'Close the Tap!': COVID-19 and the Need for Convivial Conservation

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Fletcher, R., B. Büscher, K. Massarella and S. Koot (2020)
‘Close the Tap! COVID-19 and the Need for Convivial Conservation’
Journal of Australian Political Economy
No. 85, pp. 200-11.
‘CLOSE THE TAP!’: COVID-19 AND THE
NEED FOR CONVIVIAL CONSERVATION
Robert Fletcher, Bram Büscher, Kate Massarella
and Stasja Koot
When 2020 was declared a ‘super year’ for biodiversity conservation, no
one suspected that a particular form of this biodiversity would proliferate
to such an extent as to bring all of the anticipated activity to a screeching
halt.1 With species and ecosystems in dangerous decline the world over
(IPBES 2019), there is growing recognition that previous conservation
strategies have been largely inadequate to tackle the challenges they face,
and hence that something radically different is needed (Kareiva et al. 2012;
Wuerthner et al. 2015).
A series of global meetings to address this deficiency were scheduled to
take place throughout 2020. Most centrally, the IUCN’s quadrennial World
Conservation Congress, slated for June in France,2 was intended to feed
into the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention of Biological
Diversity to be held in October in China,3 during which the global
biodiversity targets for the next decade would be established (OECD
2019). Concurrently, the 26th COP of the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change would meet in November in Scotland to
plan for the future of climate change intervention,4 upon which
biodiversity conservation crucially depends (Harvey 2020).
1 https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/news/2020-super-year-nature-and-
biodiversity
2 https://www.iucncongress2020.org/
3 https://www.greengrowthknowledge.org/event/2020-un-biodiversity-conference
4 https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/conferences/glasgow-climate-change-conference-
to-be-postponed

COVID-19 AND CONVIVIAL CONSERVATION 201
Enter COVID-19. These global meetings have all now been postponed,
cancelled or pared back due to the pandemic. This means that the future of
global biodiversity conservation has been left even more uncertain than
before. Yet the crisis has also been framed by some conservationists as an
opportunity to emphasize the vital importance of their work in the face of
zoonotic diseases such as this. Hence, the question that Adams (2020)
posed in a previous commentary – ‘how should conservation use the
growing crisis that is COVID-19?’ – has become increasingly important.
In this article, we outline some of the ways that biodiversity conservation
is being affected by COVID-19 and how conservationists are responding
to these issues. We focus in particular on the challenge the pandemic has
posed to a model of conservation finance heavily reliant on revenue from
(eco)tourism. We conclude by suggesting that transforming policy and
practice in the direction of convivial conservation (Büscher and Fletcher
2020) might offer a hopeful way through and out of the current crisis.
COVID-19 and conservation
Discussions of the relationship between biodiversity conservation and the
COVID-19 pandemic have been multi-faceted and multi-directional. Soon
after the infection first spread from China to Europe and beyond, some
conservationists began to emphasize the virus’s origins in humans’
increasing encroachment on natural spaces (Carrington 2020).
Given that the virus was initially believed to have moved from animals to
humans in a ‘wet market’ in Wuhan, conservationists argued that this
demonstrated the dangers of trade in wildlife more generally (Wittemyer
2020). After China consequently instituted a temporary ban on this trade,
conservationists called for this to become both permanent and global
(Bwambale 2020).
Yet others have insisted that such a blanket ban would be devastating for
the hundreds of millions of people worldwide who depend on wildlife for
survival, and that driving the wildlife trade underground could have
additional negative consequences (Challender et al. 2020).
Still others have highlighted the links between COVID-19 and the spread
of industrial agriculture, deforestation, mining, bioprospecting and other
extractive enterprises more generally, pointing out similarities between the
current crisis and previous viral outbreaks (e.g. Safina 2020).

202 JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY No 85
All of this, various conservationists have warned, signal that ‘nature is
sending us a message’ to reign in our reckless destruction of nonhuman
species and spaces (Carrington 2020). This echoes longstanding assertions
by deep ecologists that nature is a coherent entity possessing will and
intention – as illustrated by the popular ‘Gaia hypothesis’ championed by
James Lovelock (e.g. 2000). In some variants of this stance, extreme
environmentalists have even labelled humans a ‘virus’ infecting the rest of
the planet (see Brown 2020). Some have indeed warned – even hoped –
that nature would eventually ‘fight back’ against the ‘human infection’
(e.g. Foreman 2014). Such scenarios include predictions that the spread of
a zoonotic virus would wipe out humans completely or reduce their
numbers to a level capable of re-establishing balance with the rest of the
planet’s inhabitants (see Bailey 2006).
In terms of material practice, one of COVID-19’s main impacts has been
to alter humans’ physical interaction with wildlife and natural spaces on a
massive scale. The enforced or voluntary lockdowns introduced in many
societies have led to mass withdrawal from many spaces, including both
biodiverse and non-biodiverse areas that have now largely been left to
nonhuman species.5 The result has been a widely documented proliferation
of wildlife in rural as well as urban areas.6
Considering this, one might argue that COVID-19 has forced the world
into something akin to the ‘half earth’ scenario championed by celebrity
biologist E.O. Wilson (2016) and others (see e.g. Wuerthner et al. 2015).
These conservationists assert that at least half the planet must be reserved
for protected areas occupied primarily by ‘self-willed nature’. Most
humans should then be consolidated within the other half, from which they
can witness wildlife through web cams7 and other remote technologies.
This has indeed now been actively promoted by the tourism industry under
COVID-19, along with other creative innovations including online safaris8
and virtual bushwalks.9 In a certain sense, then, this half earth imaginary
5 https://dailyhive.com/mapped/yosemite-national-park-animals-video
6 http://www.rfi.fr/en/international/20200330-wild-animals-wander-through-deserted-
cities-under-COVID-19-lockdown-ducks-paris-puma-santiago-civet-kerala
7 https://explore.org/livecams/african-wildlife/tembe-elephant-park
8 https://vimeo.com/404591533/457d79b64f
9 https://vimeo.com/410654608/c90b7283aa

COVID-19 AND CONVIVIAL CONSERVATION 203
comes close to how large portions of the world have been de facto
reorganized under the global lockdown.
On the other hand, in some places with less stringent restrictions, people
have been flocking to conservation areas, as well as to nearby rural
communities, as a potential refuge from the virus and to escape the
drudgery of home-bound lockdowns (McGivney 2020; Petersen 2020). In
a variant of this trend, some indigenous groups, in Brazil, Canada and
elsewhere, are also retreating to remote areas to protect themselves from
infection and access alternate food supplies (Fellet 2020; Morin 2020).
And for the very wealthy, there are now even ‘corona-virus free private
safaris’ in East Africa10 – demonstrating the fact that far from being an
‘equalizer’ signalling that ‘we are all in this together’, COVID-19 has had
highly uneven impacts that build on long-standing patterns of injustice
within the global economic order (Timothy 2020; Carr 2020).
Ecotourism under global lockdown
Among the pandemic’s most significant effects has been its impact on the
global tourism industry – an important source of conservation financing in
many places. In some situations, this is affecting wildlife directly. For
instance, animals inhabiting conservation areas who have come to depend
on tourists for food have been threatened by the sudden withdrawal of this
sustenance (Roth 2020). Fears that endangered mountain gorillas might
contract the virus from human visitors, meanwhile, has resulted in a
suspension of highly lucrative tourism activities in Sub-Saharan Africa.11
Yet, the main consequence of COVID-19’s tourism impacts concerns the
conservation activities to which tourism is connected. The United Nations
World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) estimates that global visitations
in 2020 may drop 60-80% due to the crisis, resulting in losses of hundreds
of billions of euros to tourism operators and workers worldwide.12 This
has provoked widespread concern that loss of revenue from tourist
visitation may endanger conservation programming in many places, as
10 https://greatmigrationcamps.com/coronavirus-free-safari/
11 https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/virus-which-causes-COVID-19-
threatens-great-ape-conservation
12 https://www.unwto.org/news/COVID-19-international-tourist-numbers-could-fall-60-80-
in-2020

204 JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY No 85
over the past decade ecotourism has become one of the main sources of
revenue for conservation as well as one of the main strategies to enrol local
people within it.
This latter dynamic is based on what Martha Honey (2008: 14) calls the
‘stakeholder theory’, asserting that ‘people will protect what they receive
value from’. This is one manifestation of an increasingly popular strategy
for championing conservation more generally, consistent with
paradigmatically neoliberal understandings of human reasoning and
motivation, which aims to offer economic incentives sufficient to make
conservation more lucrative than other more destructive land use options
(Fletcher 2010).
This stakeholder strategy has always been a dangerous gamble, since
basing conservation support on such ‘extrinsic’ motivation (rather than an
‘intrinsic’ sense of care for biodiversity) could obviate this support were
the revenue fuelling this motivation to disappear (Serhadli 2020). And,
considering the instability of the tourism industry due to its dependence on
an inherently volatile global economy, it was never really a question if this
would happen, but when. As Dickson Kaelo, CEO of the
Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association, thus worries:
Members of these communities may lose faith in wildlife conservation
if there is no money forthcoming. In addition, people who live around
these wildlife havens and looked forward to selling artefacts to tourists
may resort to other income-generating activities such as farming,
fuelling the never-ending human-wildlife conflicts as animals invade
and destroy their new farms (cited in Greenfield 2020).
This is precisely what seems to be occurring right now, with instances of
poaching and encroachment on the rise within many conservation spaces
worldwide (Greenfield 2020).
Yet is this ostensive connection really so clear-cut? Some question the
assertion that conservation depends so heavily on tourism revenue,
pointing out that implicit in this stance is the assumption that (usually
foreign) tourists and conservationists are the main actors valuing and
nurturing biodiversity. Kenyan conservationist Mordecai Ogada thus
asserts, ‘Let’s not pretend at any point that tourists are the ones that look

COVID-19 AND CONVIVIAL CONSERVATION 205
after our wildlife. Our wildlife is looked after by our people, our wildlife
rangers, and those mandated by government to care for them.’13
What next?
Given all of this, what is likely to happen now? There is much uncertainty
at the moment and different possibilities exist. In the short term, it is
probable that forms of coercive conservation enforcement will intensify –
as they already have in certain places – as ‘softer’ options dry up. Yet
others assert that the precarity of ecotourism finance exposed by the
COVID-19 crisis signals the need for a deeper rethinking of how
conservation is funded more generally (Greenfield 2020; Robinson 2020).
This is compounded by acknowledgment that even before the current crisis
global conservation efforts already experienced a substantial financial
shortfall estimated at 200-300 billion euros per annum (Credit Suisse and
McKinsey 2016).
Thus Johan Robinson, Chief of the Global Environment Facility (GEF)
Biodiversity and Land Degradation Unit at the UN Environment
Programme (UNEP), contends, ‘If the international community is serious
about conserving biodiversity as part of a just and sustainable world, we
must get serious about funding conservation’ (Robinson 2020). To achieve
this, Robinson calls for development of ‘a new class of financial asset, ripe
for sustainable investment. Success would depend on investments that
simultaneously reinforce the impact of conservation; providing capital
preservation and/or returns on investments and generating cashflows
through sustainable use of nature by local communities.’
Creation of a financial asset class for conservation been a widespread
aspiration of many for some time now. Several years ago, for instance,
Credit Suisse and McKinsey (2016) advanced a similar call in a widely
circulated report entitled Conservation Finance From Niche to
Mainstream: The Building of an Institutional Asset Class. This report
asserted that:
few conservation projects today are big enough to be structured as
marketable standalone investment products. Thus, aggregating distinct
but complementary projects with potentially different structures is
13 https://www.theelephant.info/videos/2020/04/20/dr-mordecai-ogada-conservation-in-
the-age-of-coronavirus/#.Xp29Aznzfw0.facebook

206 JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY No 85
required. These aggregators need to be able to bundle a diverse set of
cash flows…and mold them into a single investment product (Credit
Suisse and McKinsey 2016: 13).
Subsequently, this report helped to inspire creation of a Coalition for
Private Investment in Conservation, organized by IUCN and including
Credit Suisse as well as bankers JP Morgan Chase along with UNEP, GEF,
Conservation International and the World Bank, among many others, to
put this plan into action.14
Yet realization of this ambitious vision has remained elusive. Dempsey and
Suarez (2016: 654) demonstrate that efforts to tap economic markets for
conservation finance globally to date have fallen far short of intended
aims, producing only ‘slivers of slivers of slivers’ of envisioned funding.
Meanwhile, global programmes like payment for ecosystem services
(PES) and the reduced emissions from avoided deforestation and forest
degradation (REDD+) mechanism have largely morphed from their
original design as ‘market-based instruments’ (MBIs) for conservation
finance into dependence on state-based taxation and other forms of
redistributive funding (Fletcher et al. 2016; Fletcher and Büscher 2017).
There is little to suggest that this situation will reverse in the future. On
the contrary, there are serious questions whether it is possible for MBIs to
ever achieve their aim to reconcile conservation and sustainable local
livelihoods with profitable return on investment at significant scale
(Fletcher et al. 2016). Indeed, it is apparent that most MBIs paradoxically
depend on expansion of destructive extractive industries and financial
institutions as the basis of their economic model (Fletcher et al. 2016).
Rather than presenting opportunities for increased conservation finance
through market expansion, the current crisis will likely intensify pressures
on already vulnerable conservation areas as governments and capitalists
look to previously restricted natural resources as new sources of
accumulation. The global economy is already in deep recession and will
likely sink further in the months to come (Elliot 2020). After the 2008
recession, capitalists turned to intensified resource extraction to recapture
lost growth (Arsel et al. 2016), at great expense to ongoing conservation
efforts. It is likely that this same pattern will be repeated now too. At the
same time, the growing recession will certainly further impoverish
countless residents of rural communities close to biodiversity hotspots
14 http://cpicfinance.com/

COVID-19 AND CONVIVIAL CONSERVATION 207
(Elliot 2020) who may be forced to turn to exploitation of conserved
resources if other survival options dry up.
Closing the tap: Towards convivial conservation
All of this suggests the need for a more profound rethinking of
conservation finance than Robinson and others propose. As Serhadli
(2020) asserts:
If we promote conditions where local people are completely dependent
on external market forces, and the motivation behind conservation is
money-based, then conservation will always be dependent on a stable
global economy, which is highly uncertain as we are witnessing right
now.15
Rather than doubling down on efforts to fund conservation through
financial markets that have proven quite miserly thus far, we may
instead need to double-step in the opposite direction. That is, we may
need to ‘begin taking the market out of conservation altogether’ and
‘instead experiment with providing subsidies (state supported or
otherwise) to resource-dependent communities based on direct
taxation of extractive activities of the type that are already in some
cases covertly supplied through MBIs’ (Fletcher et al. 2016: 675).
But even this is merely a first step towards the much more radical change
that is ultimately needed. Conservation will always be a rear-guard battle
if done within a fundamentally unsustainable global economy. Bluntly
stated, it is like frantically mopping the floor with the taps wide open. The
real solution is simple: to close the tap.
A different economic system is needed to facilitate another form of
conservation. One that allows humans and nonhumans to live side-by-side
in meaningful coexistence rather than shallow commodified encounter.
One that does not aim to control nature, but that lets natures (human as
well as nonhuman) thrive, while recognising and celebrating the
biophysical limits that necessarily both constrain and enable this (Kallis
2019). And one that supports and subsidizes the livelihoods of people
living intimately with wildlife beyond providing precarious tourism
15 https://news.mongabay.com/2020/05/market-based-solutions-cannot-solely-fund-
community-level-conservation-commentary/

208 JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY No 85
employment – for instance, through redistributive mechanisms like a
conservation basic income (Fletcher and Büscher 2020).
Such calls for radical or ‘transformational’ change have been gaining
momentum over the last decade (e.g. IPBES 2019; Adams 2017; Lorimer
2015) and the COVID-19 crisis has added urgency to these calls. If
transformational change is indeed most likely to happen at ‘times of crisis,
when enough stakeholders agree that the current system is dysfunctional’
(Olsson et al. 2010: 280), then the current conjuncture may present an
opportunity to find a new way forward that may not have seemed possible
before.
Closing the tap on aggregate economic growth opens positive new
possibilities. It renders possible a more equitable world and a form of
convivial conservation that celebrates and enables living together
(Büscher and Fletcher 2020). This post-capitalist proposal is currently
being debated and tested in a number of places by various actors. Aspects
of it are already being practiced in many indigenous and community
conservation projects worldwide.16 Moving further towards convivial
conservation, we suggest, may help turn an aborted ‘super year’ for
biodiversity into a ‘super future’ for human and nonhuman natures alike.
Robert Fletcher is Associate Professor in the Sociology of Development
and Change group at Wageningen University.
robert.fletcher@wur.nl
Bram Büscher is Professor and Chair in the Sociology of Development
and Change group at Wageningen University.
Bram.buscher@wur.nl
Kate Massarella is a postdoctoral researcher in the Sociology of
Development and Change group at Wageningen University.
kate.massarella@wurl.nl
Stasja Kootis is Assistant Professor in the Sociology of Development and
Change group at Wageningen University.
stasja.koot@wur.nl
16 https://www.iccaconsortium.org/

COVID-19 AND CONVIVIAL CONSERVATION 209
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