Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Biological Conservation journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/biocon Conservation basic income: A non-market mechanism to support convivial conservation Robert Fletcher ⁎ , Bram Büscher Sociology of Development and Change, Wageningen University, De Leeuwenborch, Hollandseweg 1, 6707 KN Wageningen, Netherlands ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Convivial conservation Market-based instruments Payment for ecosystem services Universal basic income Cash transfer programs REDD+ ABSTRACT This article advances a proposal for conservation basic income (CBI) as a novel strategy for funding biodiversity conservation that moves beyond widely promoted market-based instruments (MBIs). This CBI proposal responds to two important empirical developments. The first concerns growing discussions around cash transfer programs (CTPs) and universal basic income (UBI). These are increasingly implemented or piloted yet do not usually take into account environmental issues including biodiversity conservation. The second relates to MBIs like payments for ecosystem services (PES) and REDD+ (reduced emissions through avoided deforestation and forest de- gradation). In practice, these programs have not only commonly failed to halt biodiversity loss and alleviate poverty but have also largely abandoned their market-based origins, leading to calls for moving beyond market- based conservation entirely. We conclude that the time is right to integrate and transcend these existing me- chanisms to develop conservation basic income as part of a broader paradigm shift towards convivial con- servation that foregrounds concerns for social justice and equity. 1. Introduction Conservationists have increasingly questioned the efficacy of neo- liberal conservation strategies centred on promotion of market-based instruments (MBIs). Whereas a decade ago these were seen as the most sensible and realistic conservation policies by mainstream conservation organizations, this aura is now gone. Some conservationists even assert that market-based conservation will not get us out of the current en- vironmental and extinction crisis (Cafaro et al. 2017). Based on our own research, we too have suggested that conservationists might “begin taking the market out of conservation altogether and moving toward redistribution” instead (Fletcher et al., 2016: 675). Few scholars and practitioners, however, have seriously conceptualized what this means and what concrete steps might be taken to transition towards a different strategy for financing conservation. In this article, we propose one potential mechanism that could help trigger such a broader transition: a conservation basic income (CBI). We situate this proposal within an overarching approach to transforming biodiversity policy and practice globally that we call convivial conservation (see Büscher and Fletcher, 2019; 2020). Convivial conservation is “a vision, a politics and a set of governance principles that… proposes a post-capitalist approach to conservation that promotes radical equity, structural transformation and environmental justice” (Büscher and Fletcher, 2019: 283). The approach seeks to challenge and transcend both reliance on neoliberal capitalist markets and the strict separation between humans and non- human nature via protected areas (PAs) in pursuit of conservation policy and programming that foregrounds principles of justice and equity. We detail our convivial conservation proposal in great depth else- where (see Büscher and Fletcher, 2019; 2020). There we also briefly advanced CBI as a concrete means of operationalizing part of the ap- proach. Here, we seek to outline this potential funding mechanism in in greater detail and specificity as the basis for future research and ex- perimentation concerning its possible implementation in conservation- critical areas. This proposal is timely in multiple ways. First, it builds on growing discussion concerning the potential to implement universal basic in- come (UBI), a discussion that builds on the rapidly growing oper- ationalization of cash transfer programs (CTPs). Challenging bureau- cratic, top-down interventions, CTPs and UBI aim to ensure a basic, decent living for all and so create conditions for bottom-up forms of pro-poor development. CTPs have been widely implemented worldwide in various forms while despite some partial operationalization UBI re- mains largely hypothetical. Within these discussions, however, atten- tion to environmental issues including biodiversity conservation has been largely absent thus far. We believe CBI can rectify this omission, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2020.108520 Received 28 June 2019; Received in revised form 8 March 2020; Accepted 16 March 2020 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: robert.fletcher@wur.nl (R. Fletcher). Biological Conservation 244 (2020) 108520 0006-3207/ © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T