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The assertion that 'ecosystems are infrastructure' is now common in conservation science and ecosystem management. This article interrogates that claim, which we argue underpins diverse practices of environmental investment focused on the strategic management of ecosystem functions to sustain and secure human life. We trace the genealogies and geographies of infrastructural nature as a paradigm of investment that coexists (sometimes in tension) with extractivist commodity regimes. We draw links between literatures on the political economy of ecosystem services and infrastructure and highlight three themes that hold promise for future research: labor, territory, and finance.

ABSTRACTThis article shows the two‐way relation between global norms and local conditions as they shape Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) theory and practice, through a case study of a water fund in Valle del Cauca, Colombia, the heartland of the country's sugarcane industry. Drawing on interviews, survey data and historical research, the article argues that the water fund should be understood in the context of the history of infrastructure for the sugarcane industry in the region, and that this infrastructural perspective provides a more nuanced insight into the fund's political life than the traditional PES framing. Furthermore, the article shows how the norms embedded in this locally grown programme circulated through international networks to influence PES theory and design. This case offers one example of the need to attend to the multiple and geographically specific histories of actually existing PES in order to understand its diversity in the present.