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This book unravels the profound implications of biodiversity offsetting for nature-society relationships and its links to environmental and social inequality. Drawing on people's resistance against its implementation in several urban and rural places across England, it explores how the production of equivalent natures, the core promise of offsetting, reframes socionatures both discursively and materially transforming places and livelihoods.
The book draws on theories and concepts from human geography, political ecology, and Marxist political economy, and aims to shift the trajectory of the current literature on the interplay between offsetting, urbanization and the neoliberal reconstruction of conservation and planning policies in the era following the 2008 financial crash. By shedding light on offsetting's contested geographies, it offers a fundamental retheorization of offsetting capable of demonstrating how offsetting, and more broadly revanchist neoliberal policies, are increasingly used to support capitalist urban growth producing socially, environmentally and geographically uneven outcomes.  
Nature Swapped and Nature Lost brings forward an understanding of environmental politics as class politics and sees environmental justice as inextricably linked to social justice. It effectively challenges the dystopia of offsetting's ahistorical and asocial non-places and proposes a radically different pathway for gaining social control over the production of nature by linking struggles for the right to the city with struggles for the right to nature for all.

Nature Swapped and Nature Lost: Biodiversity Offsetting, Urbanization and Social Justice

IntroductionChapter 1. The emergence, evolution and neoliberal origins of biodiversity offsetting1.1. Neoliberalism and nature1.2. A brief history of the origins and evolution of biodiversity offsetting1.3. Key definitions1.4. Current distribution of biodiversity offsetting and compensation mechanisms across the globeChapter 2. Biodiversity offsetting and equivalent natures2.1. Biodiversity offsetting and the construction of ecological equivalence: insights from the technicalliterature2.2. Biodiversity offsetting and the construction of ecological equivalence: insights from the criticalliterature2.3. Biodiversity offsetting and placeChapter 3. Biodiversity offsetting: Value or Rent?3.1. Nature, labor and value3.2. Biodiversity offsetting, value and rent53.3. Urbanization and biodiversity offsettingChapter 4. Biodiversity offsetting in England: Deepening neoliberal conservation4.1. Introduction4.2. Nature conservation in the UK after the 2008 financial crash: consolidating the hegemony of marketenvironmentalism4.3. Biodiversity offsetting in the UK and neoliberal conservation4.4. The Defra offset metric: The triumph of simplicity4.5. Biodiversity offsetting and the role of experts4.6. Biodiversity offsetting and habitat banking: buying biodiversity "off-the-self"4.7. Against the framing of the social as irrelevant4.8. Interregnum: A discussion with an offset metric designer on ecosystem services, biodiversity offsettingand the economic valuation of natureChapter 5. Biodiversity offsetting, urbanization and the neoliberalization of nature in England5.1. Offsetting, urbanization and deregulation: "A war on red tape" in post-crisis England5.2. The convergence of offsetting and urbanization: Rendering conservation part of a development agenda5.3. Austerity localism, neoliberal urbanization and offsetting5.4. Biodiversity offsetting, urbanization, and the right to nature5.4.1. The case of the Whitehouse Farm housing development5.4.2. The case of the Lodge Hill housing development5.4.3. The HS2 case: a voluntary adoption of offsetting to greenwash urban development5.5. When the win-win rhetoric meets the TINA dogma: biodiversity offsetting, neoliberalism and thetyranny of pragmatismChapter 6: Discussing with the supporters of biodiversity offsetting in England6.1. Introduction6.2. Interview with a conservation broker66.3. Interview with a consultant (ecologist) working for the housing industryChapter 7. Discussing with the opponents of biodiversity offsetting in England7.1. Interview with a conservationist7.2. Interview with a local activist opposing a mega-projectAfterwordReferences