What’s in a name? Epistemic perspectives and Payments for Ecosystem Services policies in Nicaragua

As Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) continues to gain attention as a policy tool for securing efficient and effective environmental governance, a rising tide of criticism warns of the potentially detrimental social–ecological consequences of nature commodification and ‘green neoliberalism’. These concerns are also expressed at international policy fora, where the market rhetoric has met with political resistance from countries belonging to the ‘Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America’ (ALBA). But despite this ideological opposition, some ALBA countries are increasingly integrating PES into their environmental policies. In this article we consider the reasons underlying this apparent contradiction and relate it to the notion of ‘epistemic circulation’. On the basis of a study on the evolution of PES-thinking in Nicaragua (an ALBA member) and a reassessment of the supposed ‘success’ of an influential pilot project, we shed light on the forces driving the adoption of particular PES modes and contextualise practical difficulties to endorsing more critical approaches to the tool. Instead of either ideologically rejecting PES as a neoliberal evil or embracing it uncritically as the new panacea, we argue that it is precisely through the socio-political processes surrounding environmental governance debates that the application of PES is shaped. In practice, it may either contribute to an imposed and dispossessing form of capitalism, or tend towards a more negotiated and socio-culturally embedded version of it. Only through its reconceptualisation based on political–cultural primacy rather than market-fetishism can PES achieve its true potential within a broader strategy towards improved environmental governance.     

The neoliberal elephant: Exploring the impacts of the trade ban in ivory on the commodification and neoliberalisation of elephants

This paper uses a case study that explores the impacts of the ivory trade ban on elephant management in Namibia to illuminate the processes and complexities associated with the commodification and neoliberalisation of nature. The paper demonstrates that the ivory trade ban neither prevents the commodification of elephants, nor hampers the neoliberalisation of nature. By tracing Namibia’s experience associated with applying market based approaches to elephant conservation, this paper highlights that the ivory trade ban is only one obstacle among many which prevent the commodification of the ‘living’ elephant. Analysing Namibia’s experiences alongside the wider debates informing elephant conservation reveals that actors of preservation and sustainable utilisation produce elephants. In particular, during the events leading up to the 1989 ivory trade ban, advocates of preservation produced a very lucrative representation of the elephant that relies on market mechanisms. This image has become a powerful commodity that competes with parts of the biophysical elephant (particularly its ivory) and therefore creates new and contesting ways in which elephants can be commodified.     

The green economy in Tanzania: From global discourses to institutionalization

The purpose of this paper is to examine the transfer of the green economy from a global discursive level to institutionalization at the national level in Tanzania. While there is a growing amount of research discussing technological aspects of the green economy, less attention has been paid to policy implications and governance aspects, especially in developing countries. There is an increasing emphasis on technological and market-based solutions to environmental challenges globally and in the developed part of the world. However, in developing countries, ‘green growth’ often implies transformed control over natural resources – under schemes that are often driven from abroad. Over the last five to ten years, investments aimed at increasing productivity in the rural agricultural sector in developing countries have become a focus area of the green economy, but various concepts of green have become confused. Such (mis-) interpretation of the green economy has consequences for implementation and outcomes of various ‘green’ projects. Drawing on governmentality as well as the concept of institutional bricolage, I examine how the green economy discourse and policy at the global level have been re-shaped and re-interpreted to fit the existing agri-business initiative of the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT), which has been championed as a model for green economy implementation in Africa. I discuss how the green discourse has been ‘grabbed’ as an opportunity to ‘greenwash’ SAGCOT in its establishment and institutionalization.     

Living off the land: Nature and nomadism in Mongolia

The demise of the Soviet Union precipitated profound changes in formerly collectivised rural spaces across Eastern Europe and Central Asia. However, it is only recently that attention to the post-Soviet ‘land question’ has begun to move beyond predominant, practical concerns with land restitution and fragmentation and towards engagement with diverse discourses of rurality, nature and modernity. In particular, longitudinal accounts of the narratives and practices of Soviet modernisation and post-Soviet “development” in specific rural places and societies are lacking. This paper is concerned with the complex linkages between environmental policies, practice and concepts of nature in such spaces and over recent history. Through examination of the management and representation of nature amongst pastoralist communities in Mongolia and in the collective and post-collective eras this paper seeks to understand local-level enactments, reworking and assimilation of externally-derived discursive and policy formulations. In doing so it acts as a corrective to state-centred and homogenising visions of Soviet and post-Soviet rurality. It highlights how local herders’ ‘room for manoeuvre’ in expression and enactment of diverse ideas of nature and its management resides primarily in informal spaces, facilitated by recent trends of devolution in natural resource management. Finally, the paper demonstrates how nomadism has been constructed and reconstructed as a component of, rather than inimical to, modernity, albeit with as yet unproven implications for livelihoods and for nature in rural Mongolia.     

Performative justice: New directions in environmental and social justice

New explorations of justice are arising in the wake of post-structuralist and feminist critiques of abstract, generalized notions of justice in Western liberal democracies. These interventions are opening new avenues of study on discursive practices and performances that contest social and environmental injustices in everyday life. Feminist scholars argue for greater attention to the local and the particular, the embodied, gendered, emotion-based, ethnic subject of justice and injustice. Yet, limited research has been conducted on performative and performance-based relationships to justice, despite its potential to inform matters related the use and conservation of public goods and common spaces in everyday life. This critical review examines the notion of performativity and its application to justice, aiming to clarify and advance understanding and theorizing of a potentially valuable direction in environmental and social justice at the local level. We draw on Hobson’s articulation of performative justice, as it offers some useful insights into how injustices related to the appropriation of public green spaces agendas are being identified and new meanings are being constituted through local-level citizen practices. We argue, however, that such attempts appear to be identifying injustices and demonstrating the ‘what is’ of environmental and social justice, but not ‘what ought to be’. Directions for future research are offered, which include clarifying the application of performative theories to the study and practice of justice at the local level.     

Postcolonial nature conservation in practice: the everyday challenges of on-ground urban nature conservation,Cape Town,South Africa

In a time of biodiversity loss, conservation management literature in Cape Town focuses on biodiversity preservation and top-down management responses. Contributing a more nuanced and politicised understanding of conservation management, this paper examines the challenges of everyday nature conservation and collaboration that occurs nearby Cape Town’s persistently racially-segregated and historically neglected townships. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with on-ground nature conservators and participant observations in collaborative conservation arrangements with local township residents. Examining the literature on Cape Town’s colonial and apartheid conservation histories, I also consider how manifest through the identified everyday challenges are persistent colonial legacies—including deeply racialised relations, exclusionary conservation practices, and a focus on biodiversity conservation to the neglect of community needs. However, on-ground relations and everyday practices also reveal significant contestations to and transformations away from colonising legacies. The analysis contributes towards a discussion of what it means to be a ‘postcolonial’ nature conservator in Cape Town.     

Commodity conservation: The restructuring of community conservation in South Africa and the Philippines

The world over, neoliberal modes of conservation are hybridising with, or even replacing, other forms of conservation. Under the banner of ‘win–win’ policies, planners actively work to commoditize natural resources and the social relations that determine the use and conservation of these resources. While these general processes seem to hold sway globally, it is crucial not to lose sight of the context specific ways in which neo-liberalism influences conservation practice and local outcomes. The paper examines how neo-liberalism’s global pervasiveness becomes manifest across different levels and scales in South Africa and the Philippines. The conclusion suggests that as a result of these neoliberal pressures, emphasis is shifting from local constructions of ‘nature’ by communities to what the environment should mean for communities in terms of commodified resources and growing capitalist markets.     

Virtual nature,violent accumulation: The ‘spectacular failure’ of carbon offsetting at a Ugandan National Park

In East Africa, financially strained governments increasingly experiment with voluntary, market-based carbon offset schemes for enhancing the public management of protected areas. Often, conservationists and governments portray these as ‘triple-win’ solutions for climate change mitigation, biodiversity preservation, and local socioeconomic development. Examining such rhetoric, this paper analyses the rise and decline of an integrated carbon offset and conservation initiative at Mount Elgon National Park in eastern Uganda, involving a partnership between the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) and a Dutch NGO, Face the Future. In doing so, the paper reveals the ways in which the uncompensated dispossession of local residents was a necessary precondition for the project’s implementation. Although external auditors expected the project to sequester 3.73 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO₂e) between 1994 and 2034, conflicts forced the scheme to cease reforestation in 2003. Noting this rapid decline, we problematize the ways in which Face the Future and other carbon market intermediaries represented their activities via project documents and websites, obscuring the violence that was necessary for the project’s implementation. In so doing, we argue that the maintenance of a ‘triple win’ spectacle is itself integral to the management of carbon sequestration projects, as it provides consumers with a form of ‘ethical’ use value, and greatly enhances the capacity of carbon market brokers to accumulate exchange value by attracting ‘green’ investors. Consequently, what we term a ‘spectacular failure’ manifests in at least two ways: first, in the unravelling of the heavily mediatized spectacle of harmonious, profitable conservation, and, second, in the deleterious nature of the consequences that accrue to local communities and ecosystems alike.     

The governance of nature as development and the erasure of the Pygmies of Cameroon

The Pygmies are among the remaining ‘savages’ in West and Central Africa. This paper demonstrates how the governance of nature through sedentarization, the creation of national parks as a mechanism of forestry conservation and the failure to endorse standard environmental safeguards in the creation of the Tchad-Cameroon pipeline project have led to the devastation of the livelihood of the indigenous pygmies. Simultaneously, by categorizing the Pygmies as a ‘primitive other’ despite the very dynamism of the concept of culture, the state of Cameroon has excluded them from the benefits of postmodernist development. I demonstrate that projects aimed at modernizing them, and achieving sustainability have instead accentuated their exclusion because of their presumed cultural isolation, led to their deep entrenchment in poverty and resulted in complete erasure. The failure of these projects is due to the clash between global and local perspectives and interests over the Western protectionism and nature aesthetics that underpin conservation and development schemes, and the government’s failure to ensure that developers fulfill their obligations to affected communities, as well as the non-recognition of the multiplex relationships between hunter-gatherers and farmers that is based on cultural, historical and political ecology. Against this backdrop, development has thus, become a process of erasure in which the livelihood of the Pygmies has been balkanized and their cultural existence and identity, negated.     

Rethinking rewilding: A response to Jørgensen

In this article we respond to and challenge Jørgensen’s criticisms of the concept of rewilding in her paper ‘Rethinking rewilding’, published this year in Geoforum. Jørgensen argues that ‘rewilding’ has become a ‘plastic word’, one that has been stretched to the point where it lacks definitional precision, at risk of becoming ‘the go-to blanket solution to environmental problems’. She also argues that the practice of rewilding is premised upon the dissociation of humans from the rest of nature and reproduces anti-human Nature–Culture binaries, rightly lambasted by critics of wilderness narratives in conservation practice. In response to these criticisms we challenge Jørgensen on two points. Firstly we argue that the problems of ‘plasticity’ and definitional imprecision can be rectified by highlighting and foregrounding the quality that we believe is at the core of all rewilding definitions and efforts: non-human autonomy. Secondly, we challenge Jørgensen’s broad claim that sees the collapse of ‘rewilding’ into anti-human wilderness management. We do so by reflecting on two points; the dynamic human–non-human entanglements embedded within rewilding practice(s) and by arguing for rewilding as a ‘wild experiment’. We make these points through the examination of two actually existing examples of rewilding.     

Zoogeography and imperial defence: Tracing the contours of the Nearctic region in the temperate North Atlantic, 1838–1880s

This paper focuses on the ‘zoogeographic region’ and the ‘zoogeographical boundary-line’ as key biogeographical constructs of empire. More specifically, it investigates how army and navy officers stationed at Halifax and Bermuda on the North America and West Indies Station helped to create an imperial, militarized ‘New World’ region in the North Atlantic through zoogeography in the British post-emancipation era. The tracing of the boundary-line between the temperate (Nearctic) and tropical (Neotropical) North Atlantic involved designating Bermuda and Halifax as strategic winter and summer ‘homes’ on the Station, and highlighting the ‘natural’ connections between the two sites through mobile fauna, ocean currents, and weather systems. Making visible the geographic distribution of migratory animals, the Gulf Stream, and hurricanes – through maps, natural collections, sketches, and travel-writing – provided new ways of seeing and thinking about British imperial defence in the North Atlantic. This paper also considers the role of non-human mobilities in animating these regions.     

Bovine biopolitics and the promise of monsters in the rewilding of Heck cattle

In the early 1980s the Dutch ecologist Frans Vera began an ambitious ecological restoration experiment on a polder in the Netherlands. He introduced herds of ‘back-bred’ Heck cattle and other large herbivores and encouraged them to ‘de-domesticate’ themselves and ‘rewild’ the landscape they inhabit. His intervention has triggered a great deal of interest and controversy. It is being replicated and adapted across Europe as part of a wider interest in ‘rewilding’ in nature conservation. This innovative approach rubs up against powerful and prevalent practices of environmental management. This paper examines these frictions by mapping the character and exploring the interface between different modes of nonhuman biopolitics – in this case the powerful ways in which modern humans live with and govern cattle. Focusing on the story of Heck cattle and the bovine biopolitics of their rewilding it attends in particular to the character, place and promise of monsters. It first outlines a conceptual framework for examining nonhuman biopolitics and teratology (the study of monsters), identifying fertile tensions between the work of Haraway, Derrida and Deleuze. It then provides a typology of four prevalent modes of bovine biopolitics – namely agriculture, conservation, welfare and biosecurity – and their associated monsters. This paper identifies rewilding as a fifth mode and examines frictions at its interfaces with the other four. Developing the conceptual framework the paper examines what these frictions tell us about the understandings of life that circulate in the ontological politics of contemporary environmentalisms. In conclusion the paper critically examines the monstrous promise of rewilding, in relation to tensions between the convivial aspirations of Haraway and Deleuze.     

Genes are not information: Rendering plant genetic resources untradeable through genetic restoration practices

Genetic commodification relies on methods that treat genes as information. By representing genes as information, scientists produce standardized and stable objects that are easily tradable. In this paper, I argue that a Midwestern plant conservation science institution (MPCSI) challenges genetic commodification through distinct knowledge-making and social practices. In particular, scientists at this institution treat genes not as information, but as contextual and contingent entities. By employing genetic technologies that deemphasize the code metaphor of genes, these scientists make genes unavailable to trade as information.I analyze the socionatural implications of this institution’s use of genetic technology in native ecosystem restoration. Drawing from interviews and participant observation, I focus on specific techniques used by the MPCSI’s scientists to view genes as embodied relational entities, rather than abstract information. I illustrate how these technologies allow the MPCSI to challenge the epistemologies and methodologies that are crucial to producing genetic commodities.Additionally, I illustrate how the MPCSI serves as a model for plant science institutions to reconceptualize their use of banked plant genetic resources. This model complicates the commodity speculation paradigm common to bioprospectors. At the same time, this genetic restoration approach relies on and produces different engagements with markets. I detail the MPCSI’s emerging relationship with commercial seed nurseries to illustrate how decommodification is integral to commodification. Finally, I argue that although the MPCSI’s genetic restoration strategy necessitates limited market engagements, their scientific practices and institutional relationships produce drastically different socioecological outcomes compared to institutions that treat genes as information.     

Sharing and neoliberal discourse: The economic function of sharing in the digital on-demand economy

In this paper I offer a critical analysis of ‘sharing’ as a discursive formation in the emerging on-demand economy or, as its more commonly known, ‘sharing’ economy. The set of firms and digital platforms that constitute the on-demand economy evade precise definition, though in popular commentary include Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Taskrabbit, Couchsurfing, and Yelp, among others. I argue that sharing is a discursive formation that is produced through neoliberal economic practices and contributes to their constitution and performance, connoting the embeddedness and inter-determination of the economic with the social. I analyze interview material with software developers and others working for on-demand economy firms in San Francisco to underscore how the sharing discourse is produced, and to examine the possible relationship between the sharing discourse and working practices in the on-demand economy. I explore how sharing, though a fragile and contested discourse, has been used by some proponents of the on-demand economy in an attempt to justify and normalize flexible and precarious work through an ambiguous association between capitalist exchange and altruistic social values. This ambiguity is productive insofar as sharing has become associated variously with transactional platforms, digital peer review via surveillant and punitive ratings systems, and algorithmically mediated, precarious, and ‘entrepreneurial’ contract work, while retaining affective associations with community, inclusion, and participation.     

Tactical ethics: How the discourses of Fairtrade and Black Economic Empowerment change and interact in wine networks from South Africa to the UK

This paper explores the spaces and power relations of ethical foodscapes. Ethics can offer a commodity a valuable unique selling point in a competitive marketplace but managing the changeable and multiple motivations for stakeholder participation throughout the commodity chain in order to utilise this opportunity is a complex negotiation. Through exploring the spaces and relations within three South African–UK ethical wine networks, the discursive tactics used to sustain these are uncovered. The discourses of Fairtrade, Black Economic Empowerment and organics are highly adaptive, interacting with each other in such a way as to always be contextually appealing. This ‘tactical mutability’ is combined with ‘scales of knowing’, which, this paper argues, are essential for network durability. ‘Scales of knowing’ refers to the recognition by stakeholders of the potential for different articulations of a discourse within the network, which combines with ‘tactical mutability’ to allow for a scalar, contextual and ’knowing’ (im)mutability to ensure the discourse’s continued appeal. However, even when one discourse is the ‘lead’ it always folds within it linkages to other ethical discourses at work, suggesting that ethical practice is mutually supportive discursively. This means that at the producer end ethical interactions may offer more capacity to enact genuine transformation than the solo operations of a discourse.     

Threat economies and armed conservation in northeastern Central African Republic

This article, based on ethnographic and archival research in the northeastern parklands of the Central African Republic (CAR), explores the area’s history of armed conservation. Critical scholarly accounts of armed conservation practices and projects often starkly contrast the people involved in them: there are agents of the state, or state-like actors, who seek to dominate, territorialize, and discipline, often using violence to do so, and there are local populations who are dispossessed of their lands and resources without compensation and forced into new kinds of poverty, despite rhetoric and practices meant to inculcate “local participation”. The case presented here forces us to re-think these accounts. Rather than pursuing authority in the sense of expanding control over other people, people in northeastern CAR (whether putatively in favor of or opposed to conservation) are working to create and maintain access to the status of an income. To do so they engage in practices of threatening and hiding. While the means to use physical force are not equally shared, capacities to threaten and hide are widely held, and organizational and other hierarchies are unstable, making it difficult to describe any of this as a matter of domination and resistance. Expanding on literature that examines processes of green militarization (Lunstrum, 2014), the article focuses on the interactional dynamics of armed conservation to show that threats are as important as acts of physical violence, and that hiding—whether in the bush or plain sight—is critical to understanding armed conservation in an area where the state is largely seen as absent.     

Assessing the visual impact of deep coal-mining

Four methods for assessing the impact of underground coal-mining on the visual landscape are discussed. Objective or physical methods are compared with a subjective landscape value approach. Advantages and disadvantages of the various methods are considered, and some conclusions are made regarding their applicability to land use planning and aesthetic control in mining districts. Of the three objective techniques (‘zones of visibility’, ‘proportion of views visible’ and ‘percentage of view occupied’), only the first has been applied in practice. It shows mine operations to be widely visible, providing one looks for them. But in randomly located views (the basis of the second and third techniques) the chance of sighting mine operations is only 8%, and they occupy less than 1% of the average view. However, all mining-related land uses (which includes the mine communities) occupy 7.3% of the average view. A method for gauging ‘landscape devaluation’ is introduced. This relies on landscape quality ratings made at randomly located field viewing positions. A strong non-linear relationship between mining's visual presence and landscape value is demonstrated, suggesting that objective measures of intrusion may serve as surrogate indicators for devaluation.     

Residential relocation under market-oriented redevelopment: the process and outcomes in urban China

Residential displacement by urban regeneration in western economies and forced relocation in the Third World countries are contentious issues. This paper, based on a household survey in Shanghai, examines the process and outcomes of residential relocation under market-oriented urban redevelopment in China. The results show that commodification of the socialist tenancy right helped to initiate large-scale urban redevelopment. First, there has been a complicated process of negotiation during residential relocation, involving residents, development companies, and government agencies. The de facto right of public housing tenants is considered by a pragmatic attitude in urban redevelopment in the early years. Second, residential relocation is accompanied by the changes in housing tenure, housing conditions, and the improved built form of planned residential districts. Nevertheless, the social conflict has become intensified recently because the deepening of commodification began to favour property developers by constraining the compensation standard for relocated households.     

Everyday human (in)securities in protected urban nature – Collaborative conservation at Macassar/Wolfgat dunes nature reserves,Cape Town,South Africa

The diverse residents of the urban global South experience insecurities in everyday, immediate and subjective ways. Lemanski argues these insecurities relate not only to physical concerns like fear, crime, and violence but also to stressors like insecure tenure and financial situations, and threatened and contested lifestyles and cultures as cities rapidly change. This paper considers how diverse ‘everyday human (in)securities’ manifest through urban nature and shape collaborations around nature conservation. The focus is on protected coastal dunes in Cape Town and collaborative conservation participants, including municipal nature conservators and community representatives from the adjacent apartheid-era ‘townships’. The diverse ‘everyday human (in)securities’ perceived and experienced by these participants manifest variously in physical threats to bodies and biodiversity, but also in relation to the insecure tenure and financial situations experienced by residents and conservators alike, alongside differing cultural values of nature. Through attention to diffuse power relations and everyday experiences, divergent perceptions of (in)security are shown to be frictional and sometimes paradoxical in nature. Yet identifying these (in)securities also holds potential for exploring hopeful and productive negotiations around what ‘security’ might mean, and how it might be realised through the collaborations – bringing into dialogue contested spaces of urban nature in cities of the global South and North.     

Neoliberalizing environmental governance? Land trusts, private conservation and nature on the Oak Ridges Moraine

With recent changes in the ways that state agencies are implementing their environmental policies, the line between public and private is becoming increasingly blurred. This includes shifts from state-led implementation of environmental policies to conservation plans that are implemented and managed by multi-sectoral networks of governments, the private sector and environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs). This paper examines land trusts as private conservation initiatives that become part of neoliberal governance arrangements and partnerships that challenge our conceptions of environmental preservation and democratic participation. The paper starts with an examination of the concept of neoliberalized environmental governance. Next, it addresses the shifting social constructions of property and land in the context of protecting large scale ecosystems. Through a case study of the extension of new environmental governance arrangements on the Oak Ridges Moraine in Ontario, we examine the relationships that have formed between different levels of the state and environmental non-governmental organizations. Finally, we analyze the expansion of land trusts and private conservation initiatives that are predicated on private land ownership and the commodification of nature, the emerging discourses and practices of private conservation, and how these are implicated in the privatization and neoliberalization of nature.