Selling Nature

¶ … green developmentalism, its concepts, how it is coordinated and its impact on nature either positive or negative. Green developmentalism is the approach that is taken by New supranational environmental institutions that include the convection on Biological Diversity and the World Bank in their attempts to regulate the flows of capital that nature offers. The article tries to trace the origin, theory and the practices of green developmentalism in the World Bank, the Global Environmental Facility, the Convection on Biological Diversity and internationally sponsored biodiversity conservation projects.

In this article nature is viewed as the world currency and the ecosystems are termed as warehouses of genetic resources for the biotechnology industry. Nature is therefore termed as a commodity that survives on its own when it comes to international trade. Green developmentalism is termed as the solution to environmental problems as it is promising in terms of market solutions to environment related problems. This is on the basis that nature can be privatized and priced on monetary value.

Though valuation of local nature in terms of international markets and with the diversity of currencies, on the other hand green developmentalism is an obstruction to nature's spatial and social contexts and reinforces by the elites globally to the greatest share to the earth's biomass and all its contents. Green developmentalism therefore is a factor that fosters the false dualism that separates nature and society. It also brings out the conflict that different interests of social groups as common interests in a global scale have.

The danger that global developmentalism comes with is that it will reduce the prospects of nature's ability to sustain itself. There are contradictions between universalizing the abstractions of green develpmentalism and how living nature and human communities are placed in terms of how they co-evolve in nature .these contradictions are what pose obstacles to green developmentalism practices that are applied to particular nature in specific times for instance the biodiversity conservation projects.

Green developmentalism therefore is a reflection of efforts by relatively far sighted capitalists who try to overcome the barriers to accumulation caused by toxic build up, unstable climate, urban congestion and dangers of loss to biodiversity. There has also been opposition to green devlopmentalism due to its inequitable consequences as portrayed in the article.

This is felt by programs that advocate for from some nongovernmental organizations and local movements of indigenous people and small scale farmers who seek the attention of particular countries, classes and corporations that reap benefits from environmental degradation. They therefore term green developmentalism as an agenda that is used by capitalist as a way of enriching themselves while they hide behind the purported efficiency of the neoliberal environmental economism and the supposed neutrality of the global environmental institutions.

They term green developmentalism as a way of re-politicizing nature since it has been resituated in social and ecological space and time. The author deals with nature and how it can be commoditized. The author terms nature as a commodity such that natural entities and processes can be made exchangeable through markets. For nature to succeed in markets there has to be privatization and commoditization of all aspects of nature from molecules to mountains, from human tissues to the earth's atmosphere.

Nature can hence be viewed on the basis of a global environmental economic structure that reduces organisms and ecosystems to their fungible components and a monetary price assigned to them which is calculated in reference to actual or hypothetical markets to the components. Through this natural resources can be prioritized and their international exchange managed. The ability to price nature has therefore mad nature possible to survive in the world market. The author has also termed nature as a commodity that can sustain itself.

Therefore nature forms the centre of the article and how it is viewed on different aspects and the institutions that come into play when it comes to dealing with nature. The benefits accrued from nature and how important nature is to economic development globally. The author also talks of three forms of power and how they interplay in terms of green developmentalism. These forms of power are discursive power of the post-neoliberal environmental economic structure, the.