Institutionalizing Nature's Contributions to People: How a Chinese County Fabricated Tradeable Ecological Assets Through Sequential Governance Innovation

The gap between ecosystem services valuation and practical monetization remains a persistent governance challenge, particularly in underdeveloped regions where ecological endowments are richest and fiscal capacity is weakest. This paper presents an in depth case study of Shangyou County, Jiangxi Province, China, which sequentially constructed an ecosystem services monetization architecture through four interlocking institutional mechanisms: (1) GEP/VEP accounting that rendered ecological value legible to financial actors; (2) a centralized state owned platform that consolidated scattered ecological resources; (3) market creating instruments, including China's first collapsed hill arable land indicator trade (RMB 344,960), the nation's second soil and water conservation carbon sink trade (70,000 tons CO₂e, RMB 2.1 million), and Jiangxi Province's largest VEP backed green loan (RMB 200 million); and (4) a zero carbon industrial park that anchored long term sustainability. Drawing on the IPBES framework of Nature's Contributions to People (NCP), the analysis reveals a cumulative sequential logic in which each mechanism created the preconditions for the next: measurement enabled consolidation, consolidation enabled market creation, and market creation provided the financial and policy foundation for industrial anchoring. The case contributes to the ecosystem services literature by demonstrating that the institutionalization of NCP is not a menu of independent options but a path dependent process in which sequencing determines outcomes. The findings carry implications for Payments for Ecosystem Services design, natural capital accounting, and the governance of green finance in developing economies.