Economic Knowledge for Nature Preservation: An Epistemic Inquiry into Spatial Prioritization and International Action

Biodiversity loss is accelerating worldwide, and economic research has increasingly turned to spatial prioritisation tools to guide restoration and conservation efforts. These methods, often based on cost–benefit and cost-effectiveness analyses, aim to identify areas where ecological gains can be maximised at minimal cost. Their results systematically highlight so-called developing countries or economically less productive regions as global priorities for restoration. This article conducts an epistemic inquiry into the assumptions underpinning such analyses and their implications for international ecological action. We identify three main limitations. First, prioritisation is constructed as the inverse of existing global inequalities, since economic and accounting cost data reflect wage gaps and disparities in value-added production. Second, the pixel-based framework overlooks the structural economic drivers of biodiversity decline, reducing transformative change to localised trade-offs. Third, the alleged objectivity of efficiency metrics excludes geopolitical and ontological complexities, neglecting questions of sovereignty, development trajectories, and plural relationships between societies and their environments. By interrogating the conceptual limits of techno-economic reasoning, this contribution argues for a new research agenda in economics. Such an agenda would situate biodiversity protection within the political economy of global value chains, financial dependencies, and distributive justice.