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We live in a new normal of increasing, crosscutting, and shifting patterns of disasters fueled by large-scale environmental change, from floods to wildfires to pandemics. Our intervention in this forum piece makes the case that disasters, and responses to disasters, must be understood within the context of the global political-economic system of capitalism. We situate disasters, their making, and their politics within the Capitalocene and argue that disasters and the physical processes that underpin them are not natural: they are unevenly produced through, and exacerbated by, processes inherent in the capitalist system, with uneven consequences. We suggest that the predominantly technomanagerial approaches to disasters pursued within the neoliberal state and multilateral governance institution system reveal the tensions in addressing the causes of environmental change and the new normal of disasters under capitalism. We argue that through an engagement with the Capitalocene, environmental politics could further contribute to nuanced, critical understandings of disasters and their making in ways that foreground their in/justice implications.

This article takes a political ecology approach to understanding the integration of conservation with security in tackling the illegal wildlife trade. It builds on political ecology debates on militarization by connecting it to the dynamics of global environmental politics, specifically the discursive and material support from donors, governments, and conservation nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The combined effects of a highly competitive funding environment and security concerns of governments has produced a context in which NGOs strategically invoke the idea of the illegal wildlife trade as a security threat. For donors and governments, tackling the illegal wildlife trade is a means through which they can address security threats. However, this has material outcomes for marginalized peoples living with wildlife, including militarization, human rights abuses, enhanced surveillance, and law enforcement.

Illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is commonly identified as one of the drivers of global biodiversity loss and has gained increasing attention from national governments, conservation NGOs, international institutions and the private sector. We argue that analyses of drivers and dynamics of IWT within Europe must evaluate the overlooked interconnections between legal and illegal trades. In this brief commentary, we develop a new conceptual lens that brings together cutting-edge theories of political ecology and green criminology. We apply this to the European IWT context, to deconstruct the power dynamics and inequalities that underlie environmental harms caused by green-collar crime. We use the dynamics of illegal trade in brown bears, eels and songbirds as illustrative examples, and consider three cross-cutting issues that shape the trade: consumption, uncertain scientific knowledge and legislative frameworks.

Highlights: • IUWT requires a nuanced response, there is no “one-size-fits-all” strategy. • Tools for curbing IUWT are already available. • There are gaps to be filled especially regarding regulation, enforcement, knowledge and engagement. • Tackling IUWT requires integrated solutions with multidisciplinary approach., Illegal or unsustainable wildlife trade (IUWT) currently presents one of the most high-profile conservation challenges. There is no “one-size-fits-all” strategy, and a variety of disciplines and actors are needed for any counteractive approach to work effectively. Here, we detail common challenges faced when tackling IUWT, and we describe some available tools and technologies to curb and track IUWT (e.g. bans, quotas, protected areas, certification, captive-breeding and propagation, education and awareness). We discuss gaps to be filled in regulation, enforcement, engagement and knowledge about wildlife trade, and propose practical solutions to regulate and curb IUWT, paving the road for immediate action.

This chapter examines the intersections among violence, security, and the environment. It uses a political ecology lens to analyze the violences that arise from “enforcement-first” approaches in tackling the illegal wildlife trade (IWT) as one aspect of conservation. Growing concern about IWT as a threat to biodiversity and security has led to calls for an urgent response. This has encouraged and facilitated the development of responses that are anchored in law enforcement and militarization. This is in part due to the redefining of IWT as a global security threat because it is deemed as a source of funding for armed groups and involves organized crime networks. The intense focus on the need to tackle IWT has led to shifts in conservation policy, such that anti-poaching operations are often accompanied by considerable levels of violence by conservation authorities.

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The recent antiracist movement in the United States and beyond inspired the Sierra Club, one of the oldest and most prestigious global conservation organizations, to distance itself from its founder John Muir’s racist views. In a statement issued in July, 2020, Sierra Club’s Executive Director, Michael Brune, said, “As defenders of Black life pull down Confederate monuments across the country, we must also take this moment to reexamine our past and our substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.”1 However, the legacies and consequences of the racist history of American environmentalism extend far beyond the words and actions of the founding fathers of European and American environmentalism.In this essay, we show that the effects of colonialism and racism are etched in the dominant philosophy, models, and institutional apparatus of global conservation. While some scholars and practitioners have offered significant critiques of the dominant approaches to global conservation, the institutional apparatus that upholds the colonial and racist legacies of conservation continues to hold tight. We show that in recent decades global conservation nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have contributed to further strengthening of this exclusionary and repressive institutional apparatus, especially with the emergence of the phenomenon of “militarized conservation.” Moreover, the arguments about the rights of indigenous peoples and rights-based approaches to conservation are increasingly being appropriated to serve exclusionary protected-area-based approaches to conservation. We suggest that the debates over competing models of conservation demand a newer emphasis on political and institutional reforms, coupled with public accountability of major international conservation NGOs.

Multiple proposals for transforming biodiversity conservation have been put forward, yet critical exploration of how transformative change is conceptualised in this context is lacking. Drawing on transformations to sustainability scholarship, we review recent proposals for transformative change in biodiversity conservation, considering the suggested goals and means of transformation. We outline the crucial role for critical social scientific inquiry in transformative change by highlighting two core contributions. First, critical social science is an analytical device that politicises and pluralises debates and second, it can help facililitate the identification of transformative alternatives. We then show how such a critical social science approach is operationalised within the CONVIVA (Towards Convivial Conservation: Governing Human-Wildlife Interactions in the Anthropocene) project to pursue transformative change in biodiversity conservation.

Concerns about poaching and trafficking have led conservationists to seek urgent responses to tackle the impact on wildlife. One possible solution is the militarisation of conservation, which holds potentially far-reaching consequences. It is important to engage critically with the militarisation of conservation, including identifying and reflecting on the problems it produces for wildlife, for people living with wildlife and for those tasked with implementing militarised strategies. This Perspectives piece is a first step towards synthesising the main themes in emerging critiques of militarised conservation. We identify five major themes: first, the importance of understanding how poaching is defined; second, understanding the ways that local communities experience militarised conservation; third, the experiences of rangers; fourth, how the militarisation of conservation can contribute to violence where conservation operates in the context of armed conflict; and finally how it fits in with and reflects wider political economic dynamics. Ultimately, we suggest that failure to engage more critically with militarisation risks making things worse for the people involved and lead to poor conservation outcomes in the long run.

Transnational environmental crime has become the largest financial driver of social conflict, with severe implications for peace and security. Sustainable-development frameworks need to overtly recognize and mitigate the risks posed by transnational environmental crime to environmental security.

There is increasing focus on altering consumer behavior within the conservation sector working to combat illegal wildlife trade (IWT). In this review we highlight how demand reduction campaigns can build on and reproduce problematic stereotypes that create and perpetuate a figure we characterize as the “Asian Super Consumer.” While there are numerous studies critiquing disturbing and racist narratives of particular actors engaged in the supply-side of IWT, the problematic ways in which racism can steer debates characterizing illegal wildlife product consumers remains generally under-explored. We focus on key examples of ivory demand reduction campaigns in China. We argue for more culturally-sensitive understandings of illegal wildlife product consumers and their motivations. Culturally-nuanced approaches in demand reduction campaigns are essential not just because they may be more effective, but because they move beyond on-going violent histories of cultural misrepresentation and racism.

In this paper I argue that there has been a critical shift towards war by conservation in which conservation, security and counter insurgency (COIN) are becoming more closely integrated. In this new phase concerns about global security constitute important underlying drivers, while biodiversity conservation is of secondary importance. This is a significant break from earlier phases of fortress conservation and war for biodiversity. In order to develop a better understanding of these shifts, this paper analyzes the existing conceptual approaches, notably environmental security which seeks to understand how resources cause or shape conflict, and political ecology approaches that focus on the struggles over access to and control over resources. However, this paper indicates the limitations of these existing debates for understanding recent shifts, which require a fresh approach. I chart the rise of the narrative I call poachers-as-terrorists, which relies on the invocation of the idea that ivory is the white gold of Jihad, a phrase which is closely associated with an Elephant Action League (EAL) report in 2012 which claimed Al Shabaab used ivory to fund its operations. This narrative is being extended and deepened by a powerful alliance of states, conservation NGOs, Private Military Companies and international organizations, such that it is shaping policies, especially in areas of US geo-strategic interest in Sub-Saharan Africa. As a result conservation is becoming a core element of a global security project, with significant implications for conceptual debates and for conservation practice on the ground.

Human security and underdevelopment are increasingly common themes in public debates about the security threat posed by poaching and wildlife trafficking. Most frequently highlighted are the ways i...

Conservation organizations have increasingly raised concerns about escalating rates of illegal hunting and trade in wildlife. Previous studies have concluded that people hunt illegally because they are financially poor or lack alternative livelihood strategies. However, there has been little attempt to develop a richer understanding of the motivations behind contemporary illegal wildlife hunting. As a first step, we reviewed the academic and policy literatures on poaching and illegal wildlife use and considered the meanings of poverty and the relative importance of structure and individual agency. We placed motivations for illegal wildlife hunting within the context of the complex history of how wildlife laws were initially designed and enforced to indicate how hunting practices by specific communities were criminalized. We also considered the nature of poverty and the reasons for economic deprivation in particular communities to indicate how particular understandings of poverty as material deprivation ultimately shape approaches to illegal wildlife hunting. We found there is a need for a much better understanding of what poverty is and what motivates people to hunt illegally.

This paper demonstrates how tourism, including nature based tourism, simultaneously produces and conceals the contradictions of capitalism; this is because it relies on creating attractions, or new sources of accumulation from the very crises it produces. Nature-based tourism is promoted as a ‘win-win’ that can resolve the contradiction between continual economic growth and finite natural resources (Fletcher, 2011; O’Connor, 1988). This is made possible via a process of neoliberalising nature, which cuts the threads that bind ecosystems together, so that the constituent parts can be transformed into new commodities (Büscher et al, 2012; Castree, 2009; Heynen et al, 2007; McCarthy and Prudham, 2004: 275-277; Peck and Theodore, 2007). To draw out these broad arguments, this paper firstly examines the claims around tourism as ‘Green Economy’ – which proponents claim can produce environmentally sustainable economic growth – a benefit also associated with nature-based tourism. I also show that this can be regarded as simply the latest version of an existing debate rather than offering a new intepretation. This is explored further via a comparative analysis of how tourism neoliberalises nature at the scales of the individual animal (elephant trekking in Thailand) and the landscape (by global networks of NGOs operating in Madagascar). In the case of neoliberalisation of nature at the individual animal scale, the notion of bodily fix is also important. It is not just the elephants that are primed for commodity capture, it is the emotional experience of close interactions with elephants which is commodified (Fletcher, 2014: 185; Fletcher and Neves, 2013). Such changes reshape societal relations with nature, but in uneven and incomplete ways. This is underlined by a discussion of the case of the Durban Vision Initiative in Madagascar – which reveals how neoliberalisation was incomplete as a result of its encounter with local level materialities.

The lifting of economic sanctions on Iran in early 2016 raised hopes among conservationists that much available to protect the country's unique and threatened biodiversity. Unfortunately, on 4 November, economic sanctions were reimposed, likely leading to serious repercussions on biodiversity conservation.

This forum places CEE at COP10 in the context of wider theoretical debates about global environmental governance. This special issue enhances our understanding of governance by examining how ideas travel and develop at meetings before they become the official documents and announcements that are the more common foci of such papers. The articles in this issue of GEP open up the ‘black box’ of decision-making and allow us to gain a better understanding of global environmental governance, in theory and in practice. These articles are firmly in line with International Political Economy approaches, allowing us to reflect on how regulations can mirror and deepen existing global inequalities, revealing the continuing power of epistemic communities, and demonstrating the important role of ideas. The special issue allows us insight into how global conventions work, how alliances are formed, how particular ideas emerge, and crucially, how alternatives are rendered silent and invisible. © 2014 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This article examines the rise in militarized approaches towards conservation, as part of a new ‘war for biodiversity’. This is a defining moment in the international politics of conservation and needs further examination. The claims that rhinos and elephants are under threat from highly organized criminal gangs of poachers shapes and determines conservation practice on the ground. Indeed, a central focus of the 2014 London Declaration on the Illegal Wildlife Trade is the strengthening of law enforcement, and recent policy statements by the US government and the Clinton Global Initiative also draw the link between poaching, global security and the need for greater levels of enforcement. Such statements and initiatives contribute substantially to the growing sense of a war for biodiversity. This article offers a critique of that argument, essentially by asking how we define poachers, and if militarized approaches mean conservationists are becoming more willing to engage in coercive, repressive policies that are ultimately counterproductive. Further, this article examines how the new war for biodiversity is justified and promoted by referring to wider debates about intervention in a post-Cold War era; notably that the international community has a responsibility towards wildlife, especially endangered species, and that military forms of intervention may be required to save them.

This paper traces the relationships between neoliberalism, tourism and nature. It argues that the dynamics of global tourism reveal an underlying (neoliberal) world order that draws specific places and animals into the world economy. In order to explore these debates further, this paper uses the recent development of interactive tourist experiences with trained elephants in Botswana, Southern Africa. This paper focuses on how those experiences are produced. In so doing, it tackles how nature is entrained, reconfigured and recreated to produce tourist experiences; it highlights how nature, tourism and neoliberalism are linked and with what effects, especially for the elephants themselves. This is an important but under-researched area in tourism studies.

This paper examines the inter-relationships between neoliberalism, tourism and nature. It argues that scholars of international political economy (IPE) need to engage more fully with the role of nature in driving forward the logics of neoliberalism. Most scholars view nature as a source of accumulation or as an object of governance, but this paper uses the neoliberalisation of nature debate to extend our understandings of neoliberalism. In particular, global tourism has targeted and opened up new frontiers in nature, which serves to expand and deepen neoliberalism to a wider range of biophysical phenomena. This paper uses the case of elephant tourism to demonstrate how tourism is not just reflective of neoliberalism, but is in fact a key driver of it, acting as an environmental fix for capitalism. Further, this paper takes up the challenge of research on ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’ via engagement with locally specific contexts and emerging forms of socio-nature in the Thai tourism industry...

We are grateful to receive Cafaro et al.’s () response to our article (Büscher et al., ). They clarify some of the principal tenets of the Nature Needs Half movement, and there are important issues we agree on. The outlook for biodiversity is bleak and we share a deep concern about this. Non-humans should be able to exist and thrive, and this is something that we also fully affirm. Equally important is the acknowledgement by Cafaro et al. that the neoliberal growth economy needs to be challenged if we are to make headway in addressing the extinction crisis. This position is significant given that it differs from that of the main champion of the Half Earth concept, E.O. Wilson (), who appears to have blind faith in the ability of free market capitalism to correct its social and environmental problems. It also opens up the potential for conservation to support efforts to resist the ravages of neoliberal capitalism— something that has become more urgent in light of the Trump presidency (Büscher & Fletcher, )

We question whether the increasingly popular, radical idea of turning half the Earth into a network of protected areas is either feasible or just. We argue that this Half-Earth plan would have widespread negative consequences for human populations and would not meet its conservation objectives. It offers no agenda for managing biodiversity within a human half of Earth. We call instead for alternative radical action that is both more effective and more equitable, focused directly on the main drivers of biodiversity loss by shifting the global economy from its current foundation in growth while simultaneously redressing inequality.

This paper addresses a gap in our understanding of how links between states and nonstate actors intersect with North–South dynamics. It draws together the literatures on NGOs with the debates on privatised forms of global governance to provide a deeper understanding of the growing role of nonstate actors in managing transnational environmental issues. I argue that the inclusion of nonstate actors can serve to reinforce and deepen existing global inequalities. I use the example of the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to shed light on the complex dynamics that surround (apparently) interstate environmental governance mechanisms. The CITES is one of the earliest examples of engagement with nonstate actors as shapers and drivers of environmental governance. As such, it provides us with important lessons about the problems associated with including a wider range of actors in global environmental governance mechanisms, especially engagement with Southern partners. Keywords: global environmental governance, NGOs, ivory, elephants, the CITES, Africa

This article examines the vertical nature of global networks that encompass civil society organizations (CSOs), Governments, donors and the private sector. It focuses on the power dynamics in environmental governance to cast light on how complex networks are able to define, prescribe and implement particular conservation policies at the national and sub-national levels. This article uses the case of conservation non-government organizations (NGOs) in Madagascar to reveal the ways that CSOs act as a conduit for global interests played out at national and local scales.

This paper examines challenges associated with global regulation of the tourism industry via an analysis of the use of elephants for trekking and safaris in Thailand and Botswana. It highlights inherent problems in applying universal principles in diverse locations; it unpicks the North–South power dynamics involved in drawing up global standards for elephant welfare in tourism. The development and expansion of elephant riding raise important ethical issues around questions of animal welfare, especially definitions of acceptable and appropriate standards for working animals. This paper uses a political economy approach to understandings of global governance to analyse who has the power to govern, at what scale and with what effects. It examines the role of animal welfare NGOs as key epistemic communities shaping the debate on elephant welfare. It discusses the highly variable practices of working with elephants in Botswana and in Thailand. It concludes that attempts at global regulation need to seriously ...

This paper examines the case of elephant-back safaris in Thailand and Botswana; it argues that tourism has extended and deepened neoliberalism by targeting and opening up new frontiers in nature. In essence tourism redesigns and repackages nature for global consumption. Through a cross comparison of the same product (the use of captive/trained elephants) in two very different contexts (Thailand and Botswana) this paper analyses the variations in “actually existing neoliberalisms” (Brenner and Theodore 2002) and demonstrates that the effects are not unremittingly negative (Castree 2008b). It also draws out the ways that neoliberalism is challenged and reshaped by context specific processes and so it does not completely displace existing ways of approaching nature. Instead, existing approaches mix with neoliberalism to create new ways of valuing and conserving elephants.

This article examines the ways in which illicit gem mining in Madagascar indicates the highly variable impacts of globalisation in sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that distinct categories such as global/local, legal/illegal and traditional/modern have lost much of their explanatory power. Far from being distinct categories, they are indivisible and constitute a single, complex whole which produces enormous wealth, coupled with high degrees of poverty and marginalisation in precisely the same locations. It is clear that Africa's participation in globalisation has not been just about ‘joining’ the world economy; instead it has been characterised by highly selective forms of global connection which have been combined with highly visible and very real forms of disconnection.

SummaryConservation is at a critical juncture because of the increase in poaching which threatens key species. Poaching is a major public concern, as indicated by the rises in rhino and elephant poaching, the United for Wildlife Initiative and the London Declaration, signed by 46 countries in February 2014. This is accompanied by an increasing calls for a more forceful response, especially to tackle the involvement of organized crime in wildlife trafficking. However, there is a risk that this will be counter-productive. Further, such calls are based on a series of assumptions which are worthy of greater scrutiny. First, calls for militarization are based on the idea that poverty drives poaching. Yet, poaching and trafficking are changing because of the shifting dynamics of poverty in supply countries, coupled with changing patterns of wealth in consumer markets. Second, the ways increases in poaching are being linked to global security threats, notably from Al Shabaab are poorly evidenced and yet circulate in powerful policy circles. There is a risk that militarization will place more heavily armed rangers in the centre of some of the most complex regional conflicts in the world (such as the Horn of Africa and Central Africa/Sahel region).

This article examines the concept of governance states in relation to environmental politics in Madagascar. Governance states can be regarded as a new development in North–South relations. The concept denotes a move towards the politics of post-conditionality, where states are defined as ‘stakeholders’ and drawn into ‘partnerships’ with global public–private networks. This article uses Madagascar as a case study through which to examine the politics of post-conditionality. In particular, it examines the politics of environmental governance through complex networks of actors, especially international environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the World Bank. It focuses on how such transnational networks deeply affect conservation policy-making within Madagascar in particular, and the developing world more generally. It examines the complex and increasingly close relationships between states in the developing world, global environmental NGOs and the World Bank. It argues that such rela...

This paper examines the politics of ecotourism, through an examination of how it intersects with broader shifts in the global system. In particular, it argues that the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War led to increasing forms of governance through public–private networks of actors that range from states to NGOs to private companies. This article focuses on the development of ecotourism policy in Madagascar as an example of how ecotourism is integrated into global politics through rising forms of what is often called ‘global governance’. It specifically investigates the politics of ecotourism as ideologically informed by neoliberal definitions of development which underpin global governance, and through an analysis of the interplay between different interest groups involved in it. It examines the operation of the Donor Consortium and its relationship to global environmental NGOs, in order to understand why ecotourism is promoted by organisations as diverse as the World Bank and environmental...

This article examines the environmental impact of criminalisation. It argues that developing societies are increasingly drawn into globalised networks that inextricably link the global and local, the legal and illegal. This means that in order to understand the causes of environmental degradation it is no longer useful to focus on the formal institutions and practices of government and business. Instead, this article uses the concept of the shadow state to examine and understand the causes of environmental change in two illustrative cases of Madagascar and Belize.