States, transnational networks of scientists, corporate actors, and institutions in the climate change regime have known for decades that iron ore, when dumped in the ocean, can stimulate the growth of plankton. Over the past twenty years, normative disagreements about appropriate behavior have shaped international governance of the phenomenon. Prior to 2007, firms lobbied governments to treat the oceans as a carbon sink and to allow corporations that dumped iron to sell carbon credits on the international market. However, after 2007 a transnational coalition of oceanographers and advocates opposed this agenda by linking it to an emergent antigeoengineering discourse. Crucial to their efforts was their interpretation of uncertainty: for opponents, scientific uncertainty implied possibly devastating consequences of iron dumping, which was thus best addressed with extreme caution. This normative approach ultimately shaped governance, since advocates successfully used it to lobby institutions in ocean governance to prevent carbon credits from being issued for ocean fertilization. Since these subjective understandings of certainty influenced global ocean governance, this article explains international behavior as a consequence of changing norms.

Payment for ecosystem services (PES) is becoming a dominant approach in generating political and societal support for conservation of globally important biodiversity. PES assumes that corporate actors and policymakers will be more likely to support environmental action if convinced of the economic rationale of doing so. However, by process-tracing two biodiversity projects funded by the Global Environment Facility in Jamaica and Mexico, I argue that linking biodiversity conservation to neoliberal economics reifies a short-term, exploitative view of the environment. Economic calculations about biodiversity will not persuade corporate actors and policymakers to abandon short-term exploitation. Moreover, commodifying nature under the neoliberal paradigm undermines other perspectives on the value of nature, notably those rooted in cultural, historic, subsistence and aesthetic paradigms. In turn, this restricts the ability of populations not integrated into major economic markets to participate in governance and influence what “effective” regime implementation looks like at the local level.