Towards transformative justice in conservation finance: The case for Basic Income for Nature and Climate (BINC)

Fletcher, Robert et al. Working Paper Towards transformative justice in conservation finance: The case for Basic Income for Nature and Climate (BINC) FRIBIS Discussion Paper Series, No. 01-2025 Provided in Cooperation with: University of Freiburg, Freiburg Institute for Basic Income Studies (FRIBIS) Suggested Citation: Fletcher, Robert et al. (2025) : Towards transformative justice in conservation finance: The case for Basic Income for Nature and Climate (BINC), FRIBIS Discussion Paper Series, No. 01-2025, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Freiburg Institute for Basic Income Studies (FRIBIS), Freiburg, https://doi.org/10.6094/FRIBIS/DiscussionPaper/14/01-2025 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/318190 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ FRIBIS Freiburg Institute for Basic Income Studies Towards Transformative Justice in Conservation Finance: The Case for Basic Income for Nature and Climate (BINC) Robert Fletcher* et al. DOI:10.6094/FRIBIS/DiscussionPaper/14/01-2025 * Sociology of Development and Change, Wageningen University, Netherlands Contact: https://www.wur.nl/en/persons/robert-fletcher.htm 14th May, 2025 FRIBIS Discussion Paper Series ISSN No. [2702-5462] FRIBIS Paper No. 01-2025 University of Freiburg Freiburg Institute for Basic Income Studies (FRIBIS) Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg Rempartstr. 10 79085 Freiburg Germany www.fribis.uni-freiburg.de/en Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of FRIBIS. Research published in the FRIBIS series may include views on policy, but FRIBIS takes no institutional policy positions. FRIBIS Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. FRIBIS is an interdisciplinary research institute that conducts research in basic income and offers policy and civil society debate as well as policy advice on basic Income issues. Our key objective is to build connections between academic research, policymakers and society. FRIBIS runs a worldwide network of researchers, policymakers and civil society advocates, whose joined contributions aim to provide answers to the global basic income challenges of our time. 1 Towards Transformative Justice in Conservation Finance: The Case for Basic Income for Nature and Climate (BINC) Robert Fletcher (Wageningen University, Netherlands), Georg Buchholz (GIZ, Germany), Emiel de Lange (WCS, Cambodia); Isabel Felandro (Cool Earth, Peru), Hannes Hotz (GIZ, Germany), Ariana Kelman (GiveDirectly, UK), Munib Khanyari (Nature Conservation Foundation, India), Lee Mcloughlin (Florida International University, USA), Sonny Mumbunan (UIII Indonesian International Islamic University), Bernhard Neumärker (Freiburg University, Germany), Omar Saif (WCS, Cambodia), Martin Simonneau (Cool Earth, UK), Jim Stinson (York University, Canada), Jocelyne Sze (Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain), Ben West (GiveDirectly, Germany) Introduction This article outlines the case for a Basic Income for Nature and Climate (BINC): a novel mechanism for funding biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation activities. Over the past 150 years, the international conservation movement has successfully protected endangered species in many places throughout the world (Langhammer et al. 2024). Yet it currently struggles to confront rapidly accelerating global biodiversity loss, which some have labelled the sixth extinction crisis (WWF 2024). This biodiversity crisis is compounded by the growing impacts of anthropogenic climate change. Conservation and climate policy have thus become increasingly conjoined (Locke et al. 2021). At the same time, however, there is growing recognition that dominant conservation approaches, centred mainly on creation and enforcement of protected areas (PAs) and other area-based measures, have produced a range of social injustices, including widespread displacement or marginalization of those living in or near conservation-critical spaces (Dowie 2011; Tauli-Corpuz et al 2020). Growing economic inequality throughout the world is a documented threat to biodiversity (Mikkelson et al. 2007). Yet rather than redressing this inequality, conservation has unfortunately often contributed to it by further marginalizing the rural poor who most directly rely on biodiversity for their livelihoods and who are most negatively impacted by climate change (Turner et al. 2012). As a result of all this, conservationists increasingly call for transformative change in policy and practice to address biodiversity loss, climate change, and social injustice together (Díaz et al. 2019; Massarella et al. 2021). One key area of concern in such calls is how conservation and climate action are financed, both globally and locally. Of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent annually to address these issues, the majority remains captured by already wealthy and powerful organizations and actors in the Global North rather than reaching the poorest of the poor in the Global South who need it most. And even these funds are considered woefully inadequate to effectively confront the scale of the problems to be addressed (UNEP 2021; Lee et al. 2023). To address this shortfall, a suite of so-called “market-based instruments” (MBIs) have been developed over the past several decades to deliver conservation and climate finance by harnessing the economic value of conserved resources via “non-consumptive” use to generate conservation-friendly livelihood opportunities for local people. Prominent MBIs include ecotourism and payment for ecosystem services (PES) programmes. Other offshoots include the Reduced Emissions through avoided Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative, biodiversity and wetlands offsets, and so 2 forth. Yet as we describe further below, thirty years of development and experimentation with MBIs have thus far produced few success stories and a range of criticisms (Fletcher 2023). New funding mechanisms are therefore urgently needed to redress inequality by redistributing existing resources to deliver maximum benefits to those on the front lines of conservation and climate mitigation efforts. In this article, we advance the idea of a Basic Income for Nature and Climate (BINC) as a complement or alternative to MBIs that aims to address many of their shortcomings. BINC is inspired by the growing popularity of cash transfer programmes (CTPs) and (universal) basic income ((U)BI) initiatives. These seek to offer an alternative to conventional economic development approaches that focus on delivering predefined benefits to local people. Instead, the cash transfer approach provides direct financial resources that can be used in the ways recipients deem most important (with the possibility of some restrictions included for conditional CTPs). The widespread success of CTPs in alleviating poverty while promoting empowerment and self-determination has also inspired a proliferation of even more substantial BI pilot projects as well as growing calls to scale up UBI on a society-wide (or even global) basis (see e.g. Hanlon et al. 2012; Standing 2017). However, neither CTPs nor (U)BI projects usually include direct attention to environmental issues alongside social ones. Available empirical evidence concerning the environmental impacts of existing CTPs that are not explicitly linked to conservation aims (i.e. do not have conditionality with respect to environmental behaviours or outcomes) is mixed. Some studies evaluating such programs indicate positive environmental impacts. For example, Indonesia’s ‘Family Hope’ program, a CTP targeted at the poorest families conditional on attendance at schools and health centers, resulted in 30% reductions in deforestation where the program was implemented (Ferraro & Simorangkir 2020). Positive environmental outcomes have also been documented for CTPs in Colombia (Malerba 2020) and Brazil (Dyngeland et al. 2020; Ronningstad et al 2020). Yet, the opposite effect has been documented by studies of similar programs in Mexico (Alix-Garcia et al. 2013) and Sierra Leone (Wilebore et al. 2019). This signals the need to better understand which contextual factors and/or design considerations influence the impacts of CTPs on surrounding ecosystems, in order to inform the design of CTPs that are effective at achieving positive environmental outcomes. Here, we bring social and environmental considerations together in our BINC proposal as a promising new means to address biodiversity loss, climate change, and social development in concert within a rights-based framework. We begin by briefly describing the rise of MBIs as an understandable but ultimately limited effort to address this same constellation of issues. We outline the reasons why MBIs have often failed to achieve their aims and hence why another approach is needed. We then explain how a BINC could potentially compensate for these various deficiencies. We outline the BINC mechanism based on comparison with findings from cash transfer and basic income studies. Then we anticipate the likely challenges of implementing BINC and the variations that may be possible given contextual and design considerations. Like any single mechanism, of course, BINC could never be a silver bullet. We therefore describe the key constraints and enabling conditions for promoting BINC success. To illustrate the practicality of our proposal, we then briefly outline a first effort to put BINC into practice via a new initiative in the Peruvian Amazon. We finish by calling for the global conservation community to reflect on the potential of BINC and invest in BINC as a key component of the transformative justice needed going forward. 3 MBIs and their Discontents MBIs were introduced in the 1990s as part of a broader strategy to integrate social concerns into conservation planning, often called the Integrated Conservation and Development Project (ICDP) approach. They have proven quite popular. In addition to countless ecotourism enterprises, there are currently more than 500 PES programmes in operation worldwide and a similar number of REDD+ projects (Fletcher and Büscher 2020). There are a wide variety of different MBIs with diverse forms and modes of functioning (Pirard 2012). Nonetheless, MBIs share a common aim to incentivize conservation by ascribing sufficient monetary value to protected resources to cover the opportunity costs of alternative land uses and so make conservation more profitable than resource extraction (see Dempsey 2016). In a number of cases, local groups have been able to leverage MBIs for significant socio-economic benefits (Shapiro-Garza et al. 2020). Overall, however, over the decades of their existence, MBIs’ performance has been disappointing, as has the broader ICDP approach of which they are part (Fletcher 2023). MBIs’ relatively poor performance is due to a variety of factors. First and foremost, it has proven extremely difficult for MBIs to generate sufficient revenue to allow conservation to outcompete resource extraction (Koh et al. 2024). This is partly because within global markets, extraction is usually far more profitable than conservation. Consequently, the revenues delivered to local resource users for conservation are generally far too low to cover the opportunity costs of alternate land uses. As a result, national governments or other entities are commonly forced to intervene either to supplement payments, or to enforce restrictions or land use, or both, in order to make MBIs function (Fletcher and Büscher 2017). Many MBIs therefore function much like the government subsidy schemes they were usually introduced to replace (Fletcher and Breitling 2012). This stands in direct contradiction to the market-based logic of the instruments themselves (Fletcher 2023). In addition, the design costs and bureaucracy needed to develop and govern MBIs, in particular to account for the monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) of environmental outcomes, means that the instruments are usually top-heavy, with a large portion of invested resources going to institutional overhead or technical consultants rather than the local resources users on whom the initiatives are ostensibly focused. Moreover, tying finances to volatile global markets means that funding for MBIs is generally unpredictable and unsustainable over the long term (consider, for instance, the dramatic fluctuations in prices on the global carbon market in recent years) (Haya et al. 2023). Compounding such practical considerations, other problems have been identified in the MBI approach. Critics worry that emphasizing the instrumental economic value of natural resources promotes a capitalist logic in relating to nature (Sullivan 2013). This potentially crowds out cultural, spiritual, or other ways of valuing and relating to nature, as well as intrinsic motivation for conservation in favour of external motivation (Akers & Yasué 2019; Lliso et al. 2020). Additionally, tying conservation finance to specific outcomes in this way subjects local people to strict external oversight and control, limiting their freedom, agency and self-determination. On a deeper level critics point out that the MBI approach is grounded in a rather pessimistic view of human nature and behavior, assuming that people are selfish and competitive, and consequently must be incentivized with financial rewards to act in the common good (Fletcher 2023). Finally, Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLCs) involved in MBIs have raised concerns regarding their social impacts. As Osborne et al. (2024: 128) summarize, common complaints include MBIs inducing: displacement and dispossession (Sarmiento-Barletti and Larson 2017), the undermining of local governance structures, and community conflict (Alusiola et al. 2021). Many REDD+ projects have provided minimal livelihood support (Sunderlin et al. 2017), yielding only 4 temporary benefits for some community members (Duchelle et al. 2017; Kapos et al. 2022) while others lose out (Duchelle et al. 2018). In this way, REDD+ projects have been shown to replicate past harms against Indigenous Peoples, particularly around issues of territorial self-determination (Hein et al. 2020), while undercompensating them for lost access to forest resources. REDD+ has received widespread criticism from Indigenous organizations for its failures to support Indigenous selfdetermination and territorial defense (Cifuentes 2021). At the same time, some IPLCs point out that there are currently few alternative financing mechanisms available to support stewardship of their lands.1 Our BINC proposal aims to address this and the other concerns discussed above. The Case for BINC Cash transfer programmes (CTPs) A finance mechanism grounded in a cash transfer or basic income model potentially avoids many of the issues outlined in the previous section. Indeed, CTPs were originally developed precisely to address and overcome problems created by conventional market-led development policies. Rather than predefining development projects then training local people on how to implement them as the basis for income generation, CTPs instead provide cash payments directly to programme participants to spend (mostly) as they choose. Many CTPs also include complementary services or training programs – a socalled “cash+” approach. Since their introduction in the 1990s, CTPs have expanded dramatically to now encompass at least 720 million people in more than 130 countries worldwide (World Bank 2018). Practitioners generally categorize CTPs as unconditional (allowing recipients to spend their transfers freely) or conditional (where certain behaviors, like receiving vaccinations or school attendance, are preconditions for the receipt of a transfer). Some CTPs also include restrictions, where transfers themselves can only be spent on a limited set of goods and/or services. In reality, however, the spectrum of programming is more fluid. Notwithstanding the nuances distinguishing programs that are conditional versus those that are restricted (which has more to do with how those who design the programs understand them and less to do with how cash transfer recipients experience them), there is significant variation in how programs are delivered. Some unconditional programs contain so-called “nudges” or are framed in ways that can significantly influence how participants spend their money. For example, an unconditional transfer may nudge investment in education by being communicated to recipients as an educational stipend, or recipients might be nudged to invest in agricultural inputs by delivering large transfers right before the planting season. Providing complementary services or “plus” components, like trainings, can also influence how recipients behave. On the other hand, some nominally conditional programs have monitoring that is so lax as to present no real barrier to recipients spending their transfers how they choose. Still, around the world, there are far more formally conditional CTPs than unconditional ones, as many authorities are distrustful of recipients’ ability to spend money responsibly (Peck and Theodore 2015). Consequently, conditionality remains a hot topic of contention within the cash transfer world, despite the fact that empirical research concerning CTP outcomes largely supports the claim that unconditional programmes 1 https://www.fscindigenousfoundation.org/global-south-voices-in-support-of-redd/ 5 produce as much positive benefit as conditional ones for a wide range of outcomes (Bagstagli et al. 2016; Standing 2017). Basic Income (BI) approaches Basic income (BI) builds on the CTP experience to propose an even more ambitious programme for poverty alleviation (variants of this concept have also been called ‘unconditional basic income,’ ‘basic income grant,’ ‘citizen's income,’ ‘social dividend,’ a ‘negative income tax,’ a ‘capital grant’ and ‘participation income’). Like CTPs, BI proposes direct cash payments to recipients. However, while CTPs generally provide modest payments, BI proposes a level of payment covering an individual’s total basic needs (how this is defined remains debated), allowing them to survive on the payments alone. Additionally, while CTPs usually target only a subsection of the population (i.e., the very poor, elderly or disabled), BI is intended for everyone, rich and poor alike (the rationale being that payments to the wealthy will be returned back via taxation). Finally, BI follows the unconditional CTP model in proposing a fully no-strings-attached payment scheme. In sum, proponents assert that a genuine BI must embody the following five principles (as defined by the Basic Income Earth Network, a global network of BI practitioners)2: 1. Periodic: it is paid at regular intervals (for example every month), not as a one-off grant. 2. Cash payment: it is paid in an appropriate medium of exchange, allowing those who receive it to decide what they spend it on. It is not, therefore, paid either in kind (such as food or services) or in vouchers dedicated to a specific use. 3. Individual: it is paid on an individual basis—and not, for instance, to households. 4. Universal: it is paid to all (within the boundaries of the given jurisdiction or project). 5. Unconditional: it is paid without means testing and without a requirement to work or to demonstrate willingness-to-work. The difficulty of fulfilling all of these conditions means that a true society-wide UBI has never yet existed in reality. However, a proliferating array of projects and programmes have implemented BI to varying degrees (the principle of universality is usually the hardest to replicate given limited project funding). In recent years, BI pilot studies have been implemented in a number of high-income countries including Canada, Finland and the Netherlands, as well as lower income countries such as Kenya, India and Namibia (Standing, 2017). The closest approximation to an UBI currently is the Alaska Permanent Fund (APF). Initiated in 1976, the APF provides every official resident of the state with a direct yearly dividend from oil production revenues within the territory (the amount fluctuates but is often around US $2000/year). While this payment is not enough to support recipients’ total basic needs, the APF “has long appealed to advocates of basic income. . .and can be regarded as a nascent fund for payment of either basic capital grants or basic incomes” (Standing 2017: 151). All of this implementation has produced a growing body of robust research. Overwhelmingly, this literature demonstrates that BI experiments deliver significant benefits to participants while some anticipated negative outcomes, such as freeloading, are not observed (e.g., Bagstagli et al. 2016; Standing 2017; Banerjee et al. 2019). This constitutes compelling evidence that an expanded and 2 https://basicincome.org/about-basic-income/ 6 extended BI programme could potentially eliminate poverty to a substantial degree. Moreover, BI has potential to change the very nature of the relationship between workers and owners within a capitalist economy, in that the mechanism essentially “reunites workers with the means of subsistence, even though they remain separated from the means of production; it thus directly modifies the basic class relations of capitalism” (Wright 2019: 109). Basic Income for Nature and Climate Our Basic Income for Nature and Climate (BINC) proposal aims to integrate these core BI principles into a composite instrument that pursues environmental protection alongside poverty alleviation in areas of high biodiversity and climate value. A previous version of this proposal was advanced as a “conservation basic income” (CBI; Fletcher and Büscher 2020). Here, building on Mumbunan et al. (2021), we expand the concept to centralize climate mitigation alongside biodiversity protection. The result would be a regular payment to members of communities living in or near areas considered critical for conservation and/or climate mitigation in order to subsidize livelihoods based on sustainable resource use. BINC thus offers an alternative approach to conservation finance that may compensate for the various deficiencies associated with MBIs. It explicitly centers local people’s rights and building trust between donors and recipients as a first step to achieving justice (Saif et al 2022). By tying payments to basic needs rather than any specific valuation of “ecosystem services”, BINC would help reverse the commodification of natural resources that MBIs encourage. They could provide an income floor, allowing more sustainable forms of livelihood generation to become sufficient for recipients to depend on, even if the payments are lower than the profits from alternative extractive activities. Providing unconditional payments would give recipients the freedom and autonomy to decide how best to spend the money they receive. Eliminating the need for oversight to enforce conditionality and delivering cash payments directly into the hands of programme participants would reduce bureaucratic overhead and the amount of project funding going to intermediaries. This could also help empower the local agents charged with disbursing the BINC payments. Delinking from offset financing would also avoid difficulties commonly encountered by MBIs in addressing key issues of additionality, permanence and leakage. Instead, BINC could develop a more sustainable and dependable funding stream source that is able to shield programme participants from financial fluctuations. Rather than a payment for provision of a specific ecosystem service or resource, BINC, like BI more broadly, can instead be understood as an instrument of social justice. In other words, BINC should be framed not as a handout or gift but rather as the return of a rightful “share” of the global commons that has been largely enclosed for private gain (Ferguson 2015), including through exclusionary conservation actions. For people who have previously been displaced from or denied access to spaces from which they once derived livelihoods as a result of conservation efforts, BINC can also be framed as a form of compensation or reparations (see Büscher and Fletcher 2020). Further, BINC can be understood as compensation for the unpaid labour many rural peoples devote to conservation activities in spaces under their control (RRI 2019; Neimark et al. 2020). 13 more time to be spent on family farming. Community cohesion remained strong, with members able to fulfil their communal duties and actively participate in conservation efforts like reforestation or the protection and management of important watering holes. Conclusion This article has made the case for developing BINC as an instrument of transformative justice in conservation and climate finance. We have described how the case for BINC emerges from the growing urgency to combine conservation and climate action with social justice and support of human rights. We explained how current efforts to address this constellation of issues through MBIs have often fallen short of their aims. Rather than encouraging further economic growth through market integration, we have argued that environmental finance should focus on effectively redistributing existing wealth and resources to those on the front lines of the conservation and climate crises. BINC is one potential means to achieve this. We have shown how a first BINC project ongoing in Peru offers promising evidence of the mechanism’s potential to reconcile poverty reduction with environmental protection. But we have also highlighted the complexity of putting BINC into practice, and the various considerations that will need to be taken into account to mould the mechanism to diverse local contexts. The next step, to which our growing international network is committed, is to develop new BINC pilot projects in other sites in which we work, in partnership with local civil society organizations and resource users. These projects should be embedded within a rigorous transdisciplinary research framework that integrates economic, ecological and sociological methods in pursuit of a holistic understanding of BINC processes and outcomes. Such research should yield comparable findings that can be used to cross-fertilize insights from different sites to inform adaptive management as projects progress. This linking and learning should also assist in developing a general model and set of best practices to guide implementation of more projects in the future. In this way, we hope to scale up potential for BINC to contribute to transforming how conservation and climate action are financed throughout the world. We invite other conservationists to join us in this effort in pursuit of a more just and sustainable future. References Agrawal, A. (2003). Sustainable governance of common-pool resources: context, methods, and politics. Annual review of anthropology, 32(1), 243-262. Akers, J. F., & Yasué, M. (2019). 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