Special session Ecological Economics - "Marketing Environmental Science and Management: Stream Mitigation Banking in the U.S."

Rebecca Lave Department of Geography, Indiana University When: Wednesday 5th of June at 14.30 Where: Sala de Graus C1/070-1, Facultat de Ciències. Market-based approaches to environmental management are increasingly common. In 1983 when Joeres and David published their pioneering collection, Buying a Better Environment, the concept was seen as at best novel, and at worst far-fetched. Yet today, conservation and water quality credits are for sale in many developed countries, and the idea of payment for ecosystem services is ubiquitous in environmental policy circles. This paper traces that shift from command and control to market-based management and its ecological and policy consequences through analysis of the emerging practice of stream mitigation banking in the U.S. In the most common form of stream mitigation banking (SMB), a for-profit company (often backed by venture capital) buys land with a damaged stream on it and restores it to produce mitigation credits which can then be purchased by developers to fulfil their permit conditions under the Clean Water Act. Entrepreneurial SMB began in 2000, and has since spread rapidly across the U.S. with the strong support of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Drawing on data from document analysis, interviews, and geomorphic fieldwork conducted from 2010 through 2013, I argue that while mitigation bankers have made several key interventions in the development of SMB policy, market forces have not dominated the policy-making process to the extent one might expect. Even so, their influence is clearly visible on the ground in the homogenization of channel form across the U.S. For streams, at least, there is a clear landscape signature of market-based environmental management. Rebecca Lave is an Assistant Professor of Geography at Indiana University. Her research takes a critical physical geography approach, combining political ecology, science and technology studies, and fluvial geomorphology to focus on the construction of scientific expertise, the privatization of science, and market-based environmental management. She has published in journals including Science, Social Studies of Science, Ecological Restoration, and the Journal of the American Water Resources Association, and is co-editor (with Julie Guthman and Jake Kosek) of a new book series, Critical Environments: Nature, Science, and Politics. Her recently published book ¿ Fields and Streams: Stream Restoration, Neoliberalism, and the Future of Environmental Science (U. Georgia Press 2012) ¿ uses the case study of stream restoration to explore how neoliberal science policies¿ emphasis on the privatization and commercialization of knowledge catalyzes increased legitimacy and visibility for knowledge producers outside the academy.