Globalization and the New Geographies of Conservation (review)

This collection of 12 invited research papers, originally presented at a 2002 University of Wisconsin conference, illustrates the range of interests that geographers have pursued regarding globalization and environmental conservation. The editor's intent with this collection is to discern emergent trends and contradictions manifest in the current "Third Wave" of environmental conservation, a general strategy based on sustainable utilization of natural areas, also called "productive conservation," the linking of conservation and economic activity to managed landscapes.

The first two waves (historical regimes) of environmental conservation policy, "fortress conservation", and Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) focused almost exclusively on protected areas and the human populations in and around them. While the estimated number of official conservation areas worldwide increased dramatically, from 1,200 (1975) to 22,000 (late 1990s) (p. 18), criticism has grown of the ineffectiveness of both strategies.

Shifting from an almost exclusive focus on protected areas management, the "Third Wave" of conservation includes a widened range of activities: managing biodiversity within agricultural landscapes; trans-boundary conservation regimes (e.g. biodiversity corridors, peace parks); green certified agricultural and forest products marketing; and community-based resource management. All of these initiatives not only accept human utilization of the natural world, but also give a more prominent role to private and non-profit sectors operating a multiple spatial scales. Conservation apparently has become a complex amalgamation of disparate action strategies. Are there any cross-cutting themes?

To make sense of this mélange of conservation approaches, Zimmerer organizes this collection of diverse research papers into four sections each of which loosely addresses a different theme characterizing the third wave: The first section entitled "Spatialities in Global Conservation and Sustainability Projects" includes papers that address certified agriculture in southern Mexico, remote sensing for certifying green forestry in the Brazilian Amazon, and bee-keeping as productive conservation also in the Brazilian Amazon. The second section, entitled "Linking Scales in Livelihood Analysis and Global Environmental Science" seeks to address how distinct logics of land use and conservation practiced by agents located at different spatial scales (e.g. from local park inhabitants to global NGOs) frequently produce clashing results for both. This section combines chapters that range from agro-diversity on urban house gardens in the Brazian Amazon, agro-biodiversity derived from seed networks across spatial scales in the Andean countries, and a case study of the politics of conservation science in the Sahel. The third section addresses transnational and border issues in global conservation management and brings together case studies on the transnationalization of conservation in the Mekong River basin, transnational protected areas in the tropical Andean lowlands, and Peru's protected area system. The final section concerns the general theme of decentralization, globalization and environmental governance and includes works on the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala, decentralization and land policy in Burkina Faso, and pastoralism and land reclamation in Inner Mongolia. Each section is preceded by an introduction that attempts to identify the key cross-cutting themes. The editor also provides a long introduction and conclusion to the entire collection.

The intellectual aspirations of this compendium are enormous and the editor succeeds in identifying a wide range of complex issues that emerge from recent geographical research on environmental conservation in the "Third Wave." But, as a whole, the volume suffers from three problems. First, it remains unclear that a distinctive and coherent "Third Wave" of conservation has actually emerged. Rather, the papers presented here illustrate a big bang of diverse strategies spinning off from various sources in different directions that are not clearly linked to a new or unified vision of environmental conservation, such as those under-girding the first and second waves. Second, because these papers are almost entirely based on site-specific ethnographic studies (some more than 10 years old), their contributions to our understanding of the role of "networks...