University for Peace

About: University for Peace is a education organization based out in The Hague, Netherlands. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Context (language use) & Human rights. The organization has 84 authors who have published 123 publications receiving 2095 citations. The organization is also known as: UPEACE.

Neoliberal environmentality: Towards a poststructuralist political ecology of the conservation debate

Abstract: This article proposes a Foucaultian poststructuralist framework for understanding different positions within the contemporary debate concerning appropriate biodiversity conservation policy as embodying distinctive ‘environmentalities’. In a recently-released work, Michel Foucault describes a neoliberal form of his familiar concept ‘governmentality’ quite different from conventional understandings of this oft-cited analytic. Following this, I suggest that neoliberalisation within natural resource policy can be understood as the expression of a ‘neoliberal environmentality’ similarly distinct from recent discussions employing the environmentality concept. In addition, I follow Foucault in describing several other discrete environmentalities embodied in competing approaches to conservation policy. Finally, I ask whether political ecologists’ critiques of mainstream conservation might be viewed as the expression of yet another environmentality foregrounding concerns for social equity and environmental justice and call for more conceptualisation of what this might look like.

Accumulation by Conservation

Abstract: Following the financial crisis and its aftermath, it is clear that the inherent contradictions of capitalist accumulation have become even more intense and plunged the global economy into unprecedented turmoil and urgency. Governments, business leaders and other elite agents are frantically searching for a new, more stable mode of accumulation. Arguably the most promising is what we call ‘Accumulation by Conservation’ (AbC): a mode of accumulation that takes the negative environmental contradictions of contemporary capitalism as its departure for a newfound ‘sustainable’ model of accumulation for the future. Under slogans such as payments for environmental services, the Green Economy, and The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, public, private and non-governmental sectors seek ways to turn the non-material use of nature into capital that can simultaneously ‘save’ the environment and establish long-term modes of capital accumulation. In the paper, we conceptualise and interrogate the grand claim of A...

Ecotourism discourse: challenging the stakeholders theory.

Abstract: Advocacy of ecotourism as a sustainable development strategy emphasising local participation has tended to espouse the so-called ‘stakeholders theory’, treating interventions as wholly material endeavours and assuming that rural community members will be motivated to participate primarily through economic incentives. Observing that ecotourism is both practiced and promoted predominantly (although not exclusively) by white, professional-middle-class members of post-industrial Western societies, this essay suggests that ecotourism can also be viewed as a discursive process, embodying a culturally specific set of beliefs and values largely peculiar to this demographic group that promoters, often unwittingly, seek to propagate through ecotourism development. As a result, local peoples’ response to ecotourism promotion may depend in part on how this particular cultural perspective resonates with their own understandings of the world. Thus, future research and planning should pay greater attention to the ways i...

Using the Master's Tools? Neoliberal Conservation and the Evasion of Inequality

Abstract: The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's HouseAudre Lorde (1983) ABSTRACT Recently, a number of prominent conservationists have declared the last quarter century of global efforts to unite conservation and development through so-called integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) an overwhelming failure, asserting that there are likely to be irreconcilable trade-offs between environmental preservation and enhancing human well-being that future policy will have to take into account. I suggest, however, that such trade-offs may be less an inherent feature of the world than an artefact of the neoliberal governance model upon which the global conservation movement increasingly relies, as embodied in the ICDP approach. In eschewing questions of resource redistribution and instead depending on economic growth to address social inequality, neoliberal conservation strategies often paradoxically force into opposition the very conservation and development interests they ostensibly seek to reconcile. This thesis is illustrated through discussion of Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula, a celebrated biodiversity hotspot where conservation interventions increasingly emphasize neoliberal market mechanisms designed to incentivize preservation by demonstrating the economic value of in situ natural resources.