Resisting the neoliberalisation of nature and space under capitalism in crisis

The Unevenness, Inequality and Injustice of the Reordering of Places and Socionatures: A Historical-Geographical Analysis of Offsetting and Social Resistance Against It

Despite the considerable contribution of the existing critical geographical literature to the analysis of offsetting, there are at least four key aspects that remain fundamentally underexplored and that have inspired the major part of my work on offsetting (see Apostolopoulou, 2020).

Firstly, there are very limited studies on how offsetting may reinforce a socially and geographically uneven production of nature, transforming places and livelihoods. Biodiversity offsetting’s profound social and class implications are so far sidelined by the proliferating technical literature obscuring that under the surface of an apparently technical process to calculate ecological equivalence between offset and development sites, offsetting brings unevenness and injustice (Apostolopoulou and Adams 2017, 2019). Secondly, the increasing convergence of offsetting and urbanization has so far escaped analytical attention preventing the understanding of the way offsetting may enable or/and facilitate the reordering of landscapes according to the patterns of urban development and growth. Thirdly, by almost taking for granted that offset are a new type of “ecological commodities,” a theoretical discussion on offsetting’s role for capital accumulation through the lenses of critical political economy, and particularly through the labor theory of value and the theory of rent, is generally lacking (Apostolopoulou et al. 2018; Greco and Apostolopoulou 2019). Fourthly, despite the emergence of various anti-offsetting struggles across the globe, critical scholarship has so far paid limited attention to social contestation against offsetting and even less to its class and social aspects.