Guest blog: Is the private financing of rewilding a threat to community empowerment?
15 October 2024
We are delighted to share a guest blog from Dr Caitlin Hafferty, University of Oxford who shares some of her recent research on communities and the nature finance markets.
As the urgency to tackle the climate and biodiversity crisis grows, private financing is increasingly sought after to support nature recovery projects like rewilding. In Scotland, the government is publishing its Natural Capital Markets Framework, offering guidance and regulatory interventions to develop responsible private investment in natural capital.
However, while private financing is essential for upscaling nature recovery efforts, it also raises valid concerns. The over-emphasis on financial returns risks undermining alternative funding models and socio-economic goals, including community empowerment. Prioritising private mechanisms can undermine progress towards delivering community benefits alongside climate and biodiversity objectives, which can (further) marginalise community voices in collective land management and democratic decision-making.

Risks of over-emphasising private finance
- Narrowing the focus of nature recovery
Private financing often prioritises measurable outcomes like carbon sequestration and biodiversity. While these goals are important, they often overshadow the less tangible – and not as easily quantified and commodified – socio-economic and cultural values that are deeply embedded in landscapes through long histories of human-nature coexistence.
Community benefits can become secondary to market-focused goals, often simplified into metrics like job creation, access to nature, or event attendance. This overlooks the more diverse and place-based values that communities hold, reducing them to by-products of ecosystem services rather than as important and emerging in their own right.
- Tensions between investor demands and community-led approaches
Private investors typically seek certainty and predictability in their returns, which can conflict with the democratic, decentralised processes required for genuine community agency in nature recovery. Participatory decision-making introduces a range of diverse land-use priorities, many of which may not align with investors’ goals of generating revenue from natural capital. This tension can lead to the marginalisation of place-based community voices, especially those who are not seen as “experts” in natural capital projects.
In the rush to “save the planet” by leveraging private finance, democratic processes, scepticism, and disagreements may be seen as obstacles to swift action rather than vital sources of innovation for transformative change. The root of the climate and biodiversity crisis is ultimately too little not too much democracy.
- The risk of “democracy washing”
Some rewilding projects include community engagement primarily as a way to increase support for pre-determined goals (e.g., as the very last step in the process of nature restoration). It’s not uncommon to hear engagement described as a way to ‘bring people on board’ or ‘win people over’. While encouraging support is valuable, it becomes problematic when it reinforces pre-set ideas about who decides, whose priorities matter, and who qualifies as an “expert” in the project.
This approach can also reduce engagement to one-off events, such as open days or educational activities, which are often assumed to automatically result in community support, pro-environmental awareness and behaviours.
However, when the goals are pre-established, community engagement becomes superficial. There is an irony when, despite best intentions, engagement processes actually end up undermining the very benefits they seek to achieve. This is sometimes called “democracy washing” or “community washing”, where engagement limits the agency and rights of communities to influence outcomes, collectively manage land and resources, or withhold consent.
Finding a constructive path forward
While private financing is important for addressing climate change and biodiversity loss, it must not come at the expense of community empowerment or democratic land-use governance. Striking a balance between private finance and bottom-up, community-led approaches is key to promoting transformative change that genuinely benefits both people and nature. Potential solutions include:
- Prioritising genuine community agency and empowerment, including strong mechanisms for community-led decision-making and collective governance (e.g., co-designing project proposals and developing a local stakeholder group, or following the ‘Silver Standard of land tenure’ which could include community management boards, community right to buy, and actively selling land to the community).
- Building on existing standards for community benefits, while recognising that these should go beyond simple metrics to include community agency in co-producing place-based standards (e.g., see these resources on a community inclusion standard in natural capital projects).
- Embrace uncertainty and complexity as an opportunity for innovation, rather than as obstacles that need to be mitigated against. Disagreement, trade-offs, and complexities are not problems to be feared and mitigated against, but are vital for crafting resilient, creative, and inclusive approaches to nature recovery (e.g., see this flexible, place-based guidance for Nature-based Solutions governance).
Additional comments:
A longer version of this blog can be found here.
This blog post is based on a pre-print paper which is currently under review. The unreviewed version of the paper can be accessed for free here.
Information:
Caitlin Hafferty is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Environmental Social Science at the Environmental Change Institute, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. She does research on the governance, democratic participation, and political dimensions of nature recovery and Nature-based Solutions. Her current research, funded by the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, explores the participatory governance of nature recovery for transformative change in the UK, and how this is impacted by private financing and market-focused objectives. Caitlin conducts transdisciplinary research that is theoretically-informed with real-world, applied impact, working in collaboration with government, businesses, charities and community organisations across Scotland and England. She has developed community engagement guidance used in rewilding projects, Landscape Recovery and Local Nature Recovery Strategies, and holds a number of advisory roles on engagement and the democratic challenges of natural capital markets.
- caitlin.hafferty@ouce.ox.ac.uk