Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Accumulation by Conservation

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 20; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13563467.2014.923824

1469-9923

Bram Büscher, Robert Fletcher,

Political Economy and Marxism

AbstractFollowing 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 AbC and argue that it should be seen as a denial of the negative environmental impacts of 'business as usual' capitalism. We evaluate AbC's attempt to compel nature to pay for itself and conclude by speculating whether this dynamic signals the impending end of the current global cycle of accumulation altogether.Keywords: accumulationconservationcapitalismnaturegreen economy AcknowledgementsWe sincerely thank the reviewers of the paper for the constructive comments and the participants of a seminar at the Institute of Social Studies, where the ideas in this paper were first presented.Notes on contributorsBram Büscher is Associate Professor of Environment and Sustainable Development at the Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University and holds visiting positions at the Department of Geography, Environmental Management and Energy Studies, University of Johannesburg and Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. He studies and teaches the political economy of conservation, environment, development and energy, with most of his empirical work based in southern Africa. He is the author of Transforming the Frontier. Peace Parks and the Politics of Neoliberal Conservation in Southern Africa (Duke University Press, 2013) and, with Wolfram Dressler and Robert Fletcher, editor of NatureTM Inc: New Frontiers of Environmental Conservation in the Neoliberal Age (University of Arizona Press, 2014).Robert Fletcher is Associate Professor in the Department of Environment and Development at the University for Peace in Costa Rica. He is the author of Romancing the Wild: Cultural Dimensions of Ecotourism (Duke University Press, 2014) and co-editor of NatureTM Inc: Environmental Conservation in the Neoliberal Age (University of Arizona Press, 2014).Notes1. See http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/02/sustainable-capitalism and http://www.generationim.com/media/pdf-wsj-manifesto-sustainable-capitalism-14-12-11.pdf (accessed 8 March 2013).2. This is of course not to say that the differential ways in which broader capitalist processes manifest itself on regional, national and local levels are not important; to the contrary. This, however, is not the main focus or contribution of this paper.3. We employ the term 'environmental conservation' broadly to refer to any type of deliberative activity aimed at having a positive (i.e. non-destructive) impact on nature and natural resources (such as wildlife, ecosystems, water bodies and so forth).4. But see Brockington and Scholfield (Citation2010) and Holmes (Citation2010) for cautionary notes about the power and dominance of these BINGOs.5. http://www.conservation.org/sites/celb/pages/main.aspx (accessed 8 November 2011).6. http://www.nature.org/aboutus/ourpartners/index.htm (accessed 8 November 2011).7. We here define capitalism broadly as a political economic system geared towards stimulating the logic of capital. This logic of capital, in turn and crucially, is a process (not a thing) of putting forth money or resources in order to acquire more money or resources (Arrighi Citation2009: 8, Harvey Citation2010). This means that 'accumulation' is not accidental to capitalism; it is, according to Marx's famous quote, 'Moses and the prophets!' Exactly how accumulation must proceed and be organised, however, has transformed dynamically over time and is subject to heated debates.8. http://news.mongabay.com/2013/0226-swf2013-horowitz.html (accessed 20 March 2013).9. TNC's 'corporate partners' include Boeing, BP, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Dow Chemicals, Caterpillar, Dupont, Monsanto, Rio Tinto, Shell and Wal-Mart (http://www.nature.org/about-us/working-with-companies/companies-we-work-with/index.htm). CI's corporate partners include Agropalma, ArcelorMittal, BHP Billiton, Cargill, Northrop Grumman, Chevron, Exxon Mobile, McDonald's, Vale, Cerrejon Coal and – interestingly – some of the same companies also on TNC's list, including Coca-Cola, Shell, BP and Wal-Mart. Finally, WWF's partners include Alpro Soya, HSBC, IKEA, Johnson and Johnson, IBM, Sony, Panasonic, Nike, Nokia and – again – Coca Cola. See http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/how_we_work/businesses/corporate_support/business_partners/ (accessed 20 March 2013).10. See http://www.conservation.org/fmg/pages/videoplayer.aspx?videoid=98. See also Rob Walton's discussions with CI CEO Peter Seligmann: http://news.walmart.com/executive-viewpoints/how-we-came-to-embrace-sustainability (accessed 20 March 2013).11. Graeber (Citation2011) presents a compelling deconstruction of this same representation.12. http://bankofnaturalcapital.com/category/natural-capital/ (accessed 8 November 2011). The TEEB initiative is paradigmatic of the AbC approach in a variety of respects, beautifully summarised by MacDonald and Corson (Citation2012).13. Obviously, the 'usual' and necessary caveats apply in these types of periodisation: that they are generalised ideal types that never correspond to empirical reality directly, but rather serve to indicate broader, more structural trends. Moreover, these periods are indications only: in empirical reality, the characteristics and mechanisms of the different regimes and conservation approaches are interspersed and overlapping.14. Brockington et al. (Citation2008), importantly, point out that prior to these, areas that resemble today's protected areas had been created in various forms in many parts of the world.15. This is, for instance, the express motivation of the so-called flexible mechanisms (Clean Development Mechanism, Joint Implementation, etc.) introduced via the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. As Bumpus and Liverman (Citation2008: 132) describe: The Kyoto Protocol recognized that emission reductions in the industrial world would probably be more expensive than reductions in the developing world and that if developed countries were forced to meet their emission-reduction targets alone, they would face economic impacts because of the high marginal costs of reductions in domestic emissions.The emerging REDD+ mechanism promises to intensify this strategy by creating a new global framework for the transfer of emissions reductions to rural areas of less-developed societies where opportunity costs are lower than inn industrialised regions.16. See http://www.raptorsviewwildlifeestate.co.za/aboutus.aspx (accessed 12 February 2014).17. See http://www.padddtracker.org/ (accessed 15 March 2013).