Apples and oranges? Exchanging offsets for a place agency-based approach

Abstract

Offsets-based approaches attempt to compensate for the loss of cultural and natural heritage destroyed by development. Similar approaches have been extended worldwide, from wetland mitigation to Indigenous cultural heritage management. Offsets are criticised for becoming a licence to destroy, for infringeing the mitigation hierarchy and for failing to ensure equivalence: exchanging “apples and oranges”. The principle of like-for-like replacement is rarely ever achievable in practice. It is an impossible ideal: all places are unique. Rather than piecemeal reform, fundamental transformation is required, by recognising the co-constituted web of social and natural interactions which comprise and produce places. Place agency-based approaches are preferable for both cultural and natural heritage, given their mutual embeddedness.