The value of nature: The Global Environment Facility and the Mexico-Mesoamerican biological corridor in Chiapas

Utilizing a political ecology framework, this dissertation examines the politics of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and its Mexico-Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MMBC) project in Chiapas, situating the GEF's institutional and conservation strategies within the broader trends of neoliberal global governance. It is argued that the ascendance of neoliberal modes of environmental and social regulation within institutions such as the GEF requires that environmental problems are "rendered technical" and thus made amenable to managerial market-driven technical fixes.;By way of critique, this dissertation details how the GEF's universal blueprint, when applied to biodiversity conservation in Chiapas, attempts to redefine biodiversity as a private rather than public good, reorienting participatory development towards accumulation ends and redefining citizenship according to market criteria. The study suggests that by analyzing how such objectives are privileged, the intense contradictions between the blueprint and the actually existing causes of biodiversity loss and underdevelopment in the South are exposed – contradictions which render the blueprint incapable of resolving those factors responsible for biodiversity loss in the first place and which are rooted in local, national, and international social relations. Moreover, existing power imbalances at the community and state levels in Chiapas, along with the legacy of that state's intense agrarian conflict, have led to the uneven distribution of potential project benefits, while exacerbating preexisting conflicts. In turn, this dissertation concludes with an analysis of a number of locally-driven alternative visions of conservation and development in Chiapas that offer more promising avenues through which to achieve conservation and development success.;By analyzing the GEF at the institutional level, along with the implementation of the MMBC locally in Chiapas, this study develops a critique of what it refers to as the GEF's "universal blueprint." Irrespective of the particular problem confronted, or the particularities of its evolution across space and time, the universal blueprint offers a neoclassical economic account of environmental deterioration, suggesting that so long as environmental goods remain "free," humans will overexploit them. The universal solution is to privatize and commodify environmental goods and resources and to develop markets to regulate subsequent human use.