The politics of biodiversity offsetting across time and institutional scales

Biodiversity offsetting—actions aimed to produce biodiversity gains to compensate for development impacts—has become an important but controversial instrument of sustainability governance. To understand how this occurred, we conducted a discourse analysis, iteratively applying a qualitative coding system to 197 policy documents produced between 1958 and 2019 across four institutional scales. We show that offsetting has historically been promoted by reformist approaches, which encourage economic growth without consideration of biocultural limits. More recently, those promoting more transformative approaches have reinterpreted offsetting as an instrument to transition towards sustainable economies respectful of planetary boundaries. However, we show that enacting this approach requires major structural governance changes that challenge the dominance of reformist coalitions across scales. Such changes would need to include a commitment by institutions to renounce non-essential projects and avoid damage and for offset stakeholders to become aware of how their contributions become enrolled in the service of specific discourses. Without such changes, offsetting risks structurally encouraging conservationists to produce natures compatible with a status quo development, rather than to advance transformative practices for biocultural diversity.