Shifting Environmental Governance in a Neoliberal World: US AID for Conservation

Abstract: By exploring the shifting and uneven power relations among state, market and civil society organizations in US environmental foreign aid policy‐making, this article forges new ground in conversations about conservation and neoliberalism. Since the 1970s, an evolving group of non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) has lobbied the US Congress to support environmental foreign assistance. However, the 1980s and 1990s rise of neoliberalism laid the conditions for the formation of a dynamic alliance among representatives of the US Congress, the US Agency for International Development, environmental NGOs and the private sector around biodiversity conservation. In this alliance, idealized visions of NGOs as civil society and a countering force to corporations have underpinned their influence, despite their contemporary corporate partnerships. Furthermore, by focusing on international biodiversity conservation, the group has attracted a broad spectrum of political and corporate support to shape public policy and in the process create new spaces for capital expansion.     

The Political Forest in the Era of Green Neoliberalism

Nancy Peluso and Peter Vandergeest first used the term “political forest” to denaturalise forests, refiguring them as political-ecological entities. Across three moments of colonialism, post-colonial independence, and counter-insurgency struggles, they analyse how states in Southeast Asia (re)made forests as a means of territorialising power. More recently, they identify a fourth, contemporary moment characterised by the entry of diverse non-state actors into the making of forests, and a shift in the rationalities and technologies of forest management. We label this fourth moment “green neoliberalism” to identify an era of global environmental governance characterised by market-based solutions to socio-ecological problems, biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration priorities, and new moral and scientific claims to forests spanning a variety of sites and scales. The papers in this symposium transport the analytic of the political forest to Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Indonesia, Madagascar, Singapore, and Thailand to examine how green neoliberalism’s discourses and practices have created new sites and expressions of territorialisation, governance, knowledge production, and subject formation. In doing so, they illuminate the multiplicity of actors (re)making political forests at a moment when forests’ virtues as carbon sinks and biodiversity hotspots draw massive flows of capital and justify remaking socio-ecological relations across the globe.     

Violent maritime spaces: Conservation and security in Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park,India

The militarisation of conservation involves the integration of conservation, security and counterinsurgency through violent and armed strategies, or ‘war, by conservation’. We describe a militarised conservation practice in which a marine protected area was established by the state and supported by international actors in a region of ongoing ethnic and military conflict as a case of conservation, by war. Conservation and security actors actively criminalise artisanal fishing communities in Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park in India. The harvest of sea cucumbers, marine species of commercial value historically traded between the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, was banned and has become the target of militarised action. When the Sri Lankan civil war broke out in 1983, sea cucumber trade turned into a security concern as the same sea routes were also being used for trafficking arms, ammunition, and other contraband. Tamil Nadu was geographically and logistically involved in the civil war due to ethnic ties. The Sri Lankan civil war and its social and political consequences on the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu due to ethnic ties is a fitting case of the nexus of conservation and security in a marine context. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted with artisanal fishers and conservation and security actors, we show that violent political conflict provided the justification for securitisation of conservation. As the state focuses its conservation efforts on the marine protected area, commercial fisheries detrimental to fisheries and biodiversity conservation continue. Marine protected areas allow the state to achieve its security outcomes even as it fails to meet its conservation goals due to non-local drivers of declines in species populations. Trans-boundary marine environments are particularly difficult to govern due to the dynamic nature of the seascape. The materiality of the sea and the conservation-security nexus results in the creation of a violent maritime space.     

The Devil is in the (Bio)diversity: Private Sector “Engagement” and the Restructuring of Biodiversity Conservation

Abstract: Intensified relations between biodiversity conservation organizations and private‐sector actors are analyzed through a historical perspective that positions biodiversity conservation as an organized political project. Within this view the organizational dimensions of conservation exist as coordinated agreement and action among a variety of actors that take shape within radically asymmetrical power relations. This paper traces the privileged position of “business” in aligning concepts of sustainable development and ecological modernization within the emerging institutional context of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Global Environment Facility in ways that help to secure continued access to “nature as capital”, and create the institutional conditions to shape the work of conservation organizations. The contemporary emergence of business as a major actor in shaping contemporary biodiversity conservation is explained in part by the organizational characteristics of modernist conservation that subordinates it to larger societal and political projects such as neoliberal capitalism.     

A Spectacular Eco‐Tour around the Historic Bloc: Theorising the Convergence of Biodiversity Conservation and Capitalist Expansion

Abstract: The simultaneous proliferation of protected areas for biodiversity conservation and neoliberal market expansion has sparked a growing body of work, which suggests that these are mutually reinforcing processes that reflect alliances between conservationist and capitalist agendas. Because this alliance is so counter intuitive to the ways in which biodiversity conservation is popularly understood, theoretical perspectives concerning these relationships have been slow in emerging. Drawing from Gramsci's ideas of hegemony and historic bloc, we propose a theoretical framework systematically to inform understandings and investigations of these transformations. We suggest that they are driven by the convergence of networks of interests, which work to resolve the apparent contradictions between demands for continued economic growth and growing concerns about what it portends for the future of our planet. These in turn rely on spectacular presentations of conservation interventions, conservation success stories, and their putative linkages to ecosystems and the global economy.     

The Ebb and Flow of Indigenous Rights Recognitions in Conservation Policy

At the 2003 World Parks Congress, diverse conservation actors called for the end of exclusionary approaches to conservation; recognition of customary forms of environmental protection; and restoration of losses to indigenous peoples whose lands were incorporated into protected areas without meaningful consent. A primary means to achieving such reforms has been the development of rights‐based approaches to conservation, expressed at the time as the better integration of human rights into the planning and management of protected areas. This article reviews the suite of publications that followed the 2003 Congress, each identifying the need for rights‐based approaches in conservation. All reviewed materials seek to operationalize human rights into conservation planning, but the review indicates a pattern of support for, then retreat from, and even a possible ‘backlash’ against, indigenous rights. The review also finds important differences in organizations’ ideas about who is responsible for protecting the environment versus who is responsible for protecting human rights. The authors draw from these findings a caution against the subversion of the original intention of rights‐based conservation to definitions that more fully serve conservation organizations’ own ends, based on the presumption that benefits (including rights) from environmental protection will eventually trickle down to people.     

Public Authority and Conservation in Areas of Armed Conflict: Virunga National Park as a ‘State within a State’ in Eastern Congo

Much research on nature conservation in war‐torn regions focuses on the destructive impact of violent conflict on protected areas, and argues that transnational actors should step up their support for those areas to mitigate the risks that conflict poses to conservation efforts there. Overlooked are the effects transnational efforts have on wider conflict dynamics and structures of public authority in these regions. This article describes how transnational actors increasingly gained influence over the management of Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and how these actors contributed to the militarization of conservation in Virunga. Most scholarly literature suggests that ‘green militarization’ contributes to the extension of state authority over territory and population, yet this is not the case in Virunga. Instead, the militarization of Virunga translates into practices of extra‐state territorialization, with the result that many in the local population perceive the park's management as a project of personalized governance and/or a ‘state within a state’. This article thus argues that it is important to depart from an a priori notion of the ‘state’ when considering the nexus of conservation practices and territorialization, and to analyse this intersection through the lens of public authority instead.     

South Pacific Agendas in the Quest to Protect Natural Areas

In the South Pacific islands, development assistance agencies, financial institutions, and international NGOs approach conservation in ways that provide opportunities for foreigners to advise islanders about appropriate paths to development. They fund the intergovernmental South Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), which uses its organizational, legal and discursive powers to create opportunities for their work, and so helps validate inequitable political and economic relationships between the islands and developed regions, ensuring that these continue unchallenged by concerns about environmental degradation. But this outsider–insider dichotomy is too simplistic to describe all the endeavours connected with South Pacific protected areas. Amongst indigenous interests in the islands there is more than a single conservation agenda. The variety of agendas connected to efforts to protect natural areas in the South Pacific islands illustrates that conservation is more than a technical endeavour with a single moral goal. Conservationists’ success in preserving biodiversity and natural areas depends, therefore, upon forming explicit and open alliances with other individuals who, although they may have different aspirations and values, are prepared to work openly and effectively with them to achieve some agreed measures.     

‘An ally for all the years to come’: why Australia is not a conflicted US ally

In 2011, Australia communicated a clear choice about its strategic future. It would continue to cleave tightly to the US alliance, expand its military links and work to advance the USA's conception of regional order. Given its economic interests, why has Australia bound itself to the US alliance? What lies behind this strong commitment and what would it take for Australia to change its relationship with the USA? This article presents an analysis of the current state of the US–Australia alliance and argues that Canberra's pursuit of close relations with the USA reflects the interaction of a rational calculation of the costs and benefits of the alliance with a set of resolutely political factors that have produced the current policy setting. The article first assesses the security cost and benefit behind the alliance. It then argues that the move also derives from the strong domestic support for the US alliance, a sharpened sense that China's rise was generating regional instability that only the US primacy could manage and the realisation that the economic fallout of such a move would be minimal. It concludes with a brief reflection on what it might take to change the current policy settings.     

Rethinking Jagiełło Hungary (1490–1526)

Abstract

Historians of the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania have identified the Sejm (Diet) of 1712–13 as a moment when, after the chaos of the Great Northern War, orderly government might have been restored and some political reforms enacted. Specifically, the efforts of August II to persuade the Sejm to pass wide-ranging fiscal and military reforms have been examined by Józef Gierowski, who argued that August II missed an opportunity at this Sejm to cement an alliance with the envoys (pos?owie) that might have curbed the powers of the hetmans, and gone on to enact further political reforms.

This focus on the king’s agenda, however, overlooks the reform programme pursued independently by the Sejm envoys. The envoys were hostile to the hetmans, but sought different reforms from the king. Examining their agenda allows a fuller understanding of this Sejm, as well as broadening our understanding of szlachta political thought more generally.     

Underplaying the ‘Okinawa card’: how Japan negotiates its alliance with the United States

The US military bases in the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa have long been a source of domestic political opposition to the US–Japan alliance. As an alliance management issue, the ongoing troubles surrounding the bases raise questions as to when and why states adopt particular bargaining strategies when dealing with allies. Why, for instance, has the Japanese government not made greater use of this ‘Okinawa card’ when negotiating alliance issues with the USA? Even though highlighting particular domestic problems as a part of a negotiating strategy (known as tying hands) should appeal to a weaker ally such as Japan, this article argues that in the Okinawan case the reverse has been true. Japan has generally, though not always, sought to minimise or downplay domestic opposition to its alliance agreements, essentially preferring a cutting-slack to a tying-hands approach. The Japanese experience suggests that when states which are directly dependent on an alliance for their security see their security environment as unstable, they view tying-hands strategies as too likely to undermine their bargaining credibility. Maintaining credibility is important in an alliance bargaining context because it is a way for such states to signal their commitment to an alliance and so guard against abandonment.     

Politicized moral geographies: Debating biodiversity conservation and ancestral domain in the Philippines

Research in political ecology has paid inadequate attention to the multifaceted cultural politics surrounding discourses of environmental conservation in the developing world. Specifically, it has tended to neglect the rich politicized moral geographies integral to conservation debates. This paper, then, makes the case for thinking about conservation as an envisioning process sensitive to these politicized moral geographies as well as their linkages to political and economic processes. After a brief critique of political ecology, the paper sketches a theoretical approach in which environmental conservation is understood as a process of envisioning social relations, moral discourse and socionatural place. The approach is used to explain two contrasting visions of conservation based on the notions of integrated protected areas management and ancestral domain which are prominent today in the Philippines. The conclusion reiterates the call for a discursive political ecology alive to the politicized moral geographies that condition conservation trajectories.     

‘General interests’ as a rationale for the US–Republic of Korea alliance between 1998 and 2008

The US–Republic of Korea (ROK) alliance had significantly developed asset specificities and common social identities attached to it during the cold war period. If institutional features and ideational factors originating from the cold war threat can account for alliance resilience in the post-cold war period, the US–ROK alliance should be a ‘most likely case’ to support those causal links. This article shows that such is not the case. This article, instead, argues that the US–ROK alliance went beyond being an instrument of threat response to becoming a more complicated mechanism for serving ‘general interests’ in relation to North-East Asian regional order maintenance and order-building, which drove the US–ROK alliance between 1998 and 2008.     

Othering Pastoralists,State Violence,and the Remaking of Boundaries in Tanzania’s Militarised Wildlife Conservation Sector

This paper examines the ways in which Tanzanian conservation authorities utilise biodiversity “extinction narratives” in order to legitimise the use of violence in redrawing protected areas’ boundaries. Militarisation and violence in conservation have often been associated with the “war on poaching”. Drawing on the history of conservation and violence in Tanzania, and using an empirical case from Loliondo, the paper suggests that violence in conservation may be legitimised when based on extinction narratives and a claim that more exclusive spaces are urgently needed to protect biodiversity. It argues that the emerging militarisation and use of violence in Tanzania can be associated with both global biodiversity extinction and local neo-Malthusian narratives, which recently have regained predominance. When combined with “othering” of groups of pastoralists by portraying them as foreign “invaders”, such associations legitimise extensions of state control over contested land by any means available, including violence.     

Forest Policy Reform and the Organization of Logging in Peruvian Amazonia

Reform in the forest sector in Peru resulted in a new forestry law, developed with substantial input from international conservation and donor organizations. While it incorporates the principles of sustainable forest management, biodiversity conservation and livelihood improvement, inconsistencies remain between the regulatory mechanisms and actual practices and outcomes in the field, leading some to consider the legal framework a failure. This article suggests that problems in the sector persist because the legal and regulatory frameworks do not incorporate existing local institutions, norms and practices — all of which are rooted in complex historical social, political and economic relationships. Based on information from interviews, data on movement of timber and analysis of secondary information, the authors examine the local structure, actors and dynamics of the concession forestry system in the Peruvian Amazon. The article focuses on how financial, social and political relationships in the network of actors, and particularly the patronage system, have helped actors in the sector adapt to the new policy framework. It is proposed that any further reform in the forest sector must be based on a keen understanding and appreciation of the praxis of timber extraction in the region.     

Towards Equity in Indigenous Co‐Management of Protected Areas: Cultural Planning by Miriuwung‐Gajerrong People in the Kimberley,Western Australia

Delivery of the potential mutual benefits for biodiversity conservation and Indigenous peoples through protected area co‐management remains challenging, with partnership arrangements frequently delivering inequitable outcomes that marginalise Indigenous interests. In the Kimberley region of Western Australia, Miriuwung‐Gajerrong people initiated a Cultural Planning Framework to help achieve greater equity in planning for co‐management of the first Indigenous‐owned protected areas managed with the state. Analysis of the negotiation and delivery of this Indigenous‐controlled planning initiative concluded it made a key contribution in shaping an equitable intercultural space for ongoing negotiation of co‐management. A practitioners' model of related design concepts drawn from the analysis identified three factors of significance: a foundation platform of recognition of rights and interests; a set of effective organisations to support the roles of the key actors; and effective mechanisms for working together. The model proved robust when evaluated against international standards for best practice, suggesting it may be a useful tool for guiding better uptake of those standards. Interrogation of the two major theories underpinning these standards – common pool resource (CPR) and governance – demonstrated the theories are synergistic and inform different parts of the model. Both theories highlight the significance of Indigenous‐controlled planning. Attention to relational theory for interrogation of the intercultural space may help illuminate their relative importance. Further investigation of the potential of Indigenous‐controlled planning to build theory and practice in Indigenous co‐management of protected areas is recommended.     

Scaling down or scaling up? Local actor decisions and the feasibility of decentralized environmental governance: a case of Páramo wetlands in Southern Ecuador

In Latin America and the Global South, policy-makers are adopting community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) principles for local governments. The idealized emphasis on ‘local’ collaborative approaches is known to neglect human geographic contexts and issues of capacity, power, and human drivers of change at larger scales. However, critiques lack empirical evidence of policy implementation decisions. How do local government and community actors choose to use decentralized environmental governance policies in relation to a threatened cultural and natural landscape across their jurisdictions? This question is explored in an ethnographic case of a high Andean wetland region in southern Ecuador by focusing on the context and micro-politics of two seemingly contradictory local government decisions: proposals to nationalize a local community protected area and to work with other local governments to construct a road across the wetlands that could threaten protected area status. When different sectors are devolved to different local actors without strong sub-state institutions for conflict management, decentralization may create incentives for conflict rather than conservation. Governance design depends on understanding how and why diverse local actors engage in boundary-spanning regional strategies, calling for additional contributions from political geographers.     

Rising Inequality in an Era of Austerity: The Case of the US

US inequality has rapidly increased since the early 1970s. For advanced economies, inequality is linked to stronger incentives that enhance growth, education, innovation and entrepreneurship. However, the rise in US inequality is concentrated in the top 1%. Hence it is increasingly possible that economic rewards may be too uncertain to promote effort, suggesting the US has crossed a tipping point in which inequality reduces growth. Other costs include more social and political instability, making inequality the next potential “crisis” facing America. This study first examines trends in inequality and then reviews arguments that suggest that it is both good and bad for growth in America's cities. We then provide evidence that there has been a reversal in the effects of inequality after 2000 with it now being associated with less income and job growth in US metropolitan areas. We conclude by arguing that no general solution is possible without significant political reforms that equalize political influence.     

From the School Yard to the Conservation Area: Impact Investment across the Nature/Social Divide

In the face of planetary crises, from inequality to biodiversity loss, “impact investing” has emerged as a vision for a new, “moral” financial system where investor dollars fund socio-environmental repair while simultaneously generating financial returns. In support of this system elite actors have formed a consensus that financial investments can have beneficial, more-than-financial outcomes aimed at solving social and environmental crises. Yet critical geographers have largely studied “green” and “social” finance separately. We propose, instead, a holistic geography of impact investing that highlights the common methods used in attempts to offset destructive investments with purportedly reparative ones. This involves interrogating how elite-led ideas of social and environmental progress are reflected in investments, as well as deconstructing the “objects” of impact investments. As examples, we use insights from both “green” and “social” literatures to analyse the social values embedded in projects of financialisation in schooling and affordable housing in the US.     

“Wilderness” revisited: Is Canadian park management moving beyond the “wilderness” ethic?

This paper questions whether the rescaling of conservation practice in Canada to include local and Indigenous communities, NGOs, and private market-based actors represents a move away from wilderness-thinking in conservation, and what implications this might have for the future of conservation in Canada. We explore the links between Cronon's “wilderness” ethic and coloniality, racism/sexism/classism, and political economy, and the extent to which recent trends in conservation practice, such as co-management arrangements, private tourism proposals, and a shift in programming to attract a diverse public to parks, help us to move beyond the limited vision for conservation and environmentalism that the wilderness ethic provides. We interrogate the ways in which the concept of wilderness is being employed, resisted, and transformed by a multitude of actors in three parks and conservation areas across Canada. We argue that although recent developments in conservation practice help to redress some of the worrisome aspects of wilderness-thinking in parks, they also reinforce and re-emphasize problematic lines of thinking and praxis. While the wilderness character of Canadian parks has shifted a great deal since the turn of the 20^th century, the wilderness ethic remains deeply embedded within conservation discourse and practice.