The rise and fall of biodiversity offsetting in the Lodge Hill large-scale housing development, South East England

In this paper, we aim to shed light on the geographies that led both to the selection of Lodge Hill for the construction of a large-scale housing development and to the subsequent attempt to use biodiversity offsetting to compensate for its environmental impacts. We draw on extensive fieldwork from 2012 to 2016, and diverge from previous studies on offsetting by focusing less on issues related to metrics and governance and shifting our analytic attention to the economic and urban geographies surrounding the Lodge Hill case. We argue that this approach can offer not only an empirically grounded account of why offsetting is being selected to address the impacts of specific urban development projects, but also an in-depth understanding of the factors that determine offsetting’s actual implementation on the ground. Viewing the Lodge Hill case through the frame of urbanization allows us to better grasp the how, why and when particular alliances of actors contest and/or support the implementation of biodiversity offsetting. Our analytical lens also helps exposing the fragility of neoliberal natures and the roles inter-capitalist competition and species biology and ecology can play on the success or failure of neoliberal policies.