Governing Development, Governing Conservation: A Genealogy of Biodiversity Offset Politics Across Scales and Time
Creators: name: Damiens, Florence
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 440604
subject: Environmental geography
classificationCode: 440704
subject: Environment policy
classificationCode: 410402
subject: Environmental assessment and monitoring

description: Biodiversity offsetting – compensation for biodiversity losses due to authorised development via production of offset gains – has become a major instrument in biodiversity conservation governance. Its rapid mobilization over the past 15 years contrasts with the controversy it has unleashed in the conservation research community. This thesis aims to clarify the debates around biodiversity offsetting by elucidating political projects and governing effects of offsetting. 
I do so by conducting a genealogy of offset politics, with attention paid to institutional scales and socio-political contexts. Offsetting is re-politicised by adopting a Foucauldian post-structural lens; and conceptualized as an assemblage of rationales, technologies of government, and practices seeking to govern specific subjects and natures, transformed by competing environmental discourses and environmentalities that change across time, scales and contexts. The genealogy involves an embedded case study design as a research strategy, composed of three units of analysis, and gathering a corpus of texts and 26 interviews. Firstly, I conduct a document-based analysis of the environmental discourses having competed over the meanings ascribed to offsetting across the US, Australia, international, transnational and European scales. Secondly, I centre the analysis on the specific socio-political context of Victoria, Australia. Based on both documents and interviews, I conduct a detailed analysis of these competing discourses, the environmentalities they embody and their effects on the offset assemblage and the governing of development, conservation and nature. This analysis is deepened via the study of a development project and its on-ground offset measures in Victoria.
I demonstrate how the politics of biodiversity offsetting pivot around a deep struggle between Prometheans, reformists and radicals over limits to development, grounded, in the case of Victoria, in the settler-colonial foundations of the state. Offsetting emerged within a reformist, sovereign-disciplinary logic, initially constructed for resource management and pollution control, later applied to biodiversity. This logic sought to regulate development through its limitation, channelling, and the treatment of its effects. Yet, in Victoria, through the rise of neoliberalism as a hegemonic discourse but also Promethean backlashes from the 1990s, biodiversity offsetting progressively came to instead embody a sovereign-neoliberal logic. This logic re-normalized development and organized the delivery of offsets via a hybrid offset ‘market’. As backlashes unfolded, it increasingly leaned on its sovereign pole to ensure development certainty through accelerated land fencing as cheaper offset deals. 
Through this genealogy, a deeper story is told. One that started before neoliberalism and likely will continue beyond it. It revolves around the unquestioned norms of land ownership, the right to exploit the land; and how biodiversity offsetting can come to seduce biodiversity conservationists, historically born out of a radical ethical stance for biodiversity, into the role of service providers to development.