Fernanda Rojas Marchini

Fernanda Rojas Marchini is a human geographer and a PhD student at the University of British Columbia. She conducts research on environmental science and politics in the temperate rainforests of southern Chile. Specifically, she focuses on the turn toward market-based biodiversity conservation in conjunction with international NGOs and private protected areas whose managers are pursuing for-profit conservation. Before moving to Vancouver, Fernanda worked as independent consultant for the Forestry Institute (Ministry of Agriculture), collaborating in two projects: the first was a socioeconomic assessment of the Wild Forest Act (Law 20,283); the second was the project “Integrated National Monitoring and Assessment System on Forest Ecosystems” (GEF project ID 4968), in which she conducted a comparative study among different forest-use monitoring systems and helped in the design of a mixed methodology for monitoring socioeconomic variables underpinning non-industrial forests use.

Fernanda’s doctoral research focuses on the environmental turn toward market-based conservation in Chile. The research starts by asking what new managements of life the environmental turn toward market-based conservation incentivizes and how these managements engage with the governmental rationalities of the Chilean state. To respond to this question, Fernanda is tracing intertwined processes rendering nature investable as a tradable asset. Among these are the techno-scientific design of the UN-led biodiversity offsetting program and the creation of the new National Service for Biodiversity and Protected Areas. The research analyzes governmental and inter-governmental documentation as well as interviews with both the programmers of the environmental turn and people living near protected areas.