Robert Fletcher

Wageningen University & Research | WUR · Department of Sociology and Anthropology of Development

Within political ecology research, a dominant focus on the hard physicality of the world limits engagement with how events taking place on land mediate and are mediated by other material spaces like the atmosphere. This article engages with burgeoning research on the extraction–conservation nexus to show how the clearly demarcated land-based bounda...

The creation of private protected areas (PPA) is commonly considered an instrument of neoliberal conservation, characterized by private management and commodification of nature for (eco)tourism and other market-based instruments (MBIs). PPAs are accused of reproducing social inequalities when entailing enclosure, exclusivity, land grabbing or dispo...

Amsterdam is one of many cities that has struggled with problems of overtourism in recent years. These problems include nuisance, crowdedness, rising housing prices and economic dependence on tourism. City administrators were aware of these issues and took a variety of measures before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as placing restrictions...

This article advances a novel analytical framework for investigating the influence of political-economic processes in human-wildlife interactions (HWI) to support efforts to transform wildlife conservation governance. To date, the majority of research and advocacy addressing HWI focuses on micro-level processes, while even the small body of existin...

Biodiversity conservation supporting a global sustainability transformation must be inclusive, equitable, just and embrace plural values. The conservation basic income (CBI), a proposed unconditional cash transfer to individuals residing in important conservation areas, is a potentially powerful mechanism for facilitating this radical shift in cons...

Global biodiversity is declining at an alarming rate, leading to calls for urgent change in how humans govern, conserve, and live with non-human species. It is argued that this change must be radical and transformative, and must challenge the structures and systems that shape biodiversity conservation. This book brings together a diverse group of...

This chapter introduces the edited book 'Convivial Conservation: From Principles to Practice' and synthesises the contributions through exploration of three overarching themes.

Los destinos turísticos de masas padecen la intensificación del negocio en detrimento de las condiciones laborales, el acceso a la vivienda, el disfrute colectivo de los bienes públicos o la calidad, entre otros muchos inconvenientes del denominado overtourism. Esta manifestación del desarrollo geográfico desigual muestra así algunos síntomas de la...

Private engagement has always been central to biodiversity conservation. Recently, the role of private enterprises in (eco)tourism have increased, and private lands play a pivotal role in expanding protected areas within societies throughout the world. This paper contributes to discussions of private engagement in conservation and its relation to t...

Toerisme’s toenemende luchtvaartafhankelijkheid is een enorme barriere voor echte verduurzaming, terwijl aan dit laatste niet meer te ontkomen is. Dit essay presenteert daarom een radicaal alternatief voor planeetvriendelijk toerisme

News coverage of noteworthy environmental events is often fleeting, moving from one spectacle to another and rarely retaining global attention. But in August 2019, news of Amazon rainforest fires spread seemingly as quickly as the fires themselves, with sustained global coverage and funding pouring into environmental organizations. Yet Amazon fires...

Convivial conservation has been put forward as a radical alternative to transform prevailing mainstream approaches that aim to address global concerns of biodiversity loss and extinction. This special issue includes contributions from diverse disciplinary and geographical perspectives which critically examine convivial conservation’s potential in t...

p>Critical research concerning ecotourism has revealed the activity’s socio-economic impacts, including low-wage employment-based dependencies for many rural communities. While these dynamics are important, a crucial aspect of the ecotourism industry that falls outside this conventional sort of dependency is land use dynamics, specifically land use...

Biodiversity conservation supporting a global sustainability transformation must be inclusive, equitable, just, and embrace plural values. The conservation basic income (CBI), an unconditional cash transfer to individuals in important conservation areas, is a potentially powerful mechanism for facilitating this radical shift in conservation. Here,...

Aquest informe esbossa un nou marc conceptual per explorar les possibilitats d'identificar i potenciar diferents expressions de post-capitalisme en el desenvolupament turístic. El turisme és una de les indústries més grans del món i, per tant, una poderosa força política i socioeconòmica. Tot i això, al llarg dels anys s'han documentat nombrosos pr...

Este informe esboza un novedoso marco conceptual para explorar las posibilidades de identificar y cultivar diferentes expresiones de post-capitalismo en el desarrollo turístico. El turismo es una de las mayores industrias del mundo y, por tanto, una poderosa fuerza política y socioeconómica. Sin embargo, a lo largo de los años se han documentado nu...

A growing body of critical research interrogates the tendency within international conservation circles to present interventions as successful, even when evidence points to substantial negative impacts. The flip side of this 'selling' success is a growing emphasis on the importance of embracing and even celebrating failure. Yet this important trend...

Potential to identify and cultivate forms of post-capitalism in tourism development has yet to be explored in depth in current research. Tourism is one of the world’s largest industries, and hence a powerful global political and socio-economic force. Yet numerous problems associated with conventional tourism development have been documented over th...

This chapter explores the potential to “scale up” socialisation of the global tourism industry in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. Tourism is one of the world’s largest industries, and hence a powerful global political and socio-economic force. Yet numerous problems associated with conventional tourism development are now greatly exacerbated by the...

Researchers have highlighted a conspicuous dearth of analysis focused on political-economic structures and processes in the rapidly expanding literature exploring human-wildlife conflict and coexistence. In this paper, we respond by highlighting the importance of attending to the influence of such dynamics in understanding and addressing both confl...

The question of how to transform human–wildlife relations from conflict to coexistence, rather than merely mitigating conflicts, has become a central focus of research and practice. In this article, we address this important question by exploring the factors that may contribute to promoting successful coexistence between humans and brown bears with...

This article explores a case of human–wildlife cohabitation in the Rodopi mountains of Bulgaria, wherein people and brown bears ( Ursus arctos) have adapted to living together in relative harmony. While this is due to a variety of factors, chief among these is the way both people and bears appear to pursue knowledge of one another and act on this k...

Increasingly NGOs organize trips for their 'major donors' to visit development projects with the aim to enhance funding streams and fortify donor relations. Building on growing discussions of 'philanthrocapitalism' as a novel form of international development financing, we analyze such 'donor trips' as a unique tourism niche termed 'philanthrotouri...

In this op-ed, Robert Fletcher reviews The Dasgupta Review, a report commissioned by the UK Treasury Department on The Economics of Biodiversity, which was released in February 2021. Fletcher argues that rather than offering a fresh or timely analysis of biodiversity loss and how to counter it, the Review continues a long line of similar reports th...

Multiple proposals for transforming biodiversity conservation have been put forward, yet critical exploration of how transformative change is conceptualised in this context is lacking. Drawing on transformations to sustainability scholarship, we review recent proposals for transformative change in biodiversity conservation, considering the suggeste...

La Cuestión Turística es un libro de entrevistas a referentes internacionales de las ciencias sociales y el turismo donde se analizan muchos de los elementos problemáticos que hoy atraviesan al desarrollo turístico global. Elaborado durante tres años, este trabajo se sitúa en el marco del debate social que recorre multitud de ciudades del sur de Eu...

This article describes a case of human-bear cohabitation in the Rodopi mountains (Yagodina-Trigrad area) of Bulgaria. The lack of protected areas in the region and the increasing number of brown bears (Ursus arctos) have resulted in both human-wildlife conflicts and the development of mechanisms and practices to facilitate cohabitation in the absen...

The prospects for Earth’s biological diversity look increasingly bleak. The urgency of global efforts to preserve biodiversity long predates the COVID-19 crisis, but the pandemic has added new dimensions to the problem. Conservation funding from nature tourism has all but disappeared with international travel restrictions, wildlife poaching is on t...

This introduction to the special collection explores how a revised or expanded understanding of ‘environmentality’ can further our analysis of the evermore complex terrain of environmental politics today. We offer an outline of the literature from which the discussion emerges and how the subsequent articles both engage with and depart from it. We d...

This brief manifesto signed by 173 Netherlands-based scholars working on issues around development aims to summarize what we know to be critical and successful policy strategies for moving forward during and after the crisis. We propose five key policy proposals for a post-COVID-19 development model, all of which can be implemented immediately and...

This article investigates assertions that new philanthropic web 2.0 initiatives can empower Internet users to further social and environmental change. It focuses on two ostensibly "free" web 2.0 initiatives aimed at nature conservation: "Greenvolved" and "Safari Challenge Zoo Adventure." With Greenvolved, clicking on one's favorite projects is supp...

Rapid and uneven expansion of tourism as a response to the 2008 economic crisis has proceeded in parallel with the rise of social discontent concerning so-called "overtourism." Despite decades of concerted global effort to achieve sustainable development, meanwhile, socioecological conflicts and inequality have rarely reversed, but in fact increase...

The COVID-19 crisis shows what degrowth in the global tourism industry could look like. But it would need much more concerted planning to address the social impacts of this transition. https://politicalecologynetwork.org/2020/03/24/tourism-degrowth-and-the-covid-19-crisis/

La crisis del COVID-19 conlleva un decrecimiento forzado de la industria turística mundial. Sin embargo se necesitaría una planificación mucho más concertada para abordar los impactos sociales de esta transición. http://www.albasud.org/blog/es/1196/turismo-decrecimiento-y-la-crisis-del-covid-19

Conservation needs a revolution. This is the only way it can contribute to the drastic transformations needed to come to a truly sustainable model of development. The good news is that conservation is ready for revolution. Heated debates about the rise of the Anthropocene and the current ‘sixth extinction’ crisis demonstrate an urgent need and desi...

This paper explores local perceptions of the landscape in a small highland community near Haa, Bhutan. Through the lens of ethnoecology, it documents a storied landscape in which an animist cosmology, underpinned by Buddhism, shapes local subjectivities in particular ways that influence behaviour in relation to this landscape. We draw on this case...

Tourism development affects prominent city centres worldwide, causing social unrest that has been labelled “tourism-phobia.” This article problematizes the recent appearance of this term by unravelling the links between the materiality of contemporary urban tourism and the response it receives from social movements opposing its expansion. We endeav...

This article outlines a conceptual framework and research agenda for exploring the relationship between tourism and degrowth. Rapid and uneven expansion of tourism as a response to the 2008 economic crisis has proceeded in parallel with the rise of social discontent concerning so-called “overtourism.” Despite decades of concerted global effort to a...

Turistificación global. Esta enunciación se ha convertido en una de las piezas imprescindibles del diagnóstico del mundo actual. El turismo, lejos de ser una realidad anecdótica, está cada vez más presente en todas partes. Hoy el turismo moldea nuestras sociedades, se ha convertido en uno de los principales agentes de la globalización, a la par de...

This article outlines a novel framework for investigating complex intersections among divergent approaches to enacting environmental governance. I term this the study of “diverse ecologies.” The framework builds on J.K. Gibson-Graham’s influential “diverse economies” perspective but seeks to integrate this with research in political ecology that de...

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 par...

Article impact statement: Wallach et al.’s framing of compassionate conservation is flawed and impractical and could be dangerous for people, wildlife, and ecosystems.

This article proposes an innovative analytical framework for investigating processes of neoliberalization and its articulation with ‘alternative’ governance arrangements. It is by now well-established that neoliberalism is a variegated processthat manifests differently in diverse contexts. Yet how to actually conceptualize and investigate this vari...

Récord tras récord, 2018 rompe nuevas barreras en términos turísticos. Según la Organización Mundial del Turismo (OMT, 2018), en 2017 se han contado 1.323 millones de turistas a nivel global. El Sur de Europa y América Latina han registrado, respectivamente, 266,2 millones y 36,7 millones de turistas internacionales. El turismo es una máquina en co...

How does ecotourism – conventionally characterized by its pursuit of a “natural” experience – confront assertions that “nature is over” attendant to growing promotion of the “Anthropocene”? One increasingly prominent strategy is to try to harness this “end of nature” itself as a novel tourism “product”. If the Anthropocene is better understood as t...

In this response to Van Hecken et al. (2018), we seek to clarify the analysis (Fletcher and Büscher, 2017) they critique in the face of gross distortion and redirect the discussion back to the point we sought to make: that it is crucial to point out that PES is a neoliberal conservation paradigm, and that this acknowledgement should be made even if...

This contribution addresses the growing global trend to promote ‘natural capital accounting’ (NCA) in support of environmental conservation. NCA seeks to harness the economic value of conserved nature to incentivize local resource users to forgo the opportunity costs of extractive activities. We suggest that this represents a form of neoliberal bio...

This paper examines how state and non-state actors govern through pursuing speculative conservation among resource-dependent people who must renegotiate altered livelihoods amidst extractivism in ruptured landscapes. As donor aid declines and changes form, bilaterals, state agencies, and civil society now pursue advocacy in overlapping spaces of in...

This article introduces the special issue on 'Political Ecologies of Green Wars' and the research papers comprising it. While state-authorised and state-directed forms of violence in support of conservation have been evident in many places for quite some time, the current scope, scale and rhetorical justification of the violent defence of biodivers...

The predominant focus within the growing body of research addressing 'green violence' - that employed in the name of protecting nonhuman natures - has been the exercise of such violence by representatives of nation-state regimes. Largely overlooked thus far, therefore, is a remarkably similar discussion conducted among civil society environmental a...

This article introduces the special issue on 'Political Ecologies of Green Wars' and the research papers comprising it. While state-authorised and state-directed forms of violence in support of conservation have been evident in many places for quite some time, the current scope, scale and rhetorical justification of the violent defence of biodivers...

Tourism in Ghana has been developing rapidly over the last decade. By marketing over a dozen “community ecotourism” sites, particularly around monkey and forest sanctuaries, Ghana hopes to attract travellers to spend money in the country and so aid local development and protect natural resources. This paper analyses this trend, outlining several co...

This paper examines how Southern Andean Patagonia has been increasingly incorporated within networks of global capital since the 1990s. Once defined by military violence against indigenous societies, white settler colonialism, and livestock farming, this remote region has become an iconic center for green development in Latin America. This article...

This article reviews an emerging body of research applying a “multiple governmentalities” perspective derived from Michel Foucault to the study of environmental politics. Previous application of the popular governmentality concept to understand such politics had largely overlooked the multiple forms of governmentality, described in Foucault’s later...

Doing Whole Earth justice: a reply to Cafaro et al. - Bram Büscher, Robert Fletcher, Dan Brockington, Chris Sandbrook, Bill Adams, Lisa Campbell, Catherine Corson, Wolfram Dressler, Rosaleen Duffy, Noella Gray, George Holmes, Alice Kelly, Elizabeth Lunstrum, Maano Ramutsindela, Kartik Shanker

We question whether the increasingly popular, radical idea of turning half the Earth into a network of protected areas is either feasible or just. We argue that this Half-Earth plan would have widespread negative consequences for human populations and would not meet its conservation objectives. It offers no agenda for managing biodiversity within a...

The predominant focus within the growing body of research addressing 'green violence' – that employed in the name of protecting nonhuman natures – has been the exercise of such violence by representatives of nation-state regimes. Largely overlooked thus far, therefore, is a remarkably similar discussion conducted among civil society environmental a...

It has become commonplace to argue that greater “connection with nature” is needed to mobilize support for both biodiversity conservation and environmentalism generally, and hence to call for more effective environmental education to achieve this. I employ a political ecology lens to problematize this increasingly conventional wisdom by highlightin...

Central to the United Nations’ post-2015 development agenda grounded in the Sustainable Development Goals is the notion of ‘decoupling’: the need to divorce economic growth from its ecological impact. For proponents, decoupling entails increasing the efficiency with which value is derived from natural resources in order to reconcile indefinite econ...

We question whether the increasingly popular, radical idea of turning half the Earth into a network of protected areas is either feasible or just. We argue that this Half-Earth plan would have widespread negative consequences for human populations and would not meet its conservation objectives. It offers no agenda for managing biodiversity within a...

It has become commonplace to argue that greater “connection with nature” is needed to mobilize support for both biodiversity conservation and environmentalism generally, and hence to call for more effective environmental education to achieve this. I employ a political ecology lens to problematize this increasingly conventional wisdom by highlightin...

Tourism is not merely a capitalist practice but a central practice through which capitalism sustains itself. Precisely how tourism “products” become capital and the types of violence this process entails, however, has not yet been systematically theorized or investigated. Building on Noel Castree's six principles of commodification, we explore how...

This article explores the role of digital (video and computer) games in the rise of what Büscher (2014) calls ‘‘nature 2.0”: new web-related media that allow users to move beyond passive voyeurism to actively ‘‘co-create” or ‘‘prosume” the images and processes promoted by organizations committed to biodiversity conservation. Environmentalists have...

Increasingly, one hears furtive whispers in the halls of conservation: "REDD+ is dead; it's time to cut our losses and move on." In a recent Conservation Biology editorial, Redford, Padoch and Sunderland (2013) identify REDD+ (Reduced Emissions through avoided Deforestation and forest Degradation) as one of the latest in a long line of conservation...

The growing prominence of celebrities within the global environmental movement – and their power to shape and advance this movement’s aims – has been a burgeoning focus of recent research. Thus far, such analysis has viewed the phenomenon primarily through a political economy lens, contending that celebrity is harnessed to further the agenda of a m...

This article explores the role of ecotourism in the neoliberalisation of environmental education. The practice of ecotourism is informed by a particular ‘ecotourist gaze’ in terms of which the ‘education’ that providers characteristically offer is implicitly framed, embodying a culturally specific perspective in which western society is depicted as...

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. Arg...

Despite sustained critique of a neo-Malthusian focus on ‘overpopulation’, the issue continues to resurface regularly within international development discourse, particularly with respect to ‘sustainable’ development in relation to growing environmental security concerns. This suggests that the issue defies purely rational evaluation, operating on a...

This article reports on the results of a collaborative event ethnography (CEE) conducted at the 2012 World Conservation Congress (WCC) on Jeju Island, South Korea. The WCC is organised every four years by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which bills the Congress as the world’s most important conservation forum. Hence,...