Valuing nature, paying for ecosystem services and realizing social justice: A response to Matulis (2014)

Debates about the role of economic valuation in market-based conservation have proliferated in recent years. Specifically, scholars have engaged with the justice implications of non-market valuation and the emergence of new policy instruments paying for or trading ecosystem services and biodiversity. I hereby contribute to these debates by responding to a published commentary in this journal and I shed light on what I believe should be a new agenda for critical scholarship of market-based conservation. I argue for more precision in our claims, distinguishing across market-based instruments and across types of outcomes, and for a more nuanced account of the ethical connotations of such instruments, which should involve analyzing both unequal socio-economic relations and culturally bounded conceptions of justice. Overall, I advocate for the development of a more robust empirical basis to derive generalizations on the procedural, distributive and livelihood implications of market-based instruments for conservation.