The technocratic pathway of nature conservation and natural resources exploitation: the paradigmatic case of RIGI in Argentina

Pedro L. Lomas (FUHEM)

2025

On August 2024, it was approved in Argentina the Law 27742 – Reglamentación del
Título VII – Regimen de Incentivo para Grandes Inversiones, also known as RIGI by its
acronym in Spanish. RIGI is a regulation theoretically intended for the attraction of
investments to Argentina. This regulation was created under the widely discussed idea
of national deregulation for promotion of investments and economic efficiency, which is
at the ideological core of the economic policies carried out by the current Argentinian
government. Main measures carried out include tax, custom and exchange benefits, and
also the so-called normative stability, e.g., the impossibility of future or current
governments to regulate about topics which can affect the investments made in, at least,
30 years.
Some of the industries covered by this particular regime of investments are economic
sectors with important environmental impacts involving critical national natural
resources, such as mining, petroleum and gas, energy or forestry. Consequently, it has
created so much controversy and potentially will increase the social-ecological
conflicts.
As other political decisions taken in this line, RIGI has been justified under the umbrella
of an economic paradigm in which the institutions should be diminished, and markets
should be used as the efficient (in a Paretian sense) mechanism to manage nature. This
form of technocratic management of nature is based on the so much debatable idea that
ideal often-unrealistic markets (i.e., those in which assumed, at least, the following
conditions: private property of nature, many sellers and buyers, homogenic products,
complete, symmetric and free information, no entrance barriers, perfect mobility of
commodities, and no transaction costs) allow economic actors (buyers and sellers
always worried about paying and expending minimum amount of money, according to
the assumption of homo oeconomicus) to reach an efficient use of natural resources in
Paretian terms (an interchange in which all the economic actors theoretically obtain
maximum economic benefits without worsen the benefits obtained by the others).
Apart from the theoretical assumptions of the economic model not accomplished due to
the existence of non-ideal markets, it implies also several oversimplification and
assumptions about the nature of ecosystems.
One of the most relevant and crucial assumption is the consideration of ecosystems as a
form of capital (natural capital) providing humans with services to support the human
well-being, the so-called ecosystem services or nature’s contributions to people. Despite
strong and unsolved discussions carried out during the 1960s and 1970s between
economists about the nature and measurement of capital (Cambridge Controversy), the
conventional economic model in which these policies are based on continues to assume:
(1) the complete substitutability of the different forms of capital, and consequently, the
possibility of substitution of natural resources by forms of human or built capital in
economics, so that the exhaustion of natural resources could be considered almost an
irrelevant event to be fixed with technology (technological optimism in ecomodernist approaches); and (2) the complete measurability of the so-called natural capital, i.e., the
possibility of reducing the ecosystems’ structure, functioning and dynamics to mere
goods and services valued in monetary terms, including payments and markets for
ecosystems services.

According to the dominant view of economics, the economic goods and services must
comply with some conditions to be conceptualized in these terms. In particular, main
conditions imply to be useful for the satisfaction of needs, to have a price attached,
include productive process associated, and to hold the status of scarce. It is obvious that
ecosystems and their services do not comply with most of these conditions, and the
nature of ecosystems is more complex than the nature of economic good and services to
which they are often theoretically reduced.
Even so, different forms of commodification of nature, accounting and pseudo-valuation
methods have been developed in order to make this process potentially possible at
different scales. Thus, the ecosystem services (or nature’s contributions to people) and
natural capital approaches have been gaining academic and political momentum based
on disregarding theoretical inconsistencies between the nature of the economic goods
and services and the actual nature of ecosystems, among other structural problems
associated to these approaches.
In this sense, RIGI is a regulation consolidating a technocratic framework for resource
management in which decision-making is abandoned to certain economic reasoning
which often disregards economic and ecological theoretical principles and is focused on
allowing the obtention of maximum economic benefits and put into (economic) value of
different aspects of the ecosystems’ structure and functioning. Nature conservation or
natural resources management based on this approach are completely irrelevant to the
purpose of efficient conservation or resource management for conservation. However,
as a consequence of the assumptions made, it requires complex processes of
commodification of nature (itemization, complexity reduction, monetary valuation, etc.)
which deeply affect not only the ecosystems or the resources themselves but also the
potential of other approaches and other potential motivations for conservation.
Moreover, RIGI will consolidate these inconsistencies and associated practice issues for
decades as a consequence of the clauses preventing normative changes.

Further reading and resources

Kosoy, N., and E. Corbera (2010). Payments for ecosystem services as commodity fetishism. Ecological Economics, 69: 1228-1236.

Gómez-Baggethun, E., De Groot, R., Lomas, P.L., Montes, C., 2010. The history of ecosystem services in economic theory and practice: from early notions to markets and payment schemes. Ecological Economics, 69(6): 1209–1218.

Spash, C.L. (2015). Bulldozing biodiversity: The economics of offsets and trading-in Nature. Biological Conservation, 192: 541-551.

Clive L. Spash personal website: https://www.clivespash.org/

Green Finance Observatory: https://greenfinanceobservatory.org/ 

Text of the RIGI, available in: https://www.argentina.gob.ar/normativa/nacional/decreto-749-2024-403230

Aguado, M., Hevia, V. González, J.A., Lomas, P.L., Rodríguez-Chaves, B., Servicios de los ecosistemas/Contribuciones de la naturaleza, Glosario Speak4Nature: Interdisciplinary Approaches on Ecological Justice: https://www.speak4nature.eu/ 

Rodríguez-Chaves, B., Pago por servicios ambientales (PSA), Glosario Speak4Nature: Interdisciplinary Approaches on Ecological Justice: https://www.speak4nature.eu/