THIS PUBLICATION IS essentially an attempt to articulate some of the insights, key themes, and unsettled questions linked to market-based conservation that are more fully explored in the book People Plants and Justice. The original publication was an exploration of the relationships between market-based schemes for nature conservation or “sustainable” natural resource extraction, and justice, rights, and power, in specific contexts. If there is a primary proposition to be distilled from the original publication it is that there is no single market operating at a fixed sale and associated with particular social and environmental consequences. There are instead, multiple, culturally shaped forms of markets that are inserted into and articulated with divergent economic, historical and environmental contexts. There is no “market” that exists outside of history, culture and geographical context.

In this precis publication thirteen case study excerpts from Africa, Latin America, the South Pacific and Southeast Asia are used to illustrate these points. They are strategically placed in the author’s overall argument. The cases are illustrative rather than representative, and exemplify approaches that attempt to integrate, to varying degrees, concerns for justice, power and the politics of resource and territorial control. These case studies are intended, in their singularity and in their juxtaposition, to provoke thought about already accepted conservation and environmental “solutions” linked to markets and resource extraction. They challenge contemporary orthodoxies about communities (the “local” focal point of many conservation projects), markets (beneficial), minor forest product extraction (good), control over spatial access (critical for “local” community control), global-local relationships and processes, and the links between justice, conservation and environment/development.

In conclusion, the author argues for a more expansive terrain for discussion of social and environmental justice, and a broader intellectual and programmatic agenda for nature conservation.