Discourses and networks in biodiversity finance: who is driving for-profit conservation, and why?

Presented by Dr Megan Evans: The apparent need for “nature to pay for itself” and attract private investment is a narrative that has spanned decades, but has been enjoying its latest zenith in the form of “biodiversity finance”. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) emphasises the role of the private sector in closing a biodiversity finance “gap” of $700 billion per year, including through mechanisms such as biodiversity credits – which, at the time of signing of the GBF, had never been meaningfully implemented. Australia has a long history with environmental (pseudo) markets and in 2023 introduced what has been described as the world’s first legislated national voluntary biodiversity market. While there is always much excitement and hype around these apparent “innovative” instruments and the trillions of dollars of private capital just waiting to be “unlocked”, “leveraged”, “mobilised”, “catalysed” and “harnessed”, I am personally interested in questions such as such as “where is the evidence these mechanisms work?” and  “who actually wants to buy this stuff?” which, from experience, tends to be viewed as unwelcome by parties with interests in neoliberal conservation continuing to “fail forward” (after Fletcher). In this presentation, I’ll first discuss some quantitative work which examined the recent surge in biodiversity finance grey literature – what does it say, who publishes it, and then uses those data to examine social networks and mismatches between hype and evidence for the monetary potential of different financial instruments for biodiversity conservation. Second, I’ll describe findings of a discourse analysis of interviews with biodiversity finance professionals in Australia, where we aimed to identify as well as examine the material consequences of the discourses. Where time permits, I can discuss parallel research on carbon credits, and future research plans.