Legislating nature for biodiversity offsets in New South Wales,Australia

In the contemporary environmental management landscape, legislation is a principal means through which sustainable outcomes are negotiated. Yet the relations between legislation (as a social practice), nature and justice have been subjected to limited scrutiny. This paper explores these relations through consideration of a system of biodiversity offsets currently being implemented in New South Wales, Australia, following the enactment of the Threatened Species Conservation Amendment (Biodiversity Banking) Act 2006 (NSW). In this paper we investigate the work this legislation does in enacting the materiality of nature in order to explore the interrelations of materiality, law and concerns for environmental and ecological justice. We argue that the act of ‘legislating nature’ is simultaneously a ‘mode of matter-ing’ (Law 2004) that in the case of biodiversity banking (BioBanking), resituates biodiversity within new meanings, spatialities, human–nature relations, and which accounts for biodiversity at a state, rather than local, scale. Utilising the work of Latour, we examine the processes of ‘translation’ required to generate abstracted ‘biodiversity values’ that can be traded and moved between locations. Examination of these processes leads to a consideration of the broad requirements of environmental and ecological justice as a theoretical and political response to BioBanking.     

新自由主义的危机与都市治理——从全球到地方

自2008年的经济危机之后,新自由主义作为西方国家和城市治理的主要手段也受到根本性的挑战,这些政治经济的失败,最终表现在都市空间的治理当中。本文将以新自由主义的扩张案例入手,通过国内外都市空间治理的实践经验,剖析新自由主义所带来的短期和长期的政治经济危机后果,并讨论全球不同空间尺度当中撤退空间的治理与挑战。新自由主义的问题不仅存在于西方国家,在网络时代和全球化的趋势下,资本的累积是在全球范围内产生危机,亚洲国家以及中国也必须思考如何应对危机,以及探索后新自由主义的发展道路。最后,文章从全球到地方的撤退空间讨论当中,反思新自由主义作为一种全球性的都市治理政策在全球的流动,认为就后政治的城市来说,要超越新自由主义的局限还有待观察,中国城市走向后新自由主义的治理转型就必须勇于摆脱英美社会脉络所产生的都市治理论述,建构符合地方社会脉络的理论和实践。