Travelling Simplifications and Urban Political Ecologies

There is an increasing ascendency and importance placed on 'ecological thinking' when reflecting on cities. Last year the Cities and Biodiversity Outlook (CBO, 2012) was launched, promising a " global assessment of the links between urbanization, biodiversity, and ecosystem services " with a foreword by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon commending the study to " all who have a stake in creating ecologically sustainable urbanization for the benefit of humanity and the planet. " In New York this October there was a launch of a new volume on ecosystem services, with a foreword by Pavan Sukhdev, prominent spokesperson of ecosystems economics perspectives and former head of UNEP's Green Economy Initiative. The book, Urbanization, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services: Challenges and Opportunities – A Global Assessment, takes stock of recent developments and pushes for further expansion of ecosystem services. These are clear signs that in the intersection, real and imagined, of an unprecedented ecological crisis and rapid urbanization, the goal to reach sustainable development has placed ecologists, their methods, theories and preoccupations at centre stage. This has a background in understandable and noble ambitions among environmentally concerned scientists and activists to locate ecological knowledge more centrally in planning and decision-making and in allowing for economic valuations to speak more effectively to power. This paper is an attempt to speak to these phenomena and an intervention, however brief and preliminary, into a discussion which is on the rise as the science politics of these methodologies and discourses. Over the years a number of quantitative, often metrics based, approaches have been developed to reach this goal of. In this paper I will focus in particular on a set of tools or indicators from 'ecological planning'— especially ecosystem services— and whether and how they are made to travel (successfully or not). What are the histories of such travels in earlier transfer of knowledge and technologies, or in ecosystem and species between continents? Are these new ecological economics constructs in any way part of some broader phenomenon? What are their preferred pathways? Who carry them around the world, and what institutional and other settings are there to receive them in new urban settings, and what effects might such travels have produced in those places where new ecological planning tools have become accommodated? This includes questions on how they privilege certain expertise (and de-privileges other kinds