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The gap observed between the rhetoric and reality of biodiversity conservation draws critical attention to the discourse of conservation and to claims that local and global interests can be balanced. In this work, I suggest that the spatial framing of organized biodiversity conservation inhibits attempts to produce such 'balance'. I examine the processes by which biodiversity conservation projects are brought into being through the discursive production of scale within the institutional framework of the Global Environment Facility (GEF). Using five case studies of projects proposed under the GEF’s operational program for agrobiodiversity, I analyze how the GEF brings actors and sites into relation and engages them in the reproduction of articulations of scale through the GEF project cycle. In so doing, I reveal how the mechanisms that structure conservation projects around global goals systematically undermine the claims of situated resource users and prevent questions of justice from being raised.

The gap observed between the rhetoric and reality of biodiversity conservation draws critical attention to the discourse of conservation and to claims that local and global interests can be balanced. In this work, I suggest that the spatial framing of organized biodiversity conservation inhibits attempts to produce such 'balance'. I examine the processes by which biodiversity conservation projects are brought into being through the discursive production of scale within the institutional framework of the Global Environment Facility (GEF). Using five case studies of projects proposed under the GEF’s operational program for agrobiodiversity, I analyze how the GEF brings actors and sites into relation and engages them in the reproduction of articulations of scale through the GEF project cycle. In so doing, I reveal how the mechanisms that structure conservation projects around global goals systematically undermine the claims of situated resource users and prevent questions of justice from being raised.