Making a Governable, Value-able Nature: Calculative Practices and Eco-system Services

There is a global movement to describe the natural environment as a set of ecosystem services that have economic value. Increasingly, the approach has been adopted by governments and, in response, by non-profit organizations to inform decisions about the provision and allocation of resources. The subjection of nature to an economic rationale has been much criticised. Some of the arguments are philosophical, pointing to the inability of economics to capture the extraordinary, intrinsic character of nature. Other arguments are more practical and highlight the difficulty of determining the economic value of a good – nature – that is not traded. These criticisms have considerable force. But a different perspective on valuing nature is adopted in this chapter by considering what is done to nature in order to make it amenable to calculation. So, rather than taking the numbers that are attached to nature as given – and then debating the shortcomings of quantifying nature – we explore the actions necessary to generate these numbers in the first place. The accepted means of qualifying, quantifying and valuing nature is the product of a huge amount of social, cultural, political and economic work: work that is necessary to maintain the primacy of such an approach.