Nature Inc.: Environmental Conservation in the Neoliberal Age

6. Capitalizing Conservation/Development: Dissimulation, Misrecognition, and the Erasure of Power

127 chapter six Capitalizing Conservation/ Development Dissimulation, Misrecognition, and the Erasure of Power Peter R. Wilshusen Capital is not a thing but a process in which money is perpetually sent in search of more money. —david harvey, The Enigma of Capital Capital is not a simple relation, but a process, in whose various movements it is always capital. . . . However, as representative of the general form of wealth—money—capital is the endless and limitless drive to go beyond its limiting barrier. —karl marx, Grundrisse Over the past twenty years, global conservation efforts have unfolded within the context of two macrotrends: attempts to frame and promote sustainable development and the rise of neoliberalism. More recent initiatives have explicitly joined these two domains of theory and action via global-scale programs aimed at constructing a “green economy.” Two high-profile international conferences staged during 2012—the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD, or Rio+20) and the World Conservation Congress—illustrate how neoliberal capitalism has merged with conservation/development in practice. The Rio+20 meetings, for example, highlighted “green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication” as one of two overarching themes within a broad 128 • Peter R. Wilshusen statement issued by UN member states entitled “The Future We Want” (UNCSD 2012). Similarly, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) identified “greening the world economy” as one of five key themes for its World Conservation Congress (IUCN 2012). The extent to which the ideas and practices associated with neoliberalism have transformed conservation/development at all scales of activity has garnered considerable interest from critical scholars concerned with the tendency of capitalism to produce “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2003, 2005).1 Some of the most overt expressions of neoliberal capitalist expansion center on rural spaces in which private-sector interests move to control natural resources such as land, water, forests, minerals, and oil in order to develop new markets (e.g., Borras et al. 2011; Bridge 2008; Bakker 2007a; Sawyer 2004). Dispossession occurs, in part, when less powerful groups on the receiving end of capitalist expansion—such as small farmers and indigenous peoples—lose access to and control over the means of production. Equally important, however, are the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which neoliberalism has “colonized” conservation/development theory and practice over the past decade. The embrace of market-based approaches by a broad spectrum of conservation/development entities worldwide suggests that the assumptions and strategies associated with the green economy have coalesced into a largely unquestioned conventional wisdom. Thus, this chapter critically examines discursive manifestations of Nature™ Inc., pointing to the ways in which processes of neoliberalization within conservation/ development arenas contribute to novel forms of governmentality (Foucault 2008; Fletcher 2010). My approach is to construct a conceptual interrogation of the term “capital” in order to explore how the logic of neoliberalism becomes enmeshed with and transforms the logic of conservation/ development. When viewed in toto, neoliberal conservation/development constitutes a performative arena within which markets are but one element alongside other social-structural factors that shape both targeted outcomes and power dynamics.2 Neoliberal conservation/development manifests itself across scales of analysis within global-level environmental governance institutions such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (MacDonald and Corson 2012; MacDonald 2010a; Duffy 2006; Goldman 2005) and applied market-based instruments such as payment for ecosystem services and carbon offsets (McAfee 1999, 2012a; McAfee and Shapiro 2010; Bumpus and Liverman 2008) and within the context of specific programs related to protected areas (Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008), ecotourism (Duffy Capitalizing Conservation/Development • 129 2002), and community-based conservation/development (Fletcher 2012a; Li 2007; West 2006), among others. Amid the growing literature that critiques neoliberal conservation/ development, little attention has been directed at the ways in which the logic of capitalism has inscribed itself upon shifting theories and practices over time. In what follows, I examine the ways in which the term “capital” has been discursively extended and transformed as a means of articulating concepts and organizing practices related to sustainable livelihoods and institutional design/environmental governance. I position these two frameworks within the context of early discussions regarding sustainable development during the 1990s to uncover a progression of ideas that unfolded in conjunction with the rise of neoliberalism, thus facilitating the emergence of concepts and practices associated with the green economy. For more than two decades, a range of actors focused on...