Competing Forms of Commodification. Climate, Environmental Policy and Resources in North and West Africa

Paper Abstract: Natural resources and environments have been use, produced and transformed by humans for millenia. Shifts in the normative and econonomic foundations of societies come with shifts in nature-society relations. Often, there is not one dominant form of commodifying nature, but various ways of relating to the non-human are competing with each other in the same place.

With the growing acknowledgement of the severe consequences of global warming and environmental destruction, new forms of valuing ecosystems and species have emerged over the last decades, like the term ‘ecosystem services” shows. These forms of valuing, however, often follow pathways of historic and current domination, and can get in conflict both with earlier forms of commodifying resources and places – like the use of wood or fossil fuels – and among themselves, like in the case of protecting forests either for biodiversity of for a maximum in carbon sequestration.

At the same time, they are closely related to transregional forms of capitalist development, control and competition, as well as to regional struggles for development and a better life, leading to complex networks, where actors like European development programs, investment companies, Chinese trading partners, regional and national actors compete not for the same resources, but for different ways of producing and commodifying ecosystems and non-human life. On the example of a Moroccan cork-oak forest and Senegale coastal development projects I interrogate the different narratives and imaginaries of the future the different actors propose, and show the different natures they produce.