1. Payments for ecosystem services
as commodity fetishism
Esteve Corbera
School of International Development
University of East Anglia
International Conference on Environmental Conflicts and Justice
Barcelona, 2-3 July 2010
This presentation is based on the article:
Kosoy, N. and E. Corbera (2010) Payments for ecosystem services as commodity fetishism.
Ecological Economics 69: 1228-1236.
Friday, July 2, 2010

2. Talk outline
• What are payments for ecosystem services?
• Overview of the concept ‘commodity fetishism’
• The argument - PES three ‘invisibilities’
• Conclusions
Friday, July 2, 2010

3. What are Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES)?
• Nature provides many services to humans
Ecosystem services (ES) are those benefits obtained from nature that satisfy human
needs and simultaneously fulfill other species requirements (Costanza et al. 1997; MEA
2005)
e.g. primary production, pollination, soil formation
• ES as positive externalities
• PES emerge to address this problem
‘A voluntary transaction where a well-defined ecosystem service is bought by a buyer, if
and only if the provider secures the provision of such service’ (Wunder 2005)
a) clear relationship between the land use promoted and the provision of ES
b) stakeholders can terminate the contractual relationship
c) a monitoring system must ensure that the provision of ES takes place (additionality
and conditionality of payments)
• PES, in practice, take multiple forms (Muradian et al. 2010)
Friday, July 2, 2010

4. What are Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES)?
• PES additional premises
- Mapping “stocks and flows” of resources and processes in ecosystems
- Valuing (economically) the cost of losing such resources & services
- Establishing clear property rights over ecosystems (and their services)
Friday, July 2, 2010

5. Commodity fetishism
• The commodity
- A thing that satisfies human wants of some sort
- Conceptual and material boundaries / property
• The ‘fetish’ - ‘Feitiço’ (in portuguese) - ‘magic’
• The fetishism of commodities (Marx 1898)
- Make invisible the information re: social relations behind their production
- Difficult to quantify the surplus behind the the worker’s labour
• Commodity fetishism to refer to other contemporary processes of
human behaviour and social exchange
- Materialistic bias and privatization of public goods (Hirsch 2006)
- Uneven access to labour, profits and information in commodity chains (Bernstein and
Campling 2006)
- ‘Machine fetishism’ - isolating people’s technological capacity from their position in global
resource flows (Hornborg 2001)
Friday, July 2, 2010

6. PES as commodity fetishism
‘PES are fetishistic insofar they embed a mystical process (i.e.
itemisation); deny multiple forms of valuation (i.e. exchange-value)
and mask or reproduce uneven social relations (i.e. normalisation)’
This argument is explained with examples from the commodification of primary
production by vegetal ecosystems (carbon sequestration)
Friday, July 2, 2010

7. 1. Simplifying ecosystems complexity
• ES itemising for valuation, pricing and exchange (Castree 2003)
Abstraction: to establish real and classifiable
Individuation: to establish legal and material
similarities between distinct entities to
boundaries to sell, buy and use specific
ensure that one unit of ES is the same
phenomena across space and time
regardless of where it is produced or sold
Scientific expertise
a) to separate ecosystem functions in units of trade
b) to define land-use practices for maximising tradable units
• Itemisation of ecosystem functions masks the relational aspects of
ecosystems - erodes complexity (Saundberg 2007)
Does a certificate of one tone of CO2 fixed on vegetal tissues express the various and diverse
processes which have induced photosynthesis?
• Management practices can be counterproductive for the same or
other ecosystem services - trade-offs (Kareiva et al. 2007)
Eucalyptus/Pinus versus genetic diversity
Friday, July 2, 2010

8. 2. Imposing a single language of valuation
• Ecosystem services have multiple values across geographies
• Attributing an economic value may be technically possible but
this may not be accepted and may undermine other forms of
valuation (and conservation)
The ‘crowding out’ effect (Mellström and Johannesson 2008)
• Compensation should be expressed in the same metrics as expressed
by PES providers - to reflect diverse forms of human well-being
• Carbon sequestration - monetary exchange value attributed
through international carbon markets
The same exchange-value (the carbon price) underpins emission reductions from
technological change and from carbon sequestration
Changes in plantation rotation
cycles?
A forest goddess with a Compensation for indigenous-protected
tag price? forests?
A financial opportunity for consultants
and banks?
Friday, July 2, 2010

9. 3. Asymmetries in price formation & property rights
• PES do not address critically how price is established and through
which mechanism
‘The poor sell cheap’ - lack of other financial opportunities
Global historical injustices in access to sinks and resources
• Uneven structures of property rights over ecosystems/services
Lack of clarity re: ownership in property regimes
Re-distribution of property rights through State/community authority
• In the context of carbon offsetting...
Carbon credits as ‘vehicles for development’ - ahistorical & unproblematised
Particular actors marginalised from project frameworks
New carbon trading initiatives opening doors for State’s appropriation of ES
Friday, July 2, 2010

10. Conclusions
• PES (in its more efficient, market-based expression) expand
the frontiers of commodification towards nature’s services
• PES are “fetishistic”
1. Encapsulate nature’s services in commodities which make invisible the ecosystems and
socio-cultures producing them
2. Impose a single language of valuation (chrematistics)
3. Traded ES ‘mistify unequal relations of exchange’ and access to natural resources (i.e.
mechanisms of price formation and property rights)
• PES can be reformed but... a more radical take would re-
claim the public good character of ecosystem services
Friday, July 2, 2010

11. Conclusions
‘The boundaries that separate the ‘free’ unpriced world of
knowledge, the body and so on from those of the market are
being eroded. The appropriate response to the erosion of
such boundaries is not to make sure that, as they disappear,
the best price is achieved. It is rather to resist the
disappearance of the proper boundaries between the different
spheres… The same is true of environmental goods. It may be
the case that the environment is unpriced and in a world in
which market norms predominate this might be a problem…
We best serve environmental goals by resisting the spread of
market norms’
(John O’Neill (2007) Markets, Deliberation and Environment. Routledge, London. p. 45)
Friday, July 2, 2010

12. References
Bernstein, H., Campling, L., 2006a. Commodity studies and commodity fetishism I: trading
down. Journal of Agrarian Change 6 (2), 239–264.
Costanza, R., d'Arge, R., de Groot, R., et al. , 1997. The value of the world's ecosystem
services and natural capital. Nature 387 (6630), 253–260.
Hirsch, F., 2006. The new commodity fetishism. In: Jackson, T. (Ed.), The Earthscan Reader in
Sustainable Consumption. Earthscan, London.
Hornborg, A., 2001. Symbolic technologies: machines and the Marxian notion of fetishism.
Anthropological Theory 1 (4), 473–496.
Kareiva, P., Watts, S., McDonald, R., Boucher, T., 2007. Domesticated nature: shaping
landscapes and ecosystems for human welfare. Science 316 (5833), 1866.
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005. Ecosystems and HumanWell-being Synthesis.
Island Press,Washington, DC.
Mellström, C., Johannesson, M., 2008. Crowding out in blood donation: Was Titmuss right?
Journal of the European Economic Association 6 (4), 845–863.
Muradian, R., Corbera, E., Pascual, U., Kosoy, N., May, P., 2010. Reconciling theory and
practice: An alternative conceptual framework for understanding payments for
environmental services. Ecological Economics 69 (6), 1202–1208.
Saundberg, A., 2007. Property rights and ecosystem properties. Land Use Policy 24, 613–
623.
Wunder, S., 2005. Payments for environmental services: some nuts and bolts. Occasional
Paper No. 42. Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor.
Friday, July 2, 2010