodiversity offsets appear to be a viable option to maintaining natural areas in peri-urban areas in the long run. This article examines the different ways to deal with land availability and access to offset sites through the analysis of land strategies developed by public and private intermediary actors involved in the implementation of mitigation policies, and the consequences on the ecological quality of offsets. Based on a sociological survey of 20 case studies and 95 interviews conducted in 2019–2021 in six French regions, the article identifies three situations that rely on different balances between market transactions and planning: (i) private intermediaries and municipalities who coordinate to offer land solutions to developers; (ii) access to land for biodiversity offsets stems from private land transactions which can lead to temporary mobilization of land and thus to ecologically precarious solutions; (iii) attempts by municipalities to include offsets in planning policies. Finally, if municipalities do not intervene to identify and set aside dedicated land, biodiversity offsets will remain temporary and limited in their capacity to conserve biodiversity.
•Mitigation policies that are implemented are often dependant on local land dynamics.•It requires long-term planning to be effective.•Its implementation relies on the involvement of intermediaries with relevant ecological and land skills.•The ecological and land services provided by intermediaries often come up against tensed land dynamics in the peri-urban areas.•Without a planning approach, the offset measures remain temporary and therefore precarious for biodiversity conservation.
The management of economic, environmental and sanitary hazards is a founding objective of agricultural policies. During the early decades of the Common Agricultural Policy (1960–1992), risk ...management was mainly approached through direct production subsidies and protective measures at the external frontiers of the European Community. In several respects, the 1990s represented a turning point since the agricultural sector both experienced increasing hazards affecting farm income and agricultural production, and benefited from the creation and institutionalisation of new private instruments for risk management.Hazards intensified through two distinct but interrelated processes. First, European agricultural productions have been progressively integrated into international markets in the context of the Uruguay Round and the Marrakech Agreement (1994) that limits customs tariffs. Meanwhile, faced with overproduction crises and the rising costs of subsidies for society, the European Commission initiated the first steps to deregulate the previous community-level mutualised risk management system, starting in 1988 with the definition of production and subsidy thresholds. These initial measures were rapidly followed by the McSharry reform that reduced the role of direct payments, thus leading to a greater reliance on commodity markets. Since then, because agricultural productions are increasingly valorised on international markets and thereby subject to significant price fluctuations, farmers are more affected by income variations and less protected at the same time.In Europe, price-related hazards represent the greatest threat for farming economies (European Commission, 2017), but environmental hazards lie not far behind, representing a second major threat. In 1990, the first IPCC report mentioned the potential impacts of climate change on agriculture. Since then, the frequency and intensity of environmental and sanitary hazards have been on the rise and the impacts of climate disruption have been increasingly acute over the past decades. These cause price volatility as they affect both quantities and qualities of commodities, and illustrate the greater economic and environmental threats within which European farms evolve. In short, European countries are experiencing more frequent and more significant agricultural income crises, while environmental and climatic hazards are becoming more frequent and more complicated to forecast.
Although street‐level bureaucrats (SLBs) play a key role in the implementation of market‐based instruments (MBIs), their participation is widely understudied. This paper addresses this blind spot by ...engaging the concept of street‐level bureaucratic policy entrepreneurship. Using the case of conservation banking, a market‐based environmental policy in the United States, we explore why this novel instrument has only been adopted in a handful of jurisdictions. We examine both non‐adoption and adoption of conservation banking to find that SLBs are likely to engage in such entrepreneurial acts when a new policy form is particularly useful in legitimizing regulatory enforcement. Implementing a MBI is, however, not straightforward. Organizational conditions can restrain SLB autonomy to implement MBIs, preferring instead to persist with baseline policies, which further underscores the importance of SLB risk‐taking behavior. SLBs must strategically straddle their unique position between the market and the hierarchy to enroll different actors into the new policy arrangement, all within dynamic political–economic conditions.
摘要
尽管街头官僚(SLB)在落实基于市场的工具(MBI)一事中发挥着关键作用，但街头官僚的参与却没有得到广泛研究。本文通过研究街头官僚政策企业家精神这一概念，填补了该研究空白。以保护银行(conservation banking)为例（一项基于市场的美国环境政策），我们探究了为何这一新工具仅被少数司法管辖区采用。我们分析了保护银行的采用/非采用情况，发现当新的政策形式特别有助于监管执法的合法化时，街头官僚很可能会参与这类企业家行为。不过，落实MBI一事并不简单。组织情况能限制街头官僚用于实施MBI的自主权，偏向坚持基线政策，这进一步强调了街头官僚冒险行为的重要性。街头官僚必须在市场和等级制度之间策略性地保持其独特地位，以便在动态的政治经济条件下使不同的行动者加入新的政策安排。
Resumen
Aunque los burócratas de nivel de ventanilla (SLB, por sus siglas en inglés) juegan un papel clave en la implementación de instrumentos basados en el mercado (MBI, por sus siglas en inglés), su participación está muy poco estudiada. Este documento aborda este punto ciego al involucrar el concepto de iniciativa empresarial de políticas burocráticas a nivel de calle. Usando el caso de la banca de conservación, una política ambiental basada en el mercado en los EE. UU., exploramos por qué este novedoso instrumento solo se ha adoptado en un puñado de jurisdicciones. Examinamos tanto la no adopción como la adopción de la banca de conservación para encontrar que es probable que los SLB participen en tales actos empresariales cuando una nueva forma de política es particularmente útil para legitimar la aplicación de las normas. Sin embargo, implementar un MBI no es sencillo. Las condiciones organizacionales pueden restringir la autonomía de SLB para implementar MBI, prefiriendo en cambio persistir con las políticas de referencia, lo que subraya aún más la importancia del comportamiento de toma de riesgos de SLB. Los SLB deben colocarse estratégicamente a ambos lados de su posición única entre el mercado y la jerarquía para inscribir a diferentes actores en el nuevo arreglo de políticas, todo dentro de condiciones políticas económicas dinámicas.
Depuis les années 1970, les politiques environnementales sont le lieu d’un « tournant libéral » sous l’action conjuguée des sphères de la science, du droit et du marché, qui se traduit par une ...recrudescence d’instruments économiques produits en réponse à des problèmes environnementaux. Cet article interroge la pertinence d’une telle orientation en appliquant la sociologie wébérienne des rationalisations aux banques d’espèces menacées d’extinction, un instrument économique de protection de la nature développé aux États-Unis. Premièrement, il montre comment les domaines d’application du droit de l’environnement participent à une définition restrictive des objets du droit, c’est-à-dire des catégories à protéger, sous-tendue par une hiérarchie de valeurs attachées à la nature. Deuxièmement, il analyse les circuits de financement et les facteurs de rentabilité qui organisent la participation d’investisseurs privés dans la mise en œuvre de la politique, et met en évidence le fait qu’un nombre restreint d’espèces menacées sont attractives et donc effectivement protégées. En invitant à se pencher sur la tension entre les principes abstraits du droit et leur rationalisation matérielle dans le développement d’échanges marchands, la sociologie wébérienne donne ainsi à voir les effets réducteurs de la protection de la nature par le marché.
Since the 1970s, environmental policies have experienced a "liberal turn" underlined by scientific, law and market dynamics that result in the rise of market-based environmental policies. Applying a ...Weberian sociology of rationalization to endangered species conservation banks in the United States, this article questions such policy choices. First, it shows how applications of environmental law incur a restrictive definition of legal categories-the natural elements to be protected-according to a value-based hierarchy. Second, financing circuits and profitability factors that incentivize the participation of financial investors in the implementation of environmental policies are analyzed. This reveals how only a reduced number of federally listed endangered species are attractive therefore actually protected. Exploring the tension between abstract legal principles and their material rationalization in the making of economic transactions, a Weberian approach thus highlights the limiting effects on nature protection of market dynamics.
Depuis les années 1970, les politiques environnementales sont le lieu d’un « tournant libéral » sous l’action conjuguée des sphères de la science, du droit et du marché, qui se traduit par une ...recrudescence d’instruments économiques produits en réponse à des problèmes environnementaux. Cet article interroge la pertinence d’une telle orientation en appliquant la sociologie wébérienne des rationalisations aux banques d’espèces menacées d’extinction, un instrument économique de protection de la nature développé aux États-Unis. Premièrement, il montre comment les domaines d’application du droit de l’environnement participent à une définition restrictive des objets du droit, c’est-à-dire des catégories à protéger, sous-tendue par une hiérarchie de valeurs attachées à la nature. Deuxièmement, il analyse les circuits de financement et les facteurs de rentabilité qui organisent la participation d’investisseurs privés dans la mise en œuvre de la politique, et met en évidence le fait qu’un nombre restreint d’espèces menacées sont attractives et donc effectivement protégées. En invitant à se pencher sur la tension entre les principes abstraits du droit et leur rationalisation matérielle dans le développement d’échanges marchands, la sociologie wébérienne donne ainsi à voir les effets réducteurs de la protection de la nature par le marché.
