Elsevier

Geoforum

Volume 43, Issue 3, May 2012, Pages 363-366
Geoforum

Market-oriented conservation governance: The particularities of place

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.01.006Get rights and content

Abstract

Conservation policy and practice is increasingly turning towards market-based interventions to reconcile the growing conflicts between environmental conservation and rural livelihood needs. This short introductory paper to the special issue on “market-oriented conservation governance” critically investigates the growing commitment to markets as a means of meeting conservation objectives and livelihood security. We distinguish market oriented conservation from neoliberal conservation and argue for a grounded, empirically rich investigation into the passive and active promotion of markets in conservation landscapes – analysis which pays attention to how and why certain markets are promoted by ENGOs, governments and private sector, as well as how rural people negotiate livelihoods and markets when adjusting to conservation pressures. Such an approach takes seriously how the particularities of place, from local harvests to trans-local trade, shape market-oriented conservation in practice and expose the messiness of such ventures. The range of papers in this special issue show how neither neoliberal nor market-based interventions in conservation are uniform in character, impact and outcome, and that while identifying the patterns and logic behind these processes remains crucial, the basis for understanding how markets inform conservation, must be done by drawing on empirical data that speaks clearly to how actors variously engage the logic of market-driven conservation in terms of their histories and contemporary realities. We argue that doing so makes it possible to understand not only what is ‘new’ about contemporary market-oriented conservation but also its continuities with earlier forms of command and control conservation.

Highlights

► Introduction to special issue on market-oriented conservation mechanisms. ► Argue for empirical analysis that accounts for the particularities of place. ► Market oriented conservation exhibits continuities with coercive conservation.

Introduction

The policy decisions of conservation authorities and advocates along with the livelihood decisions of people living inside conservation territories are aligning to produce an increased presence of market-oriented conservation governance. This trend has emerged from long-standing debates about the conflicts arising between development, conservation and poverty in rural areas, which have supported the idea that social well-being, rural livelihoods and economic development must not be at odds with conserving valued species and ecologies. While the early days of protected area expansion post-World War Two saw a concerted effort by the state to keep people’s livelihood activities out of conservation territories, the kinder, gentler 1980s and 1990s emphasized community-based models, integrating restrictions on extractive activities with ‘off set’ developments such as schools, health care facilities and environmental education (Barrett and Arcese, 1995, Brosius et al., 2005). The shift towards community-based models was unsatisfactory to many disillusioned with the capacity of communities to advance conservation goals and fairly quickly there was a re-entrenchment of early coercive conservation – it remains in the trenches today (Wilshusen et al., 2002, Locke and Dearden, 2005). Concern over communities living in conservation landscapes persists, however, as demonstrated by the Durban Accord signed at the 2003 World Parks Congress and the principles of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) (Brosius, 2004, IUCN, 2003, UN, 2007). Such international agreements and principles push local conservation authorities to take the livelihood concerns of people residing in conservation landscapes seriously, leading to the continued search for on-the-ground mechanisms that can facilitate a reconciliation between conservation and livelihood.

Market-based conservation emerged under the mantra that assigning a monetary value to nature was the most efficient and effective way of saving it (McAffee, 1999), and had the additional benefit of being able to provide livelihood opportunities for those most affected by conservation practice. With a promise to reconcile the longstanding tension between livelihood and conservation, market-based conservation appeals to both coercive and community-based approaches, as evidenced from their wide-scale adoption (Igoe and Brockington, 2007; e.g. The Nature Conservancy, 2011, Conservation International, 2011). There are now a range of financial mechanisms that emerge out of, and easily integrate into, capitalist markets, leading to a dominance of market-based approaches to deal with the tensions between financing conservation, meeting conservation objectives and ensuring rural livelihood security. In particular, the creation of markets which value nature in monetary terms is an increasingly popular means of raising the money necessary to finance conservation and, as the thinking goes, securing local income to wean local users off of ‘scarce’ resources. Meanwhile, as farmers adjust to the loss of resources associated with conservation policy amidst rural economies diversifying, intensifying and capitalizing, they themselves seek out and take advantage of emerging market opportunities and, in doing so, inform and shape the markets they engage (Dressler and Roth, 2011, Higgins et al., 2012). Conservation and, by extension, carbon, wildlife, landscape esthetics and ecosystem services, have now become the commodities to be produced and exchanged as livelihood strategies.

Critical scholarship on conservation and development has been a bit slow to the market-based conservation party (though McAffee, 1999 is an early exception), being mostly pre-occupied with the roles of the state and local communities in environmental governance. Widespread discussion of neoliberalism in the social sciences has recently helped to push scholars’ gaze towards markets as an agent of dominant, perhaps hegemonic, governance in conservation landscapes. Similarly, critical conservation scholars have built upon insights emerging from the expanding literature on neoliberal nature that makes a strong case for understanding how nature has become central to neoliberal projects and documents the ways that natures have become neoliberalized in tangible and less tangible ways (Peck and Tickell, 2002, McCarthy and Prudham, 2004; see Hughes, 2005 for ‘third nature’; Castree, 2008; see Büscher, 2010 for ‘derivative nature’; see Igoe et al., 2010 for ‘spectacle of nature’). It is widely acknowledged that associated trends in environmental governance, such as decentralization, privatization and commodification, are greatly informed by a neoliberal logic that is now reaching once remote frontiers of the world, where nature–society relationships were once more socially embedded than monetary in nature (Polanyi, 2001). Likewise, it has become increasingly common to interrogate the trends in conservation practice as part of neoliberal processes and to understand how the shift towards decentralized environmental governance ‘inserts’ markets that facilitate (existing and new forms of) commodification of environmental goods and services as well as growing corporate, private sector involvement in global conservation initiatives (Cammack,, 2003, Chapin, 2004, Igoe and Brockington, 2007). The production of nature as a fictitious commodity, in that it pre-exists and transcends capitalist commodification, is understood in these accounts as part of a double movement (Polanyi, 2001), where the state moves in cyclical fashion to regulate–deregulate laissez-faire capitalism (Foster, 2002), ostensibly managing nature from the excesses of capitalist exploitation.

Drawing on such Polaynian analysis has informed an understanding of the neoliberalization of nature as a necessarily incomplete and fractured process where competing logics can persist and progressive opportunities can emerge (Higgins et al., 2012). Perhaps the most visible work in neoliberal conservation comes from Brockington, Igoe, Duffy and others who have provided in depth analysis of the ways in which capitalism and conservation are increasingly co-produced into what Fletcher (2010) calls ‘neoliberal environmentality’. Consequently, we now have a clearer picture of the ‘business of conservation’, its inner workings, assumptions and assertions (Brockington et al., 2008) and its ability to entice a large variety of actors to adopt markets as a panacea to solving the current environmental crisis (Büscher and Dressler, 2007). Neoliberal conservation is thus increasingly understood as the outcome of a confluence of factors meant to protect (if not expand) the processes of capital accumulation and to simultaneously promote market-based mechanisms to address environmental concerns which also meet the requirements of neoliberal governance (e.g. private property).

Neoliberalism has, as Ferguson (2010) notes, become a favoured target of critical scholars in the social sciences. Both as ideology and practice, neoliberalism appears to function as another means for corporations, governments, NGOs, farmers and middlemen, among others, to disenfranchise the rural poor and to further elite interests in controlling and commodifying landscapes and livelihoods. Some of these critiques are clearly very dangerous to the conservation establishment, as the stories of ‘disobedient’ knowledge attest (Igoe et al., 2010). While we align with this critical narrative, and with the importance of the social and ecological injustices it identifies, there are other associated processes unfolding that also require critical exploration. In particular, we have become mindful of the need to interrogate, through the analysis of placed-based empirical data, the types of markets emerging within and through conservation interventions, and critically engage the ways in which markets ‘neoliberalize’ nature, humans, and non-human species in an effort to ‘save’ all three (Castree, 2008, pp. 153–154).

Yet grounded empirical details often remain missing or disconnected from the discussion of how, when and why markets ‘neoliberalise’ nature, or empirical details are examined in an a priori fashion – and here we include some of our own work in the critique. While conducting ethnographic research in rural Southeast Asia, we have found it fruitful to use the specifics of place as an entry point into what are a confluence of processes which, articulated through local social relations and institutions, result in market-oriented ‘solutions’ to tensions between conservation, livelihoods and economic growth. Doing so enables understanding of how market oriented conservation mechanisms serve to promote market access alongside state control and how they function to present production for market exchange as the best solution to the challenges faced by rural resource dependant farmers. We have thus become aware of the need to examine the various socio-political and economic dynamics involved in creating markets, and how these inform our current interpretation of what constitutes neoliberalism relative to pre-existing, endogenous forms of production, exchange and circulation in rural areas of the world (see Gudeman, 2001).

Though it is well-established that many neoliberal characteristics (e.g. faith in the ‘free’ market) are rooted in their liberal genealogy and thus there are continuities between liberal and neoliberal forms of governance (McCarthy and Prudham, 2004), the critical literature on conservation has given little attention to the continuities present in the transition to neoliberal conservation governance. Much literature has over-emphasized what is ‘new’ by highlighting the creation of new commodities, new markets and the involvement of the private sector in financialization while neglecting to explore with the same enthusiasm the ways that contemporary forms of market-oriented conservation have a long history and connection to a ‘pre-neoliberal’ form of conservation. Conservation as a practice has long relied upon capitalist markets to help meet conservation objectives; this is not new. Philanthropy has driven conservation acquisitions, recreational hunting and the economic interests of the wealthy have informed the location of conservation territories while the lure of urban labor markets and promotion of agricultural intensification have been relied upon to reduce the pressure on conserved resources (see Brockington, 2009). There are, however, new forms of market-oriented governance strongly informed by, and increasingly constituted by, neoliberal logic such as biodiversity offsets, ecosystem services and tradable quotas. But even these, when articulated through often contradictory political economic processes, are not always recognizable as neoliberal interventions when viewed from the ground (McAfee and Shapiro, 2010, McElwee, 2012). While we acknowledge such governance interventions are often of neoliberal origin, and may remain so while manifesting locally, the very particularities of people and place can often transform projects with a neoliberal logic into something no longer recognizable as such. Many projects, in fact, look surprisingly similar to ‘old-school’ command and control conservation where capitalist markets have long played a facilitating role in disciplining people, livelihood and landscape. Consequently, this special issue investigates what we refer to as market-oriented conservation as set against, or held relative to neoliberal conservation to emphasize the continuities with a conservation agenda which has only been amended rather than fundamentally changed, and to capture the messiness of market-oriented conservation in practice.

This special issue, then, makes two contributions. First, it engages the contemporary scholarship on neoliberalism and environmental policy with a specific focus on the history, practice and contradictory outcomes of market-oriented conservation. And second, it focuses on markets, not as abstract processes but as very particular sets of relationships emplaced within different social fields; in other words, it investigates the types of markets being employed in conservation practice, how they emerge and how they unfold in particular places. By doing so, this special issue examines the motives, patterns and trends of the global rise of capitalist, market-based interventions that have sought to reconcile the conflicts between financing environmental conservation, maintaining conservation objectives, and supporting livelihood security. The papers offer new insight into how, when and why expanding capitalist markets have articulated with and steered global conservation discourse, policy and practice toward so-called ‘win–win’ market-based solutions for livelihood support and biodiversity conservation. The authors give explicit attention to the ways in which market-based conservation becomes manifest in local social relations, livelihood strategies and landscapes over time and space, providing critical new insights into market oriented conservation governance.

All of the papers, to a greater or lesser extent, show how the particularities of place disrupt the implementation of new governance models. The resulting gaps between the plan and the practice, create what are no longer primarily neoliberal, market-oriented or state controlled conservation, but rather possess a combination of characteristics. This is most obvious in McElwee’s (2012) piece, where she traces the emergence of payment for ecosystem schemes (PESs) in a nominally socialist state and demonstrates how such schemes fit themselves into the logic of local politics, economies and social structure. Higgins et al. (2012), investigate how farmers negotiate market-based initiatives, showing how they contest, take up and resist, shaping the characteristics and relative success of the project; while Fletcher and Breitling (2012) shows how the neoliberal ideals at the heart of PES schemes in Costa Rica are refracted through the pragmatism of local leadership and the specific socio-political context of conservation in Costa Rica creating a significant gap between ‘vision’ and ‘execution’. It is Büscher and Dressler’s (2012) piece that draws our attention back to the ways in which, despite these localized disruptions, there remains a logic – evident at the global and local level, that continues to infuse localized market-oriented conservation governance. Nature, in these instances, becomes a tradable commodity, governed through its position as an emerging commodity in a larger network of actors in the capitalist economy.

In their interrogation of the creation of market-oriented conservation initiatives, a number of the papers in the collection challenge any lingering assertions that ‘neoliberal’ conservation entails the retreat of the state (through the hallmark of increased participation of private enterprise) and draws attention to the extensive amount of work needed in order for these presumably neoliberal conservation strategies to function. Büscher and Dressler (2012) show in the cases of South Africa and the Philippines that, in order for local people to be attracted to the market for its ‘opportunities’ considerable effort must first be dispensed to create an ‘enabling regulatory environment’ within which nature can be commodified and produced for (in these cases) local to global consumption and further, effort must also be exerted to enforce the rules constraining previous, traditional, means of using nature. Similarly, the analysis of Pokorny et al. (2012) of a series of market-based conservation projects in the Amazon revealed that such projects did not meet development expectations partly because of the high costs born by sponsoring organizations and that any project that could potentially be considered successful required ongoing funding and support. Markets and farmers’ choice to engage them, in these instances, are not as ‘natural’ as it might appear, but the product of considerable state and non-state intervention. Moreover, both McElwee’s (2012) and Fletcher and Breitling (2012) papers on payment for ecosystem services challenge the notion that such schemes are about a full shift from state to market oriented allocation of environmental goods and services. In both cases, Vietnam and Costa Rica, respectively, analysis of empirical data demonstrates how the creation of PES schemes requires strong state intervention at inception and continued participation as both buyer and seller of ecosystem services. Fletcher demonstrates how the state acts in the absence of self-regulating environmental markets and McElwee (2012) investigates the multiple ways PES works with and strengthens centralized forest management in Vietnam.

The continued involvement, rather than retreat, of the state in PES schemes is one example of how, even ostensibly neoliberal conservation schemes, display significant continuities with previous forms of conservation and land management from earlier periods of liberalism. Pokorny et al. (2012), demonstrate that the ‘new’ generation of market based conservation arrangements in the Amazon do not significantly depart from earlier conservation and development projects in that they appear to increase inequality, with the better off and more established families benefiting from external models and support. This inequality is also noted in McElwee’s (2012) Vietnam case, where she states that, “in many ways PES may simply replicate already existing patterns of institutionalized management of land and commodities”. She found that the adoption of PES has not radically changed the patterns of land ownership or forest use, and that in many ways can be considered “new wine in old bottles” where the same old problem of pursuing conservation goals without exacerbating inequality or poverty persists, despite the change in strategy. The following papers question the extent to which these new forms of conservation governance truly depart from old style command and control conservation governance, particularly when viewed from the lives of target populations.

The collection as a whole furthers the above insights into market-oriented conservation governance by raising concerns about the unquestioning faith an ever-growing number of agencies, organizations and people have come to place in valuing nature for the sake of financing conservation and supporting livelihoods. A variety of these approaches have been labeled as neoliberal, where agencies and organization draw on finances from private sector corporations (Chapin, 2004) as part of ‘common sense’ solutions to overcoming the financial constraints and incentives of reconciling the conflicts between conservation and local livelihoods. As Büscher and Dressler (2012) suggest, the common sense argument and character of neoliberal conservation has made it difficult to identify and question, particularly in practice, as conservation motives and design become increasingly enmeshed in markets, such that most approaches move towards market-oriented governance solutions. This special issue addresses this concern by giving explicit ethnographic attention to how market-based conservation becomes manifest in local social relations, livelihood strategies and landscapes over time and space. While much research on neoliberal conservation governance has examined how assertive marketization and incentive schemes drive interventions, this collection tries to ground these interventions by characterizing how market-oriented conservation and local economies merge to govern rural ways of life and livelihood toward increasing intensification and local commodity production.

The case material focuses our attention on how various political actors at different social scales, from government staff to charismatic local leaders, facilitate market processes that lead to new forms of conservation governance that reconfigure local livelihoods, economies and environments. The collaborative impact of this special issue centers on how the increasing convergence between market-oriented conservation and local economies will continue to enhance the intensification of resource use, the use of rural labor for commodity production, and private sector investment in emerging markets that govern rural production. The intensification of market activity in rural areas has implications for people’s livelihoods, valuing of nature, and for the social–ecological landscapes in the global north and south.

In contrast to the dissent and critique one sees in the academic literature, market-based conservation continues to be viewed as a win–win solution in conservation circles but without strong empirical data detailing the messiness of these ventures, a convincing critique aimed at reforming conservation policy and practice, is beyond reach. This special issue is a step in that direction.

Section snippets

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the authors for their hard work and patience while helping us see this special issue through to fruition; it has been a bit of a long haul since the papers were first presented at an AAG conference. In particular, we are indebted to the comments and editorial insights of Scott Prudham and anonymous reviewers which served to strengthen the collection.

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