Event Date: February 7, 2018 - 12:00 to 13:30
Location: FSS 5028, 120 University Private

CIPS and IPEN present a Lunchtime Seminar with Jennifer Allan  

The concept of ecosystem services gained prominence in international policymaking circles as a mechanism to achieve sustainable development, and became shorthand for efforts to value nature’s contribution to human wellbeing, usually in economic terms. This paper traces the history and evolution of actors shaping and diffusing ecosystem services concept. Despite the potential for a new form of “triple bottom line” capitalism, the private sector is nearly entirely absent, as international organizations continue to dominate the policy space. Surprisingly, despite its apparent maturity as an international policy instrument, a great deal of past, present and future ES activities remain focused on capacity building, rather than valuing, and paying, for nature’s services. As a consequence, ES remains weak as a policy concept aimed at encouraging the sustainable use of natural capital, and prone to definitional vagaries, undermining its practical use as an alternative model to the “single bottom line” of profit maximization.

Jen Iris Allan is a postdoctoral fellow at Carleton University. She received her PhD from the University of British Columbia in May 2017. Jen’s research explores the motivations and strategies of non-state actors in global environmental governance, and the conditions under which those strategies can lead to institutional change. With the Value of Nature project, she studies the evolution and diffusion of the ecosystem services concept, and the implications for environmental conservation. Jen has published on global environmental politics in Third World Quarterly and Environmental Politics, in addition to over 100 Earth Negotiation Bulletins from nearly 30 UN environmental conferences.