CONSERVATION AND THE NATURE OF GOODS

Conflicts within the conservation movement have reflected disagreement s regarding the purposes of conservation. We offer the concept of good s as a means to analyze these purposes. Conservation may be understood as the management of ecosystems to generate a continuous or sustained provision of specified sets of goods. A political economy of natural resources that focuses on goods will assess the allocative and distrib utive consequences of conservation regimes, That is, it will examine w hat people want ecosystems to provide and how institutional arrangemen ts are related to the nature of goods and the ecosystems that produce them. This mode of analysis is as useful for the conservation of biodi versity as for more traditional conservation purposes. An analysis of goods highlights the political implications of various conservation re gimes.