Towards Convivial Conservation Büscher, Bram; Fletcher, Robert
Conservation & society/Conservation & Society,
07/2019, Letnik:
17, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Environmental conservation finds itself in desperate times. Saving nature, to be sure, has never been an easy proposition. But the arrival of the Anthropocene - the alleged new phase of world history ...in which humans dominate the earth-system seems to have upped the ante dramatically; the choices facing the conservation community have now become particularly stark. Several proposals for revolutionising conservation have been proposed, including ‘new’ conservation, ‘half Earth’ and more. These have triggered heated debates and potential for (contemplating) radical change. Here, we argue that these do not take political economic realities seriously enough and hence cannot lead us forward. Another approach to conservation is needed, one that takes seriously our economic system’s structural pressures, violent socio-ecological realities, cascading extinctions and increasingly authoritarian politics. We propose an alternative termed ‘convivial conservation’. Convivial conservation is a vision, a politics and a set of governance principles that realistically respond to the core pressures of our time. Drawing on a variety of perspectives in social theory and movements from around the globe, it proposes a post-capitalist approach to conservation that promotes radical equity, structural transformation and environmental justice and so contributes to an overarching movement to create a more equal and sustainable world.
Payments for Environmental Services (PES) has become a popular means to neoliberalize biodiversity conservation throughout the world. Yet research on PES is increasingly focused on debating exactly ...how neoliberal programmes really are, documenting complexities in PES implementation and concluding that few programmes are very market-based in practice. While we agree that ideal neoliberal implementation of PES does not and cannot exist, we argue that focusing (only) on micro-politics misunderstands the importance of analysing PES as a form of neoliberal conservation. The question is not just whether PES is innately neoliberal but how it functions within a broader neoliberal political economy. By focusing on the overarching governance and power structures that gave rise to PES in the first place, we more clearly see what we call ‘the PES conceit’, namely that the approach implicitly accepts neoliberal capitalism as both the problem and the solution to the ecological crisis. This strategy is not only contradictory but also commonly fails to achieve intended outcomes, falling far short of conservation objectives while also often exacerbating socioeconomic inequality. This problematic conceit, we conclude, cannot be addressed through only micro-oriented studies; it demands connecting micro- and macro political economic analyses to confront broader neoliberal power structures.
Web 2.0 and social media applications that allow people to share, co-create and rate online content are crucial new ways for conservation organizations to reach audiences and for concerned ...individuals and organizations to be (seen as) ‘green’. These dynamics are rapidly changing the politics and political economy of nature conservation. By developing the concept of ‘nature 2.0’ and building on empirical insights, the article explores and theorizes these changes. It argues that online activities stimulate and complicate the commodification of biodiversity and help to reimagine ideas, ideals and experiences of (‘pristine’) nature. By exploring the implications of these arguments in relation to several key themes in new media studies, the article aims to provide building blocks for further investigations into the world of nature 2.0 and the effects of new media on human–nature dynamics more broadly.
This article critically reflects on contemporary discussions of human–nonhuman relations and their consequences for ecological politics. Recent critiques push back against popular ‘nonhuman turn’ ...appeals to ‘decentre’ humans and downplay distinctions between humans and nonhumans. The article seeks to both extend and nuance these critiques by emphasising how uneven developments from colonial to digital platform capitalism have intensified historical processes of alienation between humans and the rest of nature. This focus contextualises the nonhuman turn as a response to increasingly alienated forms of entanglement, which may hamper rather than enable challenging contemporary forms of domination. To address this, two conceptual shifts are proposed. First, a shift away from ‘decentring the human’ to a dialectics between more-than-human and ‘less-than-human’. This move emphasises how forms of capitalist domination continue to diminish (certain) humans and nonhumans and how challenging this requires pivoting between de- and recentring humans where needed. Second, a shift from ‘more-than-human’ to ‘more-than-life’, to emphasise how through extremely uneven histories of capitalist development the intensification of alienation has led to growing tensions between ontological relationality and epistemological and practical distinctions.
Over a thousand rhinos were killed in 2013 and 2014 as the poaching crisis in Southern Africa reached massive proportions, with major consequences for conservation and other political dynamics in the ...region. The article documents these dynamics in the context of the ongoing development and establishment of "peace parks": large conservation areas that cross international state boundaries. The rhino-poaching crisis has affected peace parks in the region, especially the flagship Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park between South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. In order to save both peace parks and rhinos, key actors such as the South African government, the Peace Parks Foundation, and the general public responded to the poaching crisis with increasingly desperate measures, including the deployment of a variety of violent tactics and instruments. The article critically examines these methods of 'green violence' and places them within the broader historical and contemporary contexts of violence in the region and in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. It concludes that attempting to save peace parks through ' green violence' represents a contradiction, but that this contradiction is no longer recognized as such, given the historical positioning of peace parks in the region and popular discourses of placing poachers in a 'space of exception'.
ABSTRACT
This article argues that Horner and Hulme's call for moving towards ‘global development’ to do justice to changing 21st century development geographies neither contributes to advancing our ...understanding of contemporary development challenges nor helps articulate realistic responses to tackle them. A key problem is that they try to explain several general trends in the geography of development with reference to mainstream statistics without appropriate critical reflection or adequate theorization. Focusing specifically on the environmental and conservation aspects of development, this article contends that these omissions not only confuse the debate on the current state and geographies of development, they risk something more serious, namely the reinforcement of a generic development narrative which will intensify 21st century development challenges. The article concludes that what we need is not global development but revolutionary development.
This short paper critically engages with new technologies for data processing related to research outputs, connections and management. Such technologies are generally heralded as making research and ...publishing more efficient, enabling better connections between researchers and bringing disparate forms of research data together for better research and output management. Based on the examples of Elsevier’s Pure and Fingerprint technologies, I argue that in reality the effects of these new technologies and the surveillance platforms they are based on, will be precisely the opposite: they degrade scientific understanding and relations by reducing them to superficial numbers, clicks and hits; they will lead to increased anxiety and stress among academic staff; and they open up the possibilities for new types of panopticon academic governance. The paper concludes by exploring an alternative based on decentralized diversity in research(er) representation.
This article advances a proposal for conservation basic income (CBI) as a novel strategy for funding biodiversity conservation that moves beyond widely promoted market-based instruments (MBIs). This ...CBI proposal responds to two important empirical developments. The first concerns growing discussions around cash transfer programs (CTPs) and universal basic income (UBI). These are increasingly implemented or piloted yet do not usually take into account environmental issues including biodiversity conservation. The second relates to MBIs like payments for ecosystem services (PES) and REDD+ (reduced emissions through avoided deforestation and forest degradation). In practice, these programs have not only commonly failed to halt biodiversity loss and alleviate poverty but have also largely abandoned their market-based origins, leading to calls for moving beyond market-based conservation entirely. We conclude that the time is right to integrate and transcend these existing mechanisms to develop conservation basic income as part of a broader paradigm shift towards convivial conservation that foregrounds concerns for social justice and equity.
Accumulation by Conservation Büscher, Bram; Fletcher, Robert
New political economy,
03/2015, Letnik:
20, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Following the financial crisis and its aftermath, it is clear that the inherent contradictions of capitalist accumulation have become even more intense and plunged the global economy into ...unprecedented turmoil and urgency. Governments, business leaders and other elite agents are frantically searching for a new, more stable mode of accumulation. Arguably the most promising is what we call 'Accumulation by Conservation' (AbC): a mode of accumulation that takes the negative environmental contradictions of contemporary capitalism as its departure for a newfound 'sustainable' model of accumulation for the future. Under slogans such as payments for environmental services, the Green Economy, and The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, public, private and non-governmental sectors seek ways to turn the non-material use of nature into capital that can simultaneously 'save' the environment and establish long-term modes of capital accumulation. In the paper, we conceptualise and interrogate the grand claim of AbC and argue that it should be seen as a denial of the negative environmental impacts of 'business as usual' capitalism. We evaluate AbC's attempt to compel nature to pay for itself and conclude by speculating whether this dynamic signals the impending end of the current global cycle of accumulation altogether.
Payments for ecosystem/environmental services (PES) interventions aim to subject ecosystem conservation to market dynamics and are often posited as win-win solutions to contemporary ecological, ...developmental and economic quagmires. This paper aims to contribute to the heated debate on PES by giving contrasting evidence from the Maloti-Drakensberg area, a crucial site for water and biodiversity resources in southern Africa. Several PES initiatives and studies, especially those associated with the Maloti-Drakensberg Transfrontier Project (MDTP), claim that an ‘ecosystem services’ market in the area is feasible and desirable. Based on empirical research in the area between 2003 and 2008, the paper challenges these assertions. It argues that the internationally popular PES trend provided an expedient way for the MDTP implementers to deal with the immense socio-political and institutional pressures they faced. Following and in spite of, tenuous assumptions and one-sided evidence, PES was marketed as a ‘success’ by the MDTP and associated epistemic communities that are implicated in and dependent on, this ‘success’. The paper concludes that PES and the process by which it was marketed are both inherent to ‘neoliberal conservation’—the paradoxical idea that capitalist markets are the answer to their own ecological contradictions.
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