Neoliberalization of nature and its effects on environmental conservation

The idea of exploring the effects of neoliberalization in environment governance has been strongly in vogue since the early 2000s. Landmark studies by Castree (2008), McCarthy and Prudham (2004) and Heynen et al. (2007) made critical advances on these issues by exploring a number of then-recently enacted policies designed to regulated incipient carbon markets and wetland banking, devise market-based urban water

distribution systems, promote environmental services and re-design institutions for regulating fisheries (see Bakker, 2007; Robertson, 2004; St.

Martin, 2007; Rocheleau, 2007). As a result, an entirely new area of social analysis opened up, orienting itself towards exploring how neoliberal ideas and policies were provoking changes in the relationship between society and nature. Environmental conservation is perhaps the policy field which has gained the most attention through this literature.

While it is well known that the history of conservation and modern protected areas has always been closely related to that of capitalist accumulation and colonialism (see Brockington et al., 2008), the rise in dominance of neoliberalism has provoked a substantive increase in capitalist impingement on conservation projects (Büscher and Fletcher, 2014). In turn, a literature on neoliberal conservation has been rapidly developed defining some common features of these initiatives, as well as the manner in which these provoke the exacerbation of material inequalities at the expense of livelihoods, values and ideas developed by the local communities that make use of these resources.

Overall there are two strands of neoliberal conservation literature.

One more inclined to Marxist analysis, whereby scholars, mostly drawing on Harvey’s (2005, itself based on previous findings by Duménil and Lévy, 2005) account of neoliberalism, contemplate these forms of market-based conservation as mostly centered on privatizing and commoditizing natural resources in order to commercialize them in new capitalist markets for the benefit of a class project of capital accumulation. Critical to this understanding is the notion of accumulation by dispossession, by which new expanded cycles of capital accumulation under neoliberalism require the constant transformation of otherwise collective forms of property owned by marginal communities to be separated from access to their natural resources in an effort to plunge them into market structures.

The other strand is much more in tune with Michel Foucault’s analysis of governmentality. Fletcher (2010) argues that neoliberalism must not be understood necessarily as a class project, but as a particular form of governance whereby individuals and groups are actively disciplined through the establishment of the necessary incentive structures that promote a desired form of action. In the case of neoliberalism, attention is not necessarily set on deregulation for the free operation of market structures, but as re-regulation and enhanced interventionism oriented towards creating the structures that allow individuals to function in markets, favoring objectives conducive to economic growth. Indeed, the rationality behind this form of governmentality is not centered in creating Smithian self-interested and utility-maximizing actors operating freely in the context of unfettered exchange, but disciplined individuals that use rationality to foster economic growth that is perceived as productive by society. This thesis is much more inclined to the second strand of neoliberal conservation, given that conservation here is perceived to be functioning not solely as part of

a wider strategy of capital accumulation but as a means of disciplining the Bribri and the Cabécar through behavioural incentives for making them more docile to modern conservation.

Whichever the strand of analysis, there are at least three common elements shared in most analysis of neoliberal conservation: 1) a prevalence of win-win discourses justifying market-based conservation projects, 2) an active effort towards commoditizing natural resources as the key perceived means of guaranteeing the conservation of natural resources and 3) the use of territory as a key tool for the re-regulation of market-society-nature relationships (see Igoe and Brockington, 2007). The first key element of neoliberal conservation is the notion that market-based conservation programs are always presented as mutually favorable and beneficial solutions to complicated socioeconomic and political problems. Indeed, a common feature of most studies is the recognition of a discourse claiming the capacity of these forms of conservation to reconcile contradicting agendas such as the promotion of economic growth alongside with environmental conservation or guaranteeing the livelihoods of the locals (Büscher, 2012; 2010). In so doing, these scholars argue, neoliberal conservation renders complicated power balances that provoke conflicts invisible, such as the notion that capitalist economic growth is the most likely the reason why the world is facing and environmental crisis requiring conservation projects. Sometimes, this win-win discourse implies the incorrect idea that solutions to complicated problems about production and environmental degradation only require technical solutions or managerial responses in order to be fixed.

Second, commodification is understood as the process of assigning exchange value to things in order to be bought and sold in markets (Castree, 2003). Of paramount importance for this literature is the fact that commodities produced by neoliberal conservation bear considerable differences with the more common commodities of our everyday life.

Indeed, attention is frequently set on the fictitious nature of the commodities being produced in the context of these measures. The concept of fictitious commodity originates in the writings of Karl Polanyi (2001), and is generally taken to refer to things which are not actively being produced with the final implication of selling them. For example, while people may physically trade in an ounce of coffee, one cannot do the same with an hectare of land, as in this latter case, one is not exchanging the actual land, but the legal right to it. Of course, to engage in this type of trading there must be a complex legal and economic infrastructure in place that includes procedures for territorializing, measuring, and titling these commodities. This is much more complicated when looking at environmental services: first, the specific ecological function must be carefully defined and delineated in order to be conceptually separated from the rest of the ecosystem that gives it meaning, afterwards, a number of methodologies need to be devised in order to allocate the ecological function with a measurable unit that

permits commercial exchange, finally, state institutions are required to locate potential providers of these services with counterparts, thereby giving the whole process the appearance of a market (Kosoy and Corbera, 2010). It is an extremely complicated procedure, which often becomes even more problematic as, by nature, ecosystems are often resilient to conceptual compartmentalization, in such easily delimited units. Of course, implicit to this market-based re-conceptualization of nature and its complexity there is also an active effort to ignore other forms of valuation of nature that may be central to the representations of the stakeholders of conservation projects. Imposition of these forms of commodification may result in the modification of patterns of behavior of local populations leading them to prioritize individual gain at the expense of more community-oriented benefits (Vatn, 2010).

The third element of neoliberal conservation is the idea that processes of neoliberal re-regulation through conservation depend of territorialization. Due to the importance of this element in the argument of this dissertation, I have decided to treat it independently and at some length in this section. Territorialization is a process by which states enhance their capacity to rule over people through the division, and arrangement of discretely-bounded geographical units that allow the control of social uses of natural resources (Vandergeest and Peluso, 1996).

Environmental policies, such as the creation of protected areas, offer states the chance to delimit highly-valued resources, define rules for using and accessing said resources, identify proxies for safeguarding these and, in so doing, control people in a more optimized fashion. Considering the close relationship between territorialization and state formation as well as the ongoing tendencies of market-based conservation to promote forms of devolved and decentralized governance strongly featuring civil society organizations, NGOs and IFOs, Igoe and Brockington (2007) argue that in the context of neoliberalism, territorialization becomes an entirely new form of state formation driven not necessarily by the state, but by non-state actors with the objective of privatizing access to natural resources for their own benefit. Whereas territorialization is seen by the Marxist strand as part of a process of systematic enclosure favoring the commodification of natural resources at the expense of local livelihoods, for the Foucauldian or post-structuralist strand, territorialization is about the active disciplining of subjects by states through the production of spatialized power relations (Peluso and Lund, 2011).

Political ecology has been drawn to the idea of state formation given its importance for describing the way conflicts over access to natural resources derived from conservation are hinged upon wider processes of political domination in society (Bailey and Bryant, 1997). One of the most important reflections from political ecology in this sense may well be Vandergeest and Peluso’s (1996) landmark article on state territorialization in Thailand. In this article, the authors study the case of long-standing efforts by the government to take control of the inhabited

forests in the periphery of this country. For them, state formation depends on the capacity of the state to create new territories, through environmental policies, to make them function as complex and overlapping units that allow people and resources to be (re-)arranged, thereby permitting a more effective administration of space and people.

This argument hinges upon the adaptation of Sack’s (1986)¹ concept of territoriality², which the authors use to narrow down the main indicators of territorial activities of the state with regards to natural resource management, and more particularly, their efforts to foster or regulate logging and forest conservation. Of key importance to Vandergeest and Peluso (1996) is the need of looking at the way in which state agencies impose new forms of conceptualizing geographic space as a means of exercising control over resources and, by extension, control the way in which indigenous people behave. “Abstract space” is a hypothetical form of space used by state planners for modeling spatial activity often times by eliminating extraneous variables deemed irrelevant for analysis (Lefebvre, 1991). This abstract dimension is linear, allowing for the formation of clear-cut boundaries in geographical space, which are used to create discrete and mappable units which can themselves facilitate the centralized management of lands for a distance.³ Quite simply, it is a form of territorial calculation that has been determined historically by the state in an effort to naturalize and reify state-induced territoriality as the only legitimate form of socio spatial organization. This means that it is used in the establishment of protected areas as discretely bounded units where behavior is disciplined through criminalization and surveillance (Peluso, 1993).