Reconceptualizing ecosystem services: Possibilities for cultivating and valuing the ethics and practices of care

Abstract

This paper responds to a recent call for geographers to engage with the ecosystem services concept which is an increasingly dominant global model for environmental policy and management. We focus on its economic exchange mechanism, payment for environmental services (PES), and reject the conventional notion of it as either an economic or an environmental strategy. Rather than treating a disaggregated nature as the ‘fixed stock’ of ecosystem services, we value instead actual human and non-human interrelations and practices and focus on how we might reconfigure the socio-cultural relations between people and nature as the valued stock.