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Nature unbound: Conservation, capitalism and the future of protected areas
Abstract and Figures
This groundbreaking volume is the first comprehensive, critical examination of the rise of protected areas and their current social and economic position in our world. It examines the social impacts of protected areas, the conflicts that surround them, the alternatives to them and the conceptual categories they impose. The book explores key debates on devolution, participation and democracy; the role and uniqueness of indigenous peoples and other local communities; institutions and resource management; hegemony, myth and symbolic power in conservation success stories; tourism, poverty and conservation; and the transformation of social and material relations which community conservation entails. For conservation practitioners and protected area professionals not accustomed to criticisms of their work, or students new to this complex field, the book will provide an understanding of the history and current state of affairs in the rise of protected areas. It introduces the concepts, theories and writers on which critiques of conservation have been built, and provides the means by which practitioners can understand problems with which they are wrestling. For advanced researchers the book will present a critique of the current debates on protected areas and provide a host of jumping off points for an array of research avenues © Dan Brockington, Rosaleen Duffy and Jim Igoe, 2008. All rights reserved.
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... This nongovernment protected area (NGPA) estate now encompasses 12 percent of Australia's terrestrial surface ). Following Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe (2008), we understand the diverse array of public and private actors involved in the NGPA estate as constituting a discrete sector of social and ecological activity, a sector becoming more prominent, coherent, and cohesive over time. The expansion and solidifying of the NGPA sector has also seen nongovernment actors play more empowered roles in conservation efforts to prevent biodiversity loss, including threatened species management (Selinske et al. 2017;Archibald et al. 2020;Ivanova and Cook 2020;Palfrey, Oldekop, and Holmes 2022). ...
... ENGO engagement with markets to address ecological concerns is not new (Igoe and Brockington 2007;Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008;Larsen and Brockington 2018). The ALCA scoping paper, however, accords with a view that conservation has "never before been so enthusiastic about the potential for capitalist solutions to conservation problems" (Holmes 2012, 188; see also Brockington and Duffy 2010;Mallin et al. 2019;Beer 2023;Damiens, Davison, and Cooke 2023;Louder and Bosak 2023). ...
This article examines the political consequences of environmental nongovernment organization (ENGO) involvement in protected area conservation in Australia. Rapid growth of a nongovernment protected area (NGPA) estate this century has involved a range of individuals, communities, First Nations, and ENGOs, and has been closely tied to government policy and private finance. Although NGPA conservation achievements have been profound, there has been limited examination of what expanded nongovernment involvement, responsibility, and leadership mean for the practice and governance of nature conservation. Thematic analysis of twenty-four key informant interviews and selective gray literature identifies how financing, accountability, and partisan politics are emerging as key domains in shaping an NGPA estate that reflects a closer alignment with capital and market forces. ENGOs are playing a key role in crafting new political conditions for protected area conservation, where their role in neoliberal governance is not just service delivery, but statecraft and agenda setting. ENGOs are increasingly casting protected area conservation as apolitical, and thereby a bipartisan activity, driven by a “pragmatic” agenda that seeks to secure private financing for land ownership and management obligations. Frameworks of accountability to donors shape ENGO practices and conceptions of conservation through exposure to novel market mechanisms. As a result, ENGO operation permits limited space for plural, ideological, and structural debate about protected area conservation, the public interest, and the root causes of ecological crises to which it responds. The embrace of conservation led by nongovernment actors marks a substantive shift from the formative politics of ENGOs in Australia.
... More broadly, these dynamics reflect what Brockington et al. (2012) analysed as the intimate alignment of western mainstream conservation and neoliberal capitalism, deepening a pattern with a long history (Beinart and Hughes, 2007). In what is now widely analysed as neoliberal conservation, this intimate alignment shifts analytical focus from 'how nature is used in and through the expansion of capitalism, to how nature is conserved in and through the expansion of capitalism' (Buscher and Fletcher, 2020, 20;Igoe and Brockington, 2016). ...
This article examines the mobilization of local communities within spaces of conservation-extraction convergence in an African context. We draw on ethnographic research from the Cross River area of Nigeria to trace the trajectory of the conservation-extraction assemblage as produced through the recent intensification of state-led capitalist development that builds on a history of colonial and postcolonial resource regulation. Our analysis suggests that 'spaces' of conservation and extraction convergence should be understood not only in terms of their spatiality and internal logic but also in terms of their articulation with agrarian relations that play out in such 'soft' techniques as community recognition and enrolment of community labour, and 'hard' techniques of resource exclusion. Drawing on a case study of the Ekuri people from Cross River area, we show how local mobilization within spaces of conservation-extraction convergence relies on globalized constructs and supra-national alliances as well as claims of indigeneity and place-based belonging. Community mobilization exploits the cracks and tensions in these convergent spaces to forge dynamic alliances and deploy diverse strategies necessary to defend resource rights and access.
... Fletcher translates plural forms of governmentality into conservation and environmental governance, elucidating a framework of multiple environmentalities based on Foucault's four distinct governmentalities. In contemporary conservation practices these may take the form of neoliberal environmentality based on the commodification of nature and market-based principles of nature (Brockington et al., 2008;Igoe and Brockington, 2007); disciplinary environmentality that seeks to create subjects through the diffusion of norms (Agrawal, 2005); sovereign environmentality based on the fortress conservation paradigm that seeks to preserve resources through policing of protected areas (Brockington, 2002;West et al., 2006); and lastly truth environmentality, which derives authority for acceptable behavior from the inherent structure of life and the universe as opposed to rules and norms (Fletcher, 2010). The latter might take shape in ideas of resource preservation based on human interconnection with nature or other derivations drawn from Indigenous perspectives. ...
How do foresters in India understand the foundational and proximate causes of negative interactions between humans and wildlife? In this article we identify five distinct epistemological orientations towards managing human-wildlife conflicts (HWC) and drivers of those conflicts among staff at differing levels of the Indian forest bureaucracy across three protected areas in the Western Ghats. Through an empirical analysis employing Q method, we analyze forester subjectivities in relation to how forests should be managed with HWC mitigation in mind. Our results suggest forester perspectives are informed by social class and rank, geography, and experience. Forester positionality and knowledge is also at times in conflict with hegemonic perspectives of forest departments and can lead to the development of tensions in how foresters think about human-wildlife relations and managing HWC. Our analysis brings together concepts of multiple environmentalities with Gramscian ideas of the incoherent individual to theorize the varying subjectivities of individual state actors in understanding, managing, and co-producing forms of HWC. In doing so, this article contributes to contemporary debates about the theorizing of subject-making in political ecology and geography through an empirical case from one of the most important megafaunal conservation landscapes in Asia.
... Con el tiempo, esos debates han ido profundizando en la comprensión de los impactos sociales, económicos y políticos asociados a distintas figuras y categorías de protección ambiental. Esos debates también ponen en cuestión las visiones excluyentes de un modelo de conservación basado exclusivamente en el manejo experto de áreas protegidas y buscan comprender con más precisión la complejidad que reviste la incidencia de las poblaciones humanas locales en las dinámicas de la biodiversidad (Brockington et al., 2008;Stern, 2008;Andrade, 2009;Hawken & Granoff, 2010;Khan & Bhagwat, 2010;Holmes & Brockington, 2013;Mollet & Kepe, 2018;Domínguez & Luoma, 2020;Zanotti & Knowles, 2020). ...
Durante décadas, la legibilidad y legalidad de las poblaciones humanas asentadas en el Sistema de Parques Nacionales Naturales (SPNN) de Colombia han sido objeto de fuertes disputas sociopolíticas. Una parte importante de este debate tiene que ver con la forma como las instituciones ambientales producen categorías y datos demográficos para caracterizar a estas poblaciones. En este artículo se propone el concepto de legibilidad selectiva para describir la forma en que las instituciones estatales vinculadas a la conservación ambiental clasifican a los habitantes de las áreas protegidas del SPNN. Este tipo particular de legibilidad convierte a ciertos grupos poblacionales en aliados de la conservación mientras que proscribe a otros como amenazas que deben ser controladas. El artículo expone las limitaciones en la sistematicidad de esas clasificaciones y censos, y explora cómo pueden obstaculizar los acuerdos participativos de conservación ambiental en un contexto en el que las estrategias de securitización han monopolizado la perspectiva de protección ambiental. A partir de una revisión documental (de normativas, políticas públicas y entrevistas), se muestra que la legibilidad selectiva que subyace al conteo de poblaciones humanas dentro de áreas protegidas es un gran reto a enfrentar para reconocer los conflictos sociales y políticos que un enfoque de conservación excluyente puede reproducir. Con ello, se reivindica la necesidad de abrir espacio a estrategias más participativas de gestión de áreas protegidas.
Environmental DNA (eDNA) has risen in popularity as a genetically-based method to enumerate species in natural ecosystems, and it is well positioned to be integrated into biodiversity monitoring and conservation initiatives. While the field has made great strides in methodological development, it has largely avoided discussion of its potential inequitable social outcomes. In this paper, we argue that the social asymmetries of eDNA are under-addressed precisely because of how it is framed and valued by powerful actors who may benefit from the technology’s proliferation. We use a framework of representational rhetorics to articulate the discursive process by which the biodiversity crisis is distilled into problems of data-deficiency and inefficiency in scientific articles such that eDNA offers the exact corresponding technological solution. This framing helps justify eDNA’s implementation in local, global, and corporate spheres, despite the methodology’s uncertainties and limitations. It may also enable future inequitable outcomes through sidelining other forms of biodiversity knowledge and enclosing biodiversity information through processes of genetic commodification and privatization. We engage with critiques of neoliberal conservation, big data, and (biodiversity) genomics made by political ecologists and feminist science and technology studies scholars to help reorient the eDNA field towards more equity-oriented discursive practices and implementations.
Carpathia—dubbed the “European Yellowstone”—is a private nature conservation project in Romania. Its establishment activates a critical linkage between entrepreneurs of the wilderness and transnational conservation elites. We indicate the contribution of entrepreneurialism to the expansion and adaptation of neoliberal conservation and reveal how biographical contingencies are involved in the making of conservation projects. At the same time, the focus on transnationalism reveals how local projects are designed, scaled‐up, and connected to global neoliberal conservation networks. Carpathia reveals the adaptability of neoliberal conservation and its expansion into the Eastern European peripheries through transnational elites. Its establishment illustrates how private conservation projects become essential sites for securing privileged access to nature in times of global ecological crises and uncovers the varieties of the global geographies of capitalist conservation.
Across the globe, community-oriented protected areas are increasingly recognised as an effective way to support the preservation and maintenance of the traditional biodiversity related knowledge of indigenous peoples and local communities. We argue that guaranteed land security and the ability of indigenous and local peoples to exercise their own governance structures is central to the success of community-oriented protected area programs. In particular, we examine the conservation and community development outcomes of the Indigenous Protected Area program in Australia, which is based on the premise that indigenous landowners exercise effective control over environmental governance, including management plans, within their jurisdiction (whether customary or state-based or a combination of elements of both), and have effective control of access to their lands, waters and resources.
Key Words: community-oriented protected areas, Indigenous rights, conservation, Australia
The World Conservation Union (IUCN) plays a global leadership role in defining different types of protected areas, and influencing how protected area systems develop and are managed. Following the 1992 World Parks Congress, a new system of categorizing protected areas was developed. New categories were introduced, including categories that allowed resource extraction. Since that time there has been rapid growth in the global numbers and size of protected areas, with most growth being shown in the new categories. Further-more, the IUCN has heralded a ‘new paradigm’ of protected areas, which became the main focus of the 2003 World Parks Congress. The paradigm focuses on benefits to local people to alleviate poverty, re-engineering protected areas professionals, and an emphasis on the interaction between humans and nature through a focus on the new IUCN protected area categories.The purpose of this paper is to examine critically the implications of the new categories and paradigm shift in light of the main purpose of protected areas, to protect wild biodiversity. Wild biodiversity will not be well served by adoption of this new paradigm, which will devalue conservation biology, undermine the creation of more strictly protected reserves, inflate the amount of area in reserves and place people at the centre of the protected area agenda at the expense of wild biodiversity. Only IUCN categories I–IV should be recognized as protected areas. The new categories, namely culturally modified landscapes (V) and managed resource areas (VI), should be reclassified as sustainable development areas. To do so would better serve both the protection of wild biodiversity and those seeking to meet human needs on humanized landscapes where sustainable development is practised.
During the past century, tropical rain forests have been reduced to about half of their original area, with a consequent loss of biodiversity. This book takes a close look at how this has happened and what the consequences may be, with an emphasis on those strategies that have proven successful in stemming the loss of plant and animal inhabitants. It describes the use of protected areas such as sacred groves, royal preserves, and today’s national parks, which have long served to shield the delicate forest habitats for countless species. Although programs for protecting habitats are under increasing attack, this book argues that a system of protected areas must in fact be the cornerstone of all conservation strategies aimed at limiting the inevitable reduction of our planet’s biodiversity. Written by leading experts with years of experience, the book integrates ecological, economic and political perspectives on how best to manage tropical forests and their inhabitants, throughout the world. In addition to conservationists, policy makers, and ecologists, the book will serve as a useful text in courses on tropical conservation.
Ngorongoro Conservation Area in the heart of Maasailand is one of the world's most important conservation heritage areas. This book centres on a field study of the Ngorongoro Maasai and their herds, around which present knowledge of African rangeland, wildlife, livestock and pastoralist ecology is brought together and analysed. Management problems in Ngorongoro encapsulate many of the major debates in the ecology and conservation of African savannas. This book explores perceived problems, ecological facts and possible management solutions. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the authors argue a highly charged issue in terms of ecological fact and theory. This is an essential book for all those interested in the interface between wildlife conservation and human land use, whether professional ecologists or biologists, conservationists or resource managers, development workers or rural planners, and more generally, all those concerned with the ecological facts behind environmental and development issues.