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Capitalism and Conservation
Abstract
Through a series of case studies from around the world, Capitalism and Conservation presents a critique of conservation's role as a central driver of global capitalism. Features innovative new research on case studies on the connections between capitalism and conservation drawn from all over the world. Examines some of our most popular leisure pursuits and consumption habits to uncover the ways they drive and deepen global capitalism. Reveals the increase in intensity and variety of forms of capitalist conservation throughout the world. © 2011 Editorial Board of Antipode and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
... New 'corridor' projects draw lines in anticipation of securing and concentrating capital, infrastructure, and commercial services, often to the surprise or displeasure of local residents (Chome et al. 2020;Mkutu, Müller-Koné amd, and Owino 2021). In the area of conservation, some very powerful organisations, such as the Nature Conservancy and Conservation International, operate in ways similar to large private corporations despite their formal status as nonprofits (Brockington and Duffy 2011;Thaler 2017). We see again a significant concentration of power and resources, facilitated by private philanthropies such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Bezos Foundation, around a particular agenda (whether AGRA's Green Revolution for Africa or versions of 'fortress conservation'). ...
... These included the removal of land from public use by conservation investments (Arsel and Büscher 2012;Benjaminsen and Bryceson 2012;Brockington 2002. Brockington andDuffy 2011;Büscher and Fletcher 2015;Corbera 2012;Ojeda 2012). But the scale and importance of 'green grabbing' has grown massively since then. ...
... Much research shows that the best protectors of land are local land users, and that the creation of protected areas with huge investment in fencing and guards may undermine conservation objectives (Brockington 2002;Brockington and Duffy 2011;Kothari, Camill, and Brown 2013). Yet 'fortress conservation' is back as the dominant paradigm: the militarisation or securitisation of conservation often occurs through the deployment of private security services employed by private conservation organisations that are contracted by governments or take long leases on land. ...
... New products are being devised through new forms of commodification of nature (e.g., carbon credits and payments for ecosystem services), which require a similarly complex apparatus operating from local to global levels (Mshale, 2016). Thus, in addition to a push towards more adaptive, participatory, and collaborative management, new partnerships are arising in part to initiate or strengthen these commodification processes (Wearing and Wearing, 1999;Igoe and Brockington, 2007;Nelson and Agrawal, 2008;Brockington and Duffy, 2011;Duffy and Moore, 2011;Stone and Nyaupane, 2016). By inserting economic logics related to pricing, promotion, and product volume into decision making, commodification distorts the scope and purpose of conservation partnerships (West et al., 2004) -adding new layers of complexity to the understanding of partnership dynamics. ...
Conservationists increasingly position conservation that is mutually beneficial to people and biodiversity on the promise of empowerment of people through participatory discourse, metrics, processes, and outcomes. Empowerment represents multidimensional concepts and theories that permeate the interlinking levels of power, from the psychological to the political, and social scales in which conservation operates. The multifaceted nature of empowerment makes it challenging to understand, pursue, and evaluate as a central philosophical commitment and goal-oriented practice in conservation. Moreover, definitional and methodological uncertainty may disempower interested and affected groups because they can foster conceptual assumptions that reinforce institutionalized barriers to systemic changes. Despite these complexities, there are no targeted reviews of empowerment in conservation. We conducted a scoping review of the conservation literature to synthesize the meanings and uses of empowerment in the field. We reviewed 121 of the most cited conservation articles that invoked or assessed empowerment from 1992 to 2017 to document geographic, conceptual, and methodological trends in the scales and theories of empowerment deployed by conservationists. Research claiming or assessing empowerment through conservation often focused on communities in the Global South. Most studies relied on qualitative and mixed methods (78%) collected largely from male or non-Indigenous participants. Few studies (30%) defined the 20 types of empowerment they referenced. Fewer studies (3%) applied empowerment theories in their work. Our findings show that empowerment discourse of local and Indigenous communities permeates the discourse of people-centered conservation. Yet, overreliance on empowerment's rhetorical promise and minimal engagement with theory (e.g., postcolonial theory) risks disempowering people by obscuring empowerment's foundational value to conservation and communities and oversimplifying the complex realities of people-centered conservation. Lasting change could come from more meaningful engagement with empowerment, including coproducing definitions and measures with and for disempowered social groups to tackle widespread power disparities in conservation today.
In the first half of the 2000s, one project to restore the former Danube floodplain was carried out in Belene, a marginal town on the Bulgarian Danube. The aim of this article is to record the practices that were already in place before the interventions on the Danube, as part of a heterogeneous local knowledge that had an alternative vision to the scientific knowledge of experts involved in the restoration project. The data comes from qualitative interviews with locals and experts implicated in this project, as well as ethnographic observations from the fieldwork I carried out in 2013–2014, 2020 and 2022. The conclusion is that without attempting to replace the scientific knowledge, the locals aim to impose, through their local knowledge, a sort of slow ecology that eases the pace of the restoration of the former Danube floodplains.
Conservation and capitalism have long been understood as opposites: the first protects the nonhuman world while the latter has, historically, plundered nature. However, today it is appropriate to regard them as mutually constitutive of each other. Capitalism is now shaping conservation practice, while conservation is extending the reach of capitalism as an economic system. Together they are remaking the biophysical world. This entry explores how this two‐way relationship works by examining recent research into neoliberalism and attempts to save nature through the market.
This book is about scholar-activism and political struggles for land. Scholar-activism is a way of working that tries to change society by combining the best features of radical academic and political activist traditions, despite the many contradictions and challenges that this entails. The role played by scholar-activists in land struggles is important, but is not straightforward. This book unapologetically celebrates the contributions of scholar-activism in land struggles and scholarship, but more than this, it is about exploring the contradictions and challenges facing scholar-activism. It is neither a glorification of the achievements of scholar-activism, nor a set of prescriptive propositions on how to ‘do’ scholar-activism. Rather, it addresses contentious issues in scholar-activism, many of which are rarely discussed, or are discussed only gingerly and awkwardly when they cannot be avoided. It is a book written by two scholar-activists who have focused their individual and collaborative research and activist works on the politics of land and the role played by radical agrarian movements. Insights in this book are drawn on the experiences of the authors working in the three main sites of global knowledge circuits: academic institutions, independent research institutions oriented to practical politics, and left-wing agrarian movements.
Literaturverz. S. [337] - 365
Through a qualitative case study of peasant-organized forestry in Durango, Mexico, this paper examines how neoliberal policy reform is reshaping the community forestry sector. Post-1992 agrarian and forestry laws facilitate the emergence of new forms of association in ejidos (collective property communities created by agrarian reform) and agrarian communities, and reorganize the delivery of forestry technical services. These developments indirectly undermine peasants' capacity to deal with the sector's long-standing internal problems, putting at risk their ability to provide themselves with the services they need for sustainable community livelihoods and forest exploitation. Nevertheless, this study of a forest peasant federation shows that institutional change is a process peopled by groups of social agents who respond creatively to external structure from local organizational and community contexts. Ethnographic methods can be used fruitfully to study complex interactions between multiple levels of political-economic structure and local action, which both constrain and provide opportunities for the organization of common-pool resource management regimes.
In February of 1997 approximately 125 representatives of government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, academic institutions, community forestry associations, and others met for four days to discuss the complex challenges facing the forestry sector in Quintana Roo, Mexico. The Agenda Forestal de Quintana Roo was organized by state agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with support from the United Kingdom's Department for International Development (DFID). In addition to topics such as industrialization, marketing, technical services, and public support, participants examined what they perceived to be worrisome trends regarding the capacity of land grant communities (ejidos) to consolidate community forest enterprises (CFEs). One of the main concerns centered on the apparent breakdown of CFEs into multiple independent producer groups. Several analysts suggested that such internal divisions might lead to a free-for-all in which individual groups would claim tracts of forest commons and abandon collective management and harvesting (DFID et al. 1998; Zabin and Taylor 1997). The move toward internal division within ejidos appeared to stem from broad legal reforms instituted by the Mexican government in 1992. In line with the actions of states across Latin America and other regions during this period, the Mexican government transformed the legal structure of the agrarian sector, promulgating constitutional and statutory reforms designed to promote economic liberalization and political decentralization. These institutional reforms included shifts in economic policy that lowered trade barriers and allowed for the privatization of state-owned industries. They also produced revisions to the federal Constitution that ended agrarian reform and altered the legal underpinning of the ejido system. Whereas collective lands were inalienable prior to 1992, the legal changes made it possible for community assemblies to dissolve their communal landholdings and obtain private property titles to the individual plots of land that had been governed collectively since the 1930s. Changes to the Constitution also allowed foreign corporations to own land in Mexico and enter into commercial partnerships with ejidos, both of which were illegal before 1992 (Cornelius and Myhre 1998; Key et al. 1998). As with all agricultural policies, the national forest law was rewritten to fall in line with liberal designs (see Merino-Pérez and Segura-Warnholtz, this volume). Beyond the legal changes regarding land tenure and foreign partnerships, revisions to the agrarian code permitted ejidatarios to form internal groups for commercial production. This subtle but important legal change allowed registered producer groups within ejidos to operate as independent commercial entities separate from the executive committee (comisariado ejidal), which had previously administered communal enterprises (see Taylor, this volume). This chapter explores how the formation of independent subgroups-known locally as work groups (grupos de trabajo)-has affected forest management, local economies, and community governance in two of Quintana Roo's most prominent forestry ejidos: Caoba and Petcacab. In the majority of large forestry ejidos in southern Quintana Roo, work groups have replaced ejido executive committees in the administration of most forest management responsibilities. This organizational shift constitutes a de facto dissolution of the CFE as originally conceived in the early 1980s under a program known as the Plan Piloto Forestal. Each work group administers timber profits from a percentage of the ejido's authorized annual harvest volume. While the work groups in both communities coordinate their forest management activities, they each decide how to use timber-based income. Since work group formation is not unique to Quintana Roo (see Taylor, this volume, for a discussion of the same phenomenon in Durango), it is worth exploring implications of these groups not just for communal forest management but also for collective governance under the ejido structure. What impact do work groups have on forest management and, by extension, forest protection? How do they affect the local economy, generally, and the distribution of timber profits, specifically? Finally, what impacts have work groups had on local governance? Do they represent the de facto breakdown of forestry ejidos in Quintana Roo? The chapter's first section provides a descriptive overview of Caoba and Petcacab. While the two ejidos are similar in many ways, they differ in terms of forestry production potential. Interestingly, Petcacab, the ejido with the higher production potential, and thus presumably greater economic incentives to cooperate, faced stiffer governance challenges compared to its less endowed counterpart, Caoba. The second section presents a comparative analysis of work group formation in Caoba and Petcacab. Caoba had seven groups in 2000, although two of these commanded a significant majority in local decision making. In contrast, Petcacab subdivided at two levels between 1996 and 2000, including 11 groups and another 18 group "sections." In the third and fourth sections, I examine the evolving collective rule systems that govern multigroup forest management in the two communities. While groups in Caoba mostly adhered to new rules, their counterparts in Petcacab frequently deviated from norms. The fifth section explores how work groups have affected local forest management and politics by focusing on changes in governance practices, participation, and informal economies. The final section of the chapter summarizes what work groups might mean for the future of community forestry in Quintana Roo.
Why is the World Bank so successful? How has it gained power even at moments in history when it seemed likely to fall? This pathbreaking book is the first close examination of the inner workings of the Bank, the foundations of its achievements, its propensity for intensifying the problems it intends to cure, and its remarkable ability to tame criticism and extend its own reach. Michael Goldman takes us inside World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C., and then to Bank project sites around the globe. He explains how projects funded by the Bank really work and why community activists struggle against the World Bank and its brand of development. Goldman looks at recent ventures in areas such as the environment, human rights, and good governance and reveals how-despite its poor track record-the World Bank has acquired greater authority and global power than ever before. The book sheds new light on the World Bank's role in increasing global inequalities and considers why it has become the central target for anti-globalization movements worldwide. For anyone concerned about globalization and social justice, Imperial Nature is essential reading.