Engaging neoliberal conservation
The growing body of work on the 'neoliberalisation of nature' has paid little attention to conservation policy and its impacts. Similarly, studies of conservation have generally overlooked the broader context of neoliberalism. This latest edition of Conservation and Society journal explores what can be gained by seeing conservation through a neoliberal lense. Drawing on detailed case studies from a range of geographical contexts, the authors attempt to place conservation policies in the context of broader social and economic changes that define neoliberalism.
The first paper, an editorial article, introduces key themes and provides an overview of the case studies. The authors argue that:
- neoliberalisation involves the reregulation of nature through forms of commodification
- this entails new types of territorialisation: the partitioning of resources and landscapes in ways that control, and often exclude, local people
- neoliberalisation has coincided with the emergence of new networks that cut across traditional divides of state, NGOs and for-profit enterprise, and which are rhetorically united by neoliberal ideologies and for biodiversity conservation.
The remaining papers present place-based case studies of conservation projects from around the world, which explore these issues in depth.
Titles are as follows:
- We thought we wanted a reserve: one community's disillusionment with government conservation management
- Between Bolivar and bureaucracy: the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor
- Friends with money: private support for a national park in the US Virgin Islands
- Conservation, commerce and communities: the story of community-based wildlife management areas in Tanzania's Northern tourist circuit
- Staying afloat: state agencies, local communities, and international involvement in Marine Protected Area management in Zanzibar, Tanzania
- Linking neoprotectionism and environmental governance: on the rapidly increasing tensions between actors in the environment-development nexus
