Conservation and the nature of goods

Conflicts within the conservation movement have reflected disagreements regarding the purposes of conservation. We offer the concept of goods as a means to analyze these purposes. Conservation may be understood as the management of ecosystems to generate a continuous or sustained provision of specified sets of goods. A political economy of natural resources that focuses on goods will assess the allocative and distributive consequences of conservation regimes. That is, it will examine what people want ecosystems to provide and how institutional arrangements are related to the nature of goods and the ecosystems that produce them. This mode of analysis is as useful for the conservation of biodiversity as for more traditional conservation purposes. An analysis of goods highlights the political implications of various conservation regimes.

Keywords:

• biodiversity
• conservation
• natural resources
• political economy
• public goods
• worthy goods