The Conservation Revolution. Bram Büscher

discussion continues in the present and arguably still forms the backbone of the ‘great conservation debate’. The many and sometimes complex positions adopted in this debate keep coming back in various guises, modified and moulded by the study of rapidly changing empirical circumstances in many parts of the world.²⁰ At the same time, it seems that this backbone has lost much of its earlier appeal, especially in academic circles though perhaps less so in the policy world. With a fundamental social science critique of CBC and the end of much of its popular funding appeal in practice, the people versus parks ‘backbone’ certainly can no longer represent an overall conceptualization of mainstream conservation.²¹ It is and will remain a central element to this conceptualization, but one that has been overtaken by other discussions and dynamics.

      MAINSTREAM CONSERVATION: AN UPDATE

      With mainstream conservation, Brockington, Duffy and Igoe refer to ‘a particular historical and institutional strain of western conservation’, practised and promoted especially by large, powerful international conservation organizations and agencies.²² They emphasize that this strain has, almost from the start, centred on both the parks and people debate and conservation’s ‘collaborative legacy’ with prominent business interests.²³ From the time Brockington and colleagues published their book until now, more than a decade later, the latter dimension has further intensified and expanded. These are the ‘other dynamics’ that need to be emphasized: the ways that conservation has further embraced the practices, imaginaries and discourses of contemporary capitalism.²⁴ An update of contemporary mainstream conservation thus needs to account for this intensified integration.

      While Western conservation has always been closely conjoined with capitalist development²⁵, the ‘mainstreaming’ of the relationship between capitalism and conservation arguably started in earnest in the early 1990s. Triggered by broader sustainable development discourses, the drive to merge conservation and development concerns was signified by revamping older and promoting new ‘market-based instruments’ (MBIs).²⁶ Examples of these include tourism and forms of ecotourism (which had accompanied protected area development from the start and includes wildlife hunting), bioprospecting, payments for environmental services (PES), and other mechanisms intended to combine forms of (neoliberal) economic development with environmental conservation. The aim of these interventions was to harness the economic value of in situ resources in order to incentivize their preservation. Kathleen McAfee presciently called this strategy ‘selling nature to save it’.²⁷

      Drawing on a parallel trend of increasing privatization and marketization in conventional primary commodity markets discussed as ‘neoliberal natures’, this trend in conservation became analysed as ‘neoliberal conservation’.²⁸ Here the analysis shifts ‘the 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’.²⁹ Conservation, in other words, has moved beyond a Polanyian double-movement to accompany the march of capitalist progress by trying to selectively reign in or counterbalance its concomitant destruction of nature and biodiversity. It is becoming a potential – yet vital – force in fostering capitalist growth in its own right.

      The neoliberal approach was rapidly and enthusiastically adopted by many of the most influential players in the global conservation movement. This includes the big non-governmental organizations (BINGOs) such as Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), but also intergovernmental financial institutions like The World Bank, IMF and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) as well as prominent business ‘partners’, many of which coordinated within the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). These various actors are, in turn, conjoined within an increasingly dense and self-referential network, of which IUCN is a key component.³⁰ The partner companies that the big non-governmental organizations currently collaborate with, depend upon and even share staff with is highly illustrative in this respect: they are the largest and many of the most environmentally destructive capitalist corporations in the world. It is for this reason that we highlight the centrality of neoliberalism to contemporary mainstream conservation in general.

      Importantly, the link between conservation and capitalism becomes ‘mainstream’ in two ways. On the one hand, we see that the ‘particular historical and institutional strain of western conservation’ that Brockington and colleagues describe has become more intensely and overtly capitalist in its goals, expressions, imaginations and ways of operating. To provide but one illustrative example, in explaining his involvement in the United Nations Environment Programme’s TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) initiative intended to monetarily value and create markets for trade in ‘ecosystem services’, Pavan Sukhdev, a former executive of Deutsche Bank, relates: ‘As an investment banker with another life built over fifteen years around my passion for the economics of nature … I am often asked how I reconcile my capitalist background with my commitments to nature and the environment … I give my stock reply “I don’t reconcile them – I am a total capitalist”.’³¹

      On the other hand, we witness how conservation has become more central to global mainstream capitalist dynamics. Hence mainstream capitalism is quickly coming to grips with the importance of conservation to capitalist processes, even if this is mostly still discursive at present.³² An important example in this regard is the ‘Natural Capital Coalition’, which brings together over 200 governmental, business and conservation organizations and whose central point of departure is that the future of capitalist business needs to take conservation of ‘natural capital’ into account.³³ The crucial point is that from both the side of conservation and from the side of capitalist industry, the link between the two has become more intense, accepted and mainstream.³⁴ This fundamental development – together with the point to be developed further in chapters two and three that capitalism is inherently environmentally unsustainable – is the reason why we argue that a critique of capitalism must be at the heart of any meaningful prospects for the future of conservation.

      Claiming that capitalism and conservation are increasingly intertwined and mainstream is not to imply a straightforward, one-dimensional or clear process and result, nor that this is merely a recent phenomenon. To the contrary: this intertwining and main-streaming is highly uneven, complex, multidimensional, political, and deeply historical – just like capitalist uneven geographical development more generally.³⁵ Our thinking on this, therefore, stays far from any determinism. It instead embraces uncertainty, complexity and change as fundamental dynamics of contemporary capitalist political economy and its uneven geographical development. At the same time, we can discern broad yet specific historical trends and forms running through these uneven and complex developments.

      In an earlier article building on world system perspectives, we argued that the global conservation movement can be seen to have moved through three broad, overlapping stages.³⁶ These stages represent different ways in which conservation functions as a component of the capitalist world economy facilitating the internalization of environmental conditions in order to safeguard or expand capital accumulation. They therefore also logically parallel historical shifts in the dominant regime of capitalist accumulation within the global economy as a whole. Analysts have suggested that these regimes have transitioned, firstly, from ‘organized’ or ‘Fordist’ to ‘disorganized’ or ‘post-Fordist’, ‘flexible’ forms.³⁷ Secondly, in the present period, scholars describe a further shift away from commodity production of any sort towards an emphasis on financialization – what David Harvey calls ‘fictitious capitalism’.³⁸

      Building on this, we have suggested that the global conservation movement has broadly moved through three related stages that we call fortress, flexible, and fictitious conservation, corresponding with the historical movement from protected area creation through community-based conservation with its preferred integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) and attendant income-generation mechanisms to the increasing focus on financialization through neoliberal market engagement (table 2).

Table