Is conservation neoliberal? Flashcards
Selling Nature to Save It
The market solution is to commodify and privatise nature.
* Neoclassical ideal of the world as a vast marketplace
* Growth is not only compatible with environmental protection but should result from it
* However, ecosystems are composed of an incalculable variety of interspecies dependencies
McAfee (1999)
Conservation and capitalism
Authors identify a new, neoliberal ‘conservationist mode of production’ emerging through alliances of governments, NGOs and corporations
- Conservation/capitalism have a long history since rich elites promoted species conservation for enjoyment long before emergence of neoliberalism
- However, there is a new intensity and variety
- Moreover, it is now widely accepted that capitalism CAN AND SHOULD help the enviornment
- Conservation today is instrumental to capitalism’s reproduction and growth
Notably, authors do not argue that conservation has been financialised.
Brockington & Duffy (2010)
How conservation has become capitalist
Book chapter that tracks how the institutional context of conservation governance has been controlled by corporate interests and states to minimise impediments to business.
- E.g. the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1993
- Corporate interests have also reached out to conservation groups for symbolic advantages
MacDonald (2010)
Conservation NGOs in Sub Saharan Africa
Conservation NGOs are integral to a ‘conservationist mode’ of production that intertwines economic growth with conservation.
- NGOs are seen as having legitimate interests in nature
- So they have huge power in circulating images and commodities of wildlife
- Images of charismatic African megafauna have globally diffused so that nature is a fetishised commodity
- Saving wildlife is turned into a task for NGOs
- Wildlife conservation is now inherently a kind of capitalist production
Brockington & Scholfield (2010)
Very simplistic and somewhat unconvincing argument. Could be rebutted with Sandbrook et al (2010) on the diversity of NGOs and Corson (2016) on state corruption/interests.
The financialisation of conservation
Builds on Brockington & Duffy (2010), arguing they have neglected financialisation.
* Conservation is a new frontier for investment and financiers, sped up by recent financial crisis
* Ntature finance e.g. new investment funds in environmental conservation products
* Nature work e.g. re-writing nature as a worker/bank of capital - this is a significant conceptual move
* Nature banking
Altogether, article argues for a frontier of new conservation practices associated with financialised discourses of environmental crisis where nature is structured as an exchangeable-commodity form
Sullivan (2013)
Neoliberal environmentality
Neoliberal environmentality appeals to economic rationales to alter individual values
* Creation of a new form of an entrepreneurial environmental subject, an evolution from earlier stages of coercion to enforce conservation
* A person of enterprise who engages in the market economy
* Ecosystems services language renders nature technical
Fletcher (2017)
Bellbird Biological Corridor, Costa Rica
- The corridor is a site of neoliberal conservation and green market initiatives such as PES
- Farmers are offered monetary compensation in exchange for ecosystem services provisioning
- The infiltration has changed the way that people think about the environment
- Market mentality more common amongst farmers who now reduced land uses to a monetary exchange value
- Markets are not new (farmers used to exchange produce with the government via a guaranteed market) but they are novel in the way they have been introduced
Neoliberal conservation found to have reinforced a market mentality (Sandel, 2012)
Allen (2018)
Demonstration of Fletcher (2017)
Rhino bonds
An example of the financialisation of conservation.
The Rhino Bond is the first financial instrument dedicated to protecting a species.
Investors can invest in the conservation of the black rhinoceros, with the amount of money returned dependent on whether numbers increase and by how much.
Financial actors found to have exerted significant control over decision making with preferences for large and easily counted species. Only some sites were able to meet these conditions, narrowing the vision to charismatic megafauna
An uneven geography of financialised conservation.
Medina & Scales (2023)
Addressing the narrowness of PE critiques.
Easier to complain than to find solutions! Debunks 4 generalisations made about conservation in PE.
1) Conservation is not a monolithic practice with identical practioners
2) There is no longer such a single entity as a park
3) Non-park conservation is often underreperesented
4) Conservation is not always bad for local people
In reality, many stories of success involve incorporation of neoliberal practices e.g. a reduction in Amazonian deforestation due to targeted regulation and civil society pressure.
We need a more nuanced rendering of politics which is more conducive to dialogue.
Cleary (2017)
Value plurality among conservation professionals
Finds 4 diametrically opposed positions from NGOS about why conservation should happen and how it should be done.
So we cannot throw them under the same umbrella.
Sandbrook et al (2010)
Corridors of Power.
State agency in attracting aid for corrupt elite profit.
E.g. Gabonese government have triped PA after Durban Parks Congree in exchange for donor money from USA ID.
Corson (2016)
Convivial conservation
An actually radical alternative?
Rejecting a neoliberal consensus politics and the nature/culture dichotomy.
E.g. from protected to promoted areas - people are welcome but not in the terms of capital accumulation
Buscher & Fletcher (2019)
Review of convivial conservation
Idea still needs to be proved!
Proposal still keeps some distinction between humans and non-humans because human exceptionality is needed to function as intentional political and moral agents.
Also PE is founded on human exceptionalism as a discipline (Lave, 2015)
Loque-Lora (2021)
