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Accumulation by Conservation

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DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2014.923824

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Accumulation by Conservation
a b
Bram Büscher & Robert Fletcher
a
Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University, Kortenaerkade
12, 2518 AX, The Hague, The Netherlands. Email:
b
Department of Environment and Development, University for
Peace, P.O. Box 138-6100, Ciudad Colón, Costa Rica. Email:
Published online: 23 Jul 2014.

To cite this article: Bram Büscher & Robert Fletcher (2014): Accumulation by Conservation, New
Political Economy, DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2014.923824

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 New Political Economy, 2014
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2014.923824

Accumulation by Conservation
BRAM BÜSCHER & ROBERT FLETCHER

Following the financial crisis and its aftermath, it is clear that the inherent contra-
dictions of capitalist accumulation have become even more intense and plunged
the global economy into unprecedented turmoil and urgency. Governments,
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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 Econ-
omics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, public, private and non-governmental
sectors seek ways to turn the non-material use of nature into capital that can sim-
ultaneously ‘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: accumulation, conservation, capitalism, nature, green economy

Over time, capital seeks to capitalize everything and everybody;

that is, everything potentially enters into capitalist cost accounting.
(O’Connor 1994: 8)
Let me emphasize the quality that seems to me to be an essential
feature of the general history of capitalism: its unlimited flexibility,
its capacity for change and adaptation. (Braudel 1992: 433;
emphasis in original)

Bram Büscher, Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University, Kortenaerkade 12, 2518 AX, The
Hague, The Netherlands. Email: buscher@iss.nl
Robert Fletcher, Department of Environment and Development, University for Peace, P.O. Box
138-6100, Ciudad Colón, Costa Rica. Email: rfletcher@upeace.org

# 2014 Taylor & Francis

 Bram Büscher & Robert Fletcher

Introduction
Both mainstream and critical analyses of our contemporary capitalist system agree
that one of its major problems is the way it systematically deteriorates environ-
mental conditions and, therefore, that if capitalism is to find another period or
cycle of stable accumulation it needs to find a way to effectively address these.
On the side of global capital, we can see this occurring in an unprecedented
manner at present. Green is hot. Companies, governments and non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) all over the world are eager to do and be seen as ‘green’.
Recognition of the need for more environmentally sustainable forms of capitalist
accumulation has become incredibly high over the last decade, with Al Gore and
David Blood’s ‘manifesto for sustainable capitalism’ one of the more recent in a
long series of similar calls.1
Yet this recognition entails a great contradiction, namely that capitalism is now
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seen as the grand saviour of its own negative ecological contradictions (Büscher
2012), that is, the disjuncture between an economic system predicated on contin-
ual growth and the reality of finite natural resources (O’Connor 1988, 1994). This
is expressed in numerous ways. Increasing concerns about anthropogenic climate
change are channelled into carbon markets that claim to mitigate greenhouse gas
emissions through offsets (Paterson 2010, Lohmann 2011). Ecotourism markets
promise to redress the social and environmental problems caused by mass travel
(Fletcher and Neves 2012). Species and wetlands banking are promoted to
offset the ecosystem destruction wrought by industrial development (Robertson
2004, 2012, Sullivan 2013). The emerging Reducing Emissions from Deforesta-
tion and Forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative promises to reverse deforestation
by linking forest conservation to carbon markets (Angelsen 2009). Derivatives of
all of the above (and more) extend markets still further (Cooper 2010). And the list
goes on.
This trend – the increasing convergence of neoliberal capitalism and environ-
mental conservation – has become subject to a growing critique over the last
decade under the rubrics ‘neoliberal conservation’ or ‘NatureTM Inc.’ Yet
while this discussion has developed a number of useful lines of analysis, thus
far it has not adequately accounted for the logic of the need for capitalism to
become so focused on capitalising conservation, that is, on incorporating conser-
vation as an integral component of capital accumulation on a global scale (see
Büscher 2014). To address this lacuna, in this paper we bring in broader discus-
sions about the evolution of capitalism as a world-system that has gone through
various cycles and phases of accumulation.2 From this perspective, we contend
that the increasingly acknowledged reality of a certain finiteness to natural
resources means that environmental conservation must become more central to
a renewed stable phase of capitalist accumulation – hence, conservation’s impor-
tance to the capitalist system as a whole. In this sense, the increasing intersection
of capitalism and conservation documented by social science critics might be
understood as a transition to a new ‘phase’ of capitalist accumulation based on
a conservation model – one that takes into account the need for environmental
sustainability. Borrowing from Doane (2012), we employ the term ‘Accumulation
by Conservation’ (AbC) to designate this approach. Doane’s conceptualisation of

2
 Accumulation by Conservation

the term differs from ours, however, and indeed adds an interesting aspect to our
discussion. Doane understands AbC mainly as the ‘enclosure of value’ (rather than
the more direct ‘enclosure of space’) (2012: 166), which happens ‘when environ-
mental organisations from the global North appropriate land that is already well
preserved’ (2012: 20). Hence, she describes AbC as a particular mode of conser-
vation governmentality (see Fletcher 2010), while we refer to broader systemic
dynamics in global capitalism as a system of accumulation and the role of environ-
mental conservation within this.
By mobilising this concept, the paper aims to interrogate whether or not this
qualitative change in the relationship between capitalism and conservation
indeed signals a transition to a new ‘phase’ of (relatively) stable capital accumu-
lation. But we take the argument further to interrogate how this ‘phase’ has (or
can) come about, and what it entails in terms of ‘structural adjustment’ in the
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capitalist economy. After further introducing the conservation sector and its
newfound position within global capitalism, the third section outlines several
key contributions from world-systems and related literatures to understand
what defines phases and qualitative changes in global capital accumulation
and how environmental constraints are discussed in terms of these. In the
sections ‘Natural capital in the green economy’ and ‘Conservation as a mode
of accumulation’, we incorporate the literature on neoliberal conservation and
situate the logic of increasing capitalisation of conservation within the
broader historical development of the capitalist world-system – and particularly
the specific phase we currently find ourselves in (neoliberal capitalism after the
financial crisis). In the process, we endeavour to synthesise the two discussions
by offering a periodisation of major regimes and changes in the dominant forms
of global conservation concomitant with structural transformations within the
capitalist world economy as a whole. Finally, we evaluate the attempt at the
heart of AbC to compel nature to pay for itself within the framework of this
phase and conclude by asking whether this attempt might signal the looming
end of (this current cycle of) accumulation altogether.

Capitalism and conservation

The global conservation community has come to occupy a special place in
relation to international capital. Many non-profit NGOs pursuing environmental
conservation3 have found themselves, rather suddenly, in the middle of the
urgent need to green capitalism and argue that they are well positioned to
help dirty companies become fit for the ‘green economy’ (Robinson 2012).
This goes especially for the so-called BINGOs, the ‘Big Conservation
NGOs’, particularly World Wildlife Fund (WWF), The Nature Conservancy
(TNC) and Conservation International (CI), which are often believed to
attract and spend over half of all conservation funding worldwide (Chapin
2004: 22).4 Thus CI states that it

has actively engaged with corporations for more than 20 years for
the purpose of improving environmental practices and conserving
nature. We challenge and collaborate with companies to improve
3
 Bram Büscher & Robert Fletcher

their business practices and invest in conservation initiatives. CI

created the Center for Environmental Leadership in Business to
engage with corporations to minimize environmental impacts and
to harness private sector ingenuity on behalf of healthy ecosystems
and human well-being. CI engages with corporations from key
industries to help ensure that effective safeguards for biodiversity
and ecosystem services are incorporated fully into business oper-
ations and supply chains. By engaging in mutually beneficial part-
nerships with influential corporations, together we have the
opportunity to transform global markets and industry standards
toward the realization of CI’s mission.5

Similarly, TNC asserts:

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For decades The Nature Conservancy has recognized that the

private sector has an important role to play in advancing our
conservation mission. In that spirit, we are working with
companies large and small around the world to help change
business practices and policies, raise awareness of conservation
issues, and raise funds to support important new science and
conservation projects.6

Such positive self-assessments, however, are regarded with increasing scepticism.

Brockington et al. (2008) take issue with what they call ‘mainstream conservation-
ists’’ common self-presentation as heroic defenders of pristine nature against the
onslaught of an extractive industrial economy by contending that the ostensive
opposition between industry and conservation is less apparent than this narrative
suggests. On the contrary, they maintain, conservation should be seen as one strat-
egy by which capitalism seeks to monetise natural resources, preserving them as
‘natural capital’ for so-called non-consumptive use rather than extracting
resources for industrial processing. Other scholars have similarly framed conser-
vation as a companion to, or part of, global capitalist development rather than a
reaction against capitalism (see, e.g. Castree 2010, Igoe et al. 2010, Brockington
and Duffy 2010a, Arsel and Büscher 2012, Büscher et al. 2012, Roth and Dressler
2012, Fairhead et al. 2012a, Corson et al. 2013, Büscher et al. 2014). At the same
time, this literature argues that this process does not actually resolve capitalism’s
problematic environmental contradictions – namely that its negative environ-
mental record far outweighs its positive one – but rather is both part of and in
fact intensified by it as well as obscuring the deleterious environmental and
social impacts of capitalist progression (Garland 2008, Kelly 2011, Büscher
2012, Fletcher 2012, MacDonald and Corson 2012).
As noted earlier, however, while this literature demonstrates that there seems to
have been a qualitative shift in the relation between conservation and capitalism,
especially under neoliberalism, it does not explain why this happens or what it sig-
nifies in terms of the overall accumulation process. Paterson (2010: 363 –4), when
talking about the need for capitalism to enter into an ‘ecological regime of

4
 Accumulation by Conservation

accumulation’, hints at this in his discussion of the tensions related to the market-
based climate change regime, but does not focus on conservation.
This focus is crucial, we believe, for it allows us to go beyond the ‘quintessen-
tial’ environmental issue of climate change and look at the overarching political
economy of what Fairhead et al. (2012b: 237) have called ‘green grabbing’:
‘the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends’. Corson and
MacDonald (2012: 264) explain how green grabbing signifies ‘emergent conser-
vation enclosures’ that

entail not only physical land grabs but also the privatization of
rights to nature, the creation of new commodities and markets
from nature, the green sanction for otherwise declining forms of
capital accumulation and the disabling of institutions that could
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pose threats to expanded accumulation.

Both articles – as do the others in the special issues of which they are part (Fair-
head et al. 2012a, Corson et al. 2013) – show how conservation is increasingly
central to accumulation processes in contemporary capitalism.7 Yet they do not
give an account of how conservation is becoming an integral component of
capital accumulation on a global scale either.
The most important source for understanding the broader evolution of ‘capital-
ism on a world scale’ and the role of different ‘modes of accumulation’ within this
is the world-systems literature (Wallerstein, 1974, Braudel, 1992, Arrighi, 2009),
which will primarily inform our discussions here, combined with important
related contributions from geography (Harvey 1989, 2005, 2010, Smith 2008)
and the critical social sciences more generally (Mandel 1978, Lash and Urry
1987, Jameson 1991, Nealon 2008). Our aim is not to provide comprehensive
reviews of these complex literatures, nor to fully do them justice. Our more
modest aim is to use several of their core contributions, particularly those concern-
ing phases and transitions in regimes of accumulation and core – periphery
relationships within the world-system, to inform the ongoing discussions on the
links between capitalism and conservation to develop a broader analysis of the
importance of conservation to capitalism on a world scale.
Conservation has scarcely been on the radar of these literatures, although environ-
mental issues more generally certainly have been (see Smith 1994, Hopkins and
Wallerstein 1996, Goldfrank et al. 1999, Wallerstein 2004: 82, Hornborg et al.
2007). Over time the importance of ‘natural resource management’ as an essential
element of the accumulation process has been acknowledged, and more recent inter-
ventions have built on this to develop further insights (Li 2008: 140, Arrighi 2009:
383, Moore 2010). One of the most important of these for our paper is the relation
between capitalism’s poor ecological record and the world-system currently experi-
encing a ‘signal crisis’ portending the potential transition from one accumulation
cycle to another (see especially Arrighi 2009, Moore 2010, 2011). We draw on
this work to frame the central insight from the literature addressing the relationship
between capitalism and conservation reviewed above: that the capitalist system has
become increasingly preoccupied with environmental sustainability.

5
 Bram Büscher & Robert Fletcher

Transitions to and phases of capitalism

Among world-system analysts, Arrighi (2009), most explicitly, argues that every
new hegemonic power aiming to provide the stable basis for another round of
long-term capital accumulation must take into account the major contradictions
of the former era. Whether the current transition will work depends, according
to Arrighi, on

the still unverified capacity of the agencies of the East Asian econ-
omic expansion to ‘open up a new path of development for them-
selves and for the world that departs radically from the one that is
now at a dead-end’. This would require a fundamental departure
from the socially and ecologically unsustainable path of Western
development in which the costs for the reproduction of humans
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and nature have been largely ‘externalized’. (2009: 383)

Li (2008: 140) examines this argument in relation to China and asserts that

capitalism in its existing form is clearly unsustainable. The advo-

cates of the existing social system and the mainstream environ-
mental movement, however, argue that the ecological
unsustainability is not the inevitable outcome of the basic laws
of motion of capitalism. Instead, they believe that capitalism can
be reformed and ‘ecological efficiency’ can be enhanced so that
ecological sustainability can be accomplished without abandoning
the pursuit of profit and capital accumulation.

Li (2008: 140) argues that this is ‘completely wishful thinking’ and that China will
not be able to incorporate the negative environmental contradictions of capitalism
into a new mode of capitalist accumulation (see also Gulick 2011). He stresses,
however, that capitalism is in a phase where environmental conservation
becomes crucially important, signalling a qualitative change in capitalism on a
world scale.
In the same tradition, but introducing more nuance regarding the political
ecology of world-systems, Jason Moore’s ‘concern is with neoliberalism as a
phase of world capitalist history, and therefore a specific moment in the modern
world-system’s patterns of evolution and recurrence’ (2010: 390). Describing capit-
alism as not merely a ‘“world-economy” but as world-ecology, joining together the
accumulation of capital and the production of nature in dialectical unity’ (2010:
396, emphasis in original), Moore argues that ‘we can best discern the nature of
the present global crisis – including speculations on eco-catastrophe that have
gained traction on the left . . . by clarifying how we understand nature–society
relations in the history of capitalism’ (2010: 395, emphasis in original). He asks:

is today’s crisis developmental, and therefore open to resolution

through new forms of productivity and plunder, as occurred after
1830 in the British-led world-system? Or is it an epochal crisis

6
 Accumulation by Conservation

that cannot be resolved within the logic of endless accumulation,

and whose outcome is by definition unknowable? (2010: 395,
emphasis in original)

His answer is the latter, again signifying the idea that we have reached, as he
phrases it, ‘the end of a road’ in the sense that contemporary capitalism is in
the midst of a qualitative sea change (see also Moore 2011). Many other world-
system thinkers came to similar conclusions earlier (see especially various chap-
ters in Goldfrank et al. 1999).
Despite their attention to the environmental limits of accumulation, however,
these analyses do not focus on conservation and what the ‘environment’ means
in a potential phase beyond extraction and energy cycles (cf. Li 2008). Or
phrased differently, by stating that we have come to the ‘end of the road’,
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world-system analysts have lost sight of the abundant empirical dynamics that
show that the possibility of a relatively new phase of ‘AbC’ is something that is
taken quite seriously in elite capitalist circles. In the word of Jeffrey Horowitz,
founder of Avoided Deforestation Partners – ‘an international network dedicated
to advancing U.S. and international climate and energy policies along with
business solutions that include robust incentives to protect tropical forests’ – a
‘corporate conservation revolution’ is taking place:

In recent years, a group of visionary corporate leaders have been

quietly teaming up with a growing number of environmental
groups to take a hard look at what’s left of our planet’s natural
resources. Together, they agree: we are past the point where our
land and oceans can meet the food, energy and commodity
demands of our planet’s seven billion inhabitants. More sobering
still, they estimate that by 2050, at our current rates of consump-
tion, it will require three planet earths to meet the needs of our
expected population of nine billion people. The take-away
message for businesses that rely on finite resources such as water
and forests is that ‘sustainability’ is no longer a matter of choice,
but a matter of economic survival.8

To get a taste of who these ‘visionary corporate leaders’ are, one can visit the web-
sites of the three largest BINGOs: CI, TNC and WWF. Together, the corporate
partners of these organisations provide a who’s who of the most environmentally
destructive companies in the world, now all committed to international environ-
mental conservation.9 Two leaders of these companies, Rob Walton of Wal-
Mart, the retail corporation, and Wes Bush of Northrop Grumman, a security
and military defence technology company, proudly proclaim on the CI website
that ‘there is a direct connection between international conservation and
America’s economic and national security interests’.10 Hence, these – and
other – corporate elites are taking conservation seriously; so seriously, indeed,
that MacDonald (2010a: 531), Igoe et al. (2010: 490) and Holmes (2010: 626)
refer to conservation as part and parcel of the ‘transnational capitalist class’
central to Sklair’s (2001) ‘sustainable development historic bloc’.
7
 Bram Büscher & Robert Fletcher

An even more illustrative example of this dynamic is provided by the World

Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), a coalition of many
of the world’s largest – and most environmentally controversial – corporations
(e.g. Shell, Rio Tinto, Duke Energy and others), which formed in the wake of
the 1992 Rio Summit and has become increasingly integral to conservation
work in the years since (MacDonald 2010a). This is signalled, most centrally,
by the WBCSD’s growing alliance with the International Union for the Conserva-
tion of Nature (IUCN), an umbrella organisation bringing together many of the
world’s most prominent conservation organisations and environmental state
departments. With every World Conservation Congress (WCC) hosted by the
IUCN, the WBCSD’s role has become increasingly central. While the 2004 con-
gress in Bangkok, for instance, was characterised by heated debate concerning the
legitimacy of IUCN’s newfound partnership with Shell Oil, by the 2008 congress
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in Barcelona this debate had been marginalised, the one motion to end the partner-
ship defeated, and the WBCSD’s presence showcased in numerous sessions (Mac-
Donald 2010b). By the 2012 WCC in Jeju Island there was no public resistance at
all: the WBCSD occupied the most visible pavilion in the conference entrance
hall; its President participated in the World Leaders Forum and the organisation’s
many events were openly endorsed by the IUCN Secretariat (Fletcher, in press). In
this growing IUCN – WBCSD alliance, then, the most influential conservationists
and the most powerful corporations in the world have become, essentially, one and
the same. In its ‘Vision 2050’ report, the WBCSD presents a paradigmatic AbC
perspective, viewing environmental constraints as both a profound challenge to
and opportunity for capitalist enterprise, stating that in the bold new future envi-
sioned in the report:

There will be a new agenda for business leaders. Political and

business constituencies will shift from thinking of climate
change and resource constraints as environmental problems to
economic ones related to the sharing of opportunity and costs. A
model of growth and progress will be sought that is based on a
balanced use of renewable resources and recycling those that are
not. This will spur a green race, with countries and business
working together as well as competing to get ahead. Business
leaders will benefit from this change by thinking about local and
global challenges as more than just costs and things to be
worried about, and instead using them as an impetus for invest-
ments that open up the search for solutions and the realization of
opportunities. (WBCSD 2010: ii)

Of course, this is not to say that AbC will overcome the ecological contradictions
of contemporary capitalism. Yet, this should not deter us from asking what this
envisaged or hoped for phase of accumulation might look like. It is by addressing
this question that we have a more solid base on which to explore what the world-
systems analysts allude to, namely that capitalism will likely be unable to success-
fully incorporate its negative environmental contradictions.

8
 Accumulation by Conservation

Natural capital in the green economy

The first step in building this more solid base entails problematising the crucial
concept that undergirds AbC: ‘natural capital’. Here, it is instructive to refer to
UNEP’s (2011) influential ‘Green Economy’ report, which describes a basic com-
monality among many of the major problems facing humanity – it names
‘climate, biodiversity, fuel, food, water, and [finance]’ but it is clear that the list
could easily be expanded – namely that solving these problems necessitates think-
ing in terms of ‘capital’:

The causes of these crises vary, but at a fundamental level they all
share a common feature: the gross misallocation of capital. During
the last two decades, much capital was poured into property, fossil
fuels and structured financial assets with embedded derivatives.
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However, relatively little in comparison was invested in renewable

energy, energy efficiency, public transportation, sustainable agri-
culture, ecosystem and biodiversity protection, and land and
water conservation. (14, emphasis added)

Specifically, this perspective argues that what is necessary is better (which the
report basically defines as ‘more’) investment which could be channelled away
from areas that have essentially distorted the idealised neoliberal logic of the mar-
ketplace – ‘property, fossil fuels and [derivatives]’ – towards the real need of the
world, i.e. solving global environmental problems. In other words, in the bold new
‘green economy’, capital will be ‘allocated’ properly, meaning that it conserves
the resources underlying the capitalist mode of production, rather than destroying
them. In terms of world-system analysis, the point becomes to correct the ‘under-
production’ of basic inputs and raw materials through the production of natural
capital (Moore 2010: 393).
In the process of making the transition to a natural capital phase of AbC,
however, some important assumptions are made, and to clarify these we refer to
the old ‘capitalist transition’ debates that raged from the 1950s to 1970s, which
sought to explain the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Following Meiksins
Wood (2002), we should ask whether there is a ‘commercialisation model or
assumption’ in the idea of the transition to natural capital and AbC. Meiksins
Wood posits that the origin of capitalism is habitually explained as ‘there really
being no origin’ at all: ‘capitalism seems always to be there, somewhere; and it
only needs to be released from its chains’ (2002: 4). She argues that

capitalism is conceived as a more or less natural outcome of age-

old and virtually universal human practices, the activities of
exchange, which have taken place not only in towns since times
immemorial but also in agricultural societies. In some versions
of this commercialization model, these practices are even treated
as the expression of a natural human inclination to ‘truck, barter
and exchange’. (2002: 28)11

9
 Bram Büscher & Robert Fletcher

As Meiksins Wood explains, this was, in classical political economy, the meaning
of ‘primitive accumulation’ – ‘“primitive” only in the sense that it represents the
accumulation of the mass of wealth required before “commercial society” can
reach maturity’ (2002: 30–1). This, she asserts, was changed by Marx, who con-
ceptualised capital as a social relation instead of simply ‘wealth’ or ‘profit’; hence,
‘his emphasis on the transformation of social property relations as the real “primi-
tive accumulation”’ (2002: 31, emphasis in original).
One of our main questions, then, is whether the shift to AbC is also seen by its
advocates as a ‘natural’ extension of the logic of capital accumulation ever further
into nature, and whether, consequently, it is assumed that nature harbours ‘innate’
capabilities, assets or qualities that have always already made it fit for capital
accumulation. The pervasive term ‘natural capital’ seems to suggest so, but we
need to be careful here. Many conservationists, especially, do not see nature as an
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inherent part of the global economy, but rather opportunistically or ‘pragmatically’

tie nature into discourses and practices of capital accumulation and economic growth
to raise the profile and importance of environmental conservation and its practical
application in ‘reality’ (see, e.g. Sandbrook et al. 2010, 2013, Robinson 2012).
Yet, at the same time, there is hardly ever any (critical!) mention within main-
stream conservation discourse of the profound changes in social relations that
must be accomplished if AbC is to become a reality. As with the commercialisation
model of the origin of capitalism more generally, ‘there seems to be no conception
of capitalism as a specific social form, with a distinctive social structure and distinc-
tive social relations of production, which compel economic agents to behave in
specific ways and generate specific laws of motion’ (Meiksins Wood 2002: 31,
see also Büscher et al. 2012). Instead, the metaphor of capital as ‘wealth’ is
simply extended to the natural domain as ‘natural capital’. In the words of the para-
digmatic TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) study: ‘we all
understand the concept of financial capital. We pay for things we find valuable.
Natural capital is the extension of that concept to environmental goods and ser-
vices’.12 The idea of capital, and thus of the social relations upon which capitalism
is based, is deemed ‘natural’ and is in very real ways ‘naturalised’. But if ‘what
transformed wealth into capital was a transformation of social property relations’,
as Meiksins Wood asserts, then what turns ‘natural wealth’ into ‘natural capital’ is
likewise a transformation of social property relations.
In other words, crucial in mainstream neoliberal conservation efforts is that
while trying to take negative environmental contradictions into account, social
property relations are actively transformed and denied. In fact, they are often
deliberately obfuscated in order to move the discussion away from the inherent
contradictions of capitalism to the system’s apparent capability to overcome con-
tradictions thought technical, institutional and organisational innovation (Bellamy
Foster and Clark 2012). Interestingly, and notwithstanding their acknowledgment
of the fundamental unsustainability of capitalist production, many world-system
analysts discussed above effect their own obfuscation of the social property
relations of green capitalism by assuming a nature simply waiting to be extracted
for its commercial value. They do not entertain the possibility of social property
relations being amended under capitalism to enable the conservation of nature for
its commercial value. AbC, we believe, helps to redress this issue by highlighting
10
 Accumulation by Conservation

the process by which the biophysical environment is conceptualised and capita-

lised as ‘natural capital’ in the interest of accumulation. In the next section, we
elaborate on this process.

Conservation as a mode of accumulation

In addition to its inspiration in Doane (2012), our notion of AbC obviously has
parallels with Harvey’s (2005) influential analysis of neoliberal capitalism as a
strategy of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Fairhead et al. (2012b: 243– 6)
have subsequently shown how processes of ‘green grabbing’ neatly relate to the
four processes connected to accumulation by dispossession: privatisation, finan-
cialisation, the management and manipulation of crises, and state redistributions.
Harvey and Fairhead et al.’s agendas, however, are different from ours, namely, to
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explain how capitalism proceeds only through exacting extensive social (and
environmental) costs. AbC, by contrast, is seen as potentially a new ‘phase of
capitalism’ as a whole, imbued with a productive form of power that shapes
new joint environmental and accumulation possibilities.
As noted earlier, while conservationists characteristically portray themselves as
locked in a fierce battle to defend natural spaces against the forces of industrial
destruction, Brockington et al. (2008) contend that conservation and capitalism
have always been conjoined, with conservation merely one way to try to
harness ‘natural capital’ for economic gain. As Büscher et al. (2012) point out,
however, conservation stands somewhat distinct from other efforts to commodify
natural capital, for while the latter usually involves resources’ extraction and
transformation into mobile commodities, the former seeks to lock resources in
place and thus commodify them in situ through ostensibly non-consumptive use.
Yet these analyses – and indeed the growing neoliberal conservation literature
more broadly – have so far not attempted to describe the larger historical process
by which this commodification has unfolded and the ways it has transformed over
time. Phrased differently, an overall assessment situating conservation within
capitalism-as-a-whole has not yet been offered (cf. Büscher 2014). Inspired by
the aforementioned literatures, we attempt to do so here by providing a periodisa-
tion of capitalism and concomitant periods and transformations of the dominant
global conservation strategy.13 Table 1 outlines this periodisation and forms the
basis of what follows in this section.
As the table indicates, our analysis divides the history of conservation into three
periods, roughly corresponding to commonly accepted periodisations of trans-
formation among regimes of capitalist accumulation offered by researchers
including Lash and Urry (1987), Arrighi (2009), Harvey (1989) and Mandel
(1978). We combine all of these into the typology presented here. In this
reading, the current global expansion of conservation begins in the latter nine-
teenth century with the creation of the original National Parks in the USA: Yel-
lowstone in 1864 and Yosemite in 1972.14 These parks were paradigmatic
examples of ‘fortress conservation’, protected areas maintained through state-
centred command-and-control measures (the so-called fences-and-fines strategy)
and funded primarily via direct appropriations by states and/or private donors
(Brockington 2002, Igoe 2004). In its emphasis on top-down control of rigidly
11
 12
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T ABLE 1. Accumulation by conservation

Bram Büscher & Robert Fletcher

Dominant Conservation
Period Regime of accumulation Key characteristics ideology approach Key mechanisms

1860s– Colonial/Fordist/ Vertical integration; statism Liberalism/ Fortress Protected areas; state funding and
1960s organised capitalism and violence Keynesianism conservation wildlife tourism

1970– Post-Fordism/ Flexible accumulation and Roll-back Flexible CBC; ICDPs; biosphere reserves;
2000 disorganised decentralisation neoliberalism conservation ecotourism and bioprospecting
capitalism
1990s Roll-out TFCAs and PES
neoliberalism
2000– Financialisation/casino Spectacular accumulation, Fictitious Carbon markets; species/wetlands
present capitalism networks and crisis conservation banking; financial derivatives and
REDD
Sources: Mandel (1978), Lash and Urry (1987), Harvey (1989), Arrighi (2009), Nealon (2008) and Büscher (2014).
 Accumulation by Conservation

defined boundaries and a blueprint cookie-cutter approach to protected area cre-

ation, this model, subsequently exported to Africa and elsewhere through coloni-
alism and postcolonial development (Igoe 2004), can be seen as an expression of
the dominant form of capitalism that also developed in the nineteenth century, the
so-called Fordist approach similarly advocating vertical integration, centralised
control and ‘investments in fixed capital’ (Arrighi 2009: 2). Harvey (1989)
indeed defines Fordism by the central characteristic of ‘rigidity’. This rigidity,
however, makes fortress conservation, like Fordist production, quite expensive
in terms of fixed capital investments and labour-intensive ‘production’ (Borgerh-
off Mulder and Coppolillo 2005), placing substantial ‘friction’ in the path of finan-
cial efficiency.
Beginning in the 1970s, the Fordist regime of accumulation increasingly gave
way to post-Fordism (Harvey 1989, Arrighi 2009). As opposed to its predecessor,
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post-Fordism is characterised by decentralisation, production in diverse forms and

an ‘explosion in new financial instruments and markets’ (Harvey 1989: 168), and
is thus characterised by Harvey (1989) as a regime of ‘flexible accumulation’
(Lash and Urry [1987] describe an analogous transformation from ‘organised’
to ‘disorganised’ capitalism). Similarly, beginning around that same time the for-
tress model was progressively displaced by what could be called a strategy of
‘flexible conservation’, pursued through diverse means including community-
based conservation (CBC), biosphere reserves, biological corridors, integrated
conservation and development projects (ICDPs) and, increasingly, transfrontier
conservation areas (TFCAs) (see Borgerhoff Mulder and Coppolillo 2005,
Büscher 2010). Like post-Fordism in its pursuit of production via all manner of
facilities, from cavernous factories to backroom sweatshops, flexible conservation
is achieved through diverse mechanisms, including ecotourism, bioprospecting,
payment for environmental services (PES), promotion of sustainable agriculture
and forestry, and so on. Just as post-Fordist production commonly involves out-
sourcing to less-developed areas where costs are lessened, so flexible conservation
has entailed the widespread exportation of conservation to less-developed
societies where the opportunity costs of alternative land use are likewise
reduced to a minimum.15 This move has been conditioned, as with post-
Fordist industry, by innovations in transportation (and communications)
technology reducing transportation/transaction costs and thus facilitating the glo-
balisation of both industry and the protected area ‘estate’ (Doane 2012). In this
way conservation, like production, can be pursued where it is cheapest (Sodikoff
2009) and less susceptible to political resistance (Corson 2010). More on this
below.
The shift to post-Fordist production/conservation, of course, coincided with the
diffusion and evolution of neoliberalism. As Peck and Tickell (2002) describe, the
history of neoliberalism can be roughly divided into two phases: the ‘roll-back’
neoliberalism of the 1970s and 1980s, in which pre-existing welfare state struc-
tures were progressively dismantled in order to unleash the ‘free market’; and
‘roll-out’ neoliberalism, expressed in the Washington Consensus of the 1990s,
in which new governance structures modelled on the market are increasingly
championed for implementation in all spheres of society, from prisons to
schools (see also Overbeek and Van Apeldoorn 2012). This transition from roll-
13
 Bram Büscher & Robert Fletcher

back to roll-out neoliberalism can be seen in the evolution of flexible conservation

as well. As Büscher (2010) describes, the CBC approach ascendant in the 1980s
typifies a roll-back approach in its ostensive devolution of governance to local
community members, while the increasing popularity of TFCAs from the 1990s
onwards can be seen as a roll-out strategy in their creation of new governance
structures in the neoliberal mode for managing relations among the multiple
states involved in such initiatives. Similarly, while ecotourism, which became
popular in the 1980s, can be viewed as a roll-back mechanism in that it relies
on a somewhat spontaneous market that arose around the commodification of
the aesthetic qualities of conservation areas, PES, which gained prominence in
the 1990s, is a paradigmatic roll-out process in its construction of a market that
never existed prior for exchange in the emerging idea of ecological services (Sul-
livan 2009, Fletcher and Breitling 2012).
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In the last decade or so, within the context of this roll-out neoliberal pro-
gramme, the dominant regime of accumulation seems to be shifting yet again,
away from production of commodities and towards increasing emphasis on finan-
cialisation and speculation – what Harvey (1989) calls ‘casino capitalism’ (see
also Nealon 2008, Arrighi 2009). Arrighi (2009: 6) understands this shift as part
of a historical pattern, describing it as an ‘alternation of epochs of material expan-
sion (MC phases of capital accumulation) with phases of financial rebirth and
expansion (CM’ phases). Together, the two epochs or phases constitute a full sys-
temic cycle of accumulation (MCM’)’. Moore (2010) goes further to assert that
financialisation entails an attempt to dispense with the conversion of money
into commodities altogether and pursue a direct M–M′ transaction (see also
Büscher 2014). According to both Arrighi (2009) and Harvey (1989), this strategy
is pursued when expanded commodity production no longer possesses the
capacity to absorb accumulated capital at a scale sufficient to maintain current
rates of profit and the emphasis thus shifts from spatial to temporal fixes,
seeking to reduce the turnover time of invested capital in order to both displace
overproduction into the future and to increase returns in the present.
In conservation, this shift is signalled by growing interest in a variety of innova-
tive financial instruments including carbon markets, species and wetlands banking,
environmental derivatives and suchlike (see Sullivan 2013). The first concrete step
in this stage can be identified with the development of the global carbon market from
the late 1990s onwards as a result of the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC)’s Kyoto Protocol (Bumpus and Liverman 2008,
Lohmann 2011, Böhm et al. 2012). The shift was facilitated by the newfound con-
ceptualisation of nature as an ‘environmental services provider’ (Sullivan 2009),
promoting the idea that people removed from a particular resource still benefit
from it and should, therefore, finance its conservation remotely. As Büscher
(2014) describes, such instruments represent the increasing abstraction of conserva-
tion efforts from attachment to any particular place, allowing value to be generated
remotely and circulate freely around the globe. Indeed, recent years have witnessed
the rise of environmental stock exchanges (e.g. the European Union Emissions
Trading Scheme, and the Chicago and London Carbon Exchanges) and ‘environ-
mental services marketplaces’ (e.g. www.speciesbanking.com) to facilitate this
process (Sullivan 2013). In this modality, different conservation investments are
14
 Accumulation by Conservation

consolidated and packaged by emerging environmental trading firms into aggregate

portfolios. Just as Harvey (1989) describes the value created by credit and stock
markets as ‘fictitious capital’, Büscher (2014) terms the financialisation of offset-
oriented natural capital ‘fictitious conservation’. In this process of financialisation,
familiar distinctions among production, consumption, exchange and circulation all
but disappear (Büscher 2014).
This financialisation is necessary, Büscher (2014) maintains, in order to free
capital from the limitations of investment in fixed resources. Fortress-style pro-
tected areas, as noted above, require substantial investment in fixed capital, as
does agriculture, forestry, bioprospecting, cultivation of non-timber forest pro-
ducts and other forms of ostensibly sustainable resource use. Even ecotourism,
requiring the movement of consumers to tourism destination, fixes value to par-
ticular locations. PES, on the other hand, begins the process of value abstraction,
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allowing buyers in one place to connect remotely with services in another

(McAfee 2012). Yet here the value is still fixed to the particular resources osten-
sibly providing these services. With the creation of carbon markets and other new
financial mechanisms, however, this limitation is (seemingly) eliminated: value is
detached from place entirely and capable of exchange throughout the world. PES,
therefore, can be seen as something of a transition strategy, initiating the shift from
value-creation-in-place to the ‘free’ circulation of abstract value globally. The
very term also functions as a marketing strategy in order to keep this complex
shift understandable and explainable to the broader public. All this greatly facili-
tates the process of capital accumulation by decreasing the friction of transaction
costs while offering an augmented fix by both accelerating geographic expansion
and reducing turnover time for recovery of capital. In addition, it responds to
evident problems with previous efforts to successfully commodify in situ
resources via ecotourism, forestry, bioprospecting and so forth (Fletcher 2012,
McAfee 2012) by abandoning the arduous and increasingly difficult process of
converting resources into actual commodities that must be purchased and con-
sumed for capital to be recovered and instead pursuing a direct M –M′ conversion.
Carbon markets provide an illustrative example of this process (see Bumpus
and Liverman 2008, Lohmann 2011). Once a particular patch of forest, for
instance, has been certified capable of providing a given quantity of carbon
credits, these credits are then detached from direct connection with this forest
and can be purchased by anyone anywhere for purposes of emissions offset and
mitigation. Credits can then be further traded, held as collateral for other invest-
ments, packaged with other environmental ‘products’, become the subject of
environmental derivatives and so forth. Over time, as a result, their value
becomes increasingly abstracted from the value of the forest parcel from which
they originally derived. The emerging REDD+ mechanism developed during
recent UNFCCC negotiations (see Angelsen 2009) is particularly significant in
this process, as it represents an attempt to unite the two principal contemporary
conservation concerns – biodiversity and climate change – under a common
banner as the latter increasingly displaces the former as the main focus of
global environmental attention (While et al. 2010).
This dynamic also illustrates the importance of the structural relationship
between different elements of the world-system in explaining the distribution of
15
 Bram Büscher & Robert Fletcher

conservation programmes and projects globally. As Bumpus and Liverman (2008:

132) describe, carbon markets originated in the logic 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.

In other words, financial resources from the ‘core’ are invested in conserving
natural resources in the ‘periphery’ based on the economic logic of maximum
profit-seeking, maintaining lucrative development opportunities domestically by
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displacing environmental impacts of these activities to less-developed areas

where they can be offset most cheaply. A similar logic has pervaded the conserva-
tion movement from the outset, whereby protected areas were commonly created
in less-developed, postcolonial societies where local resistance was more easily
quelled and where governments could be pressured into heavy-handed enforce-
ment through linkage to development funding (Igoe 2004). This also took advan-
tage of the wage differential between developed and developing societies,
exploiting what Sodikoff (2009) calls ‘low-wage conservationists’ and thereby
reducing the per-unit cost of protected area management to a minimum. While
protected area management in the US costs on the order of $2500/km2, for
instance, in Tanzania and Kenya as little as $182 and $94, respectively, is invested
in managing the same area (James et al. 1999).
In short, AbC entails (or more strongly, depends fundamentally upon) taking
advantage of structural inequality within the world-system (McAfee 2012). In this
way, conservation and development have been able to be spatially segregated to a
substantial degree throughout the globe, reducing the friction of either on the
other. In addition to reducing the economic costs of conservation, this helps to mini-
mise the political costs by displacing activities that would impact domestic econ-
omic growth – and thus politicians’ popularity among their constituencies – to
distant lands where they are out of sight and mind and therefore more palatable
(Corson 2010) – a sort of global not in my backyard perspective. As a result, as
Brockington et al. (2008) emphasise, while negative ecological contradictions are
intrinsic to the capitalist system as a whole they play out, and are experienced differ-
ently by people living within, different areas. Hence, the authors insist on the impor-
tance of assessing not only the net costs and benefits of conservation activities but
how these differentially impact various stakeholders involved in these activities.
As Nealon (2008) points out in terms of the capitalist economy in general, the
history of transformation in conservation strategy outlined above should be
viewed less as a process of replacement of one mode of conservation by
another than as an intensification, an effort to increasingly commodify conserva-
tion over time as a new strategy is superimposed over and fuses with others in
diverse hybrid forms (see Dressler and Roth 2010, Roth and Dressler 2012). As
a second caveat, this process of commodification does not necessarily mean that
conservation areas have always everywhere been established for the express
16
 Accumulation by Conservation

purpose of capitalisation. Rather, particularly with respect to many of the original

fortress reserves, the main impetus for preservation was often an aesthetic and/or
ethic grounded in the characteristically Western desire to overcome a perceived
nature– culture divide and experience a sense of the sublime ascribed to a depopu-
lated wilderness (Nash 1973, Cronon 1996). Yet as O’Connor (1994: 8) observes
in the passage quoted in the epigram, ‘Over time, capital seeks to capitalize every-
thing and everybody’, inspiring progressive experiments to generate revenue from
conservation both to finance protected areas and to extract profit from their use.
When the limits of a particular strategy of accumulation have been reached the
search begins for new forms able to transcend the restrictions of the previous
regime. In this sense, conservation can be understood as a form of ongoing ‘primi-
tive accumulation’ or ‘accumulation by dispossession’, as several researchers
have pointed out (Kelly 2011, Corson and MacDonald 2012, Neves and Igoe
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2012).
This dynamic is undergoing still further intensification at present with the rise,
briefly noted above, of discourses concerning the so-called Green Economy in
relation to the recent Rio+20 conference (see Brockington 2012) and the TEEB
initiative promoted there (where the private sector unveiled its ‘Natural Capital
Declaration’), the IUCN’s WCC later that year (Fletcher, in press), and related
fora (MacDonald and Corson 2012). Indeed, the discourse of ‘fictitious conserva-
tion’ is increasingly pervasive, suggesting the apotheosis of ‘natural capital’ from
marginal externality to central preoccupation of the capitalist system. What all of
this means in terms of the overarching cycles of accumulation of which it is part
and parcel will occupy us next.

Neoliberal conservation and its prospects

Conservation and the aesthetics of a pleasing landscape and ‘natural’ setting
become critical in ensuring prime locations for capitalist activity in AbC. This
follows Jameson’s (1991: 5) assertion that

aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity

production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing
fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to
airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increas-
ingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic inno-
vation and experimentation.

Jameson adds that ‘such economic necessities then find recognition in the varied
kinds of institutional support available for the newer art, from foundations and
grants, to museums and other forms of patronage’. Conservation is one of these
forms of aesthetic production, namely of the ‘natural’ landscape, aiming to
make the wider environment, and its ‘ecosystematic embedding’, conducive to
the ‘frantic economic urgency’ of contemporary capitalism.
This works in several ways. First, conservation provides spaces for rest and
recovery from this urgency (i.e. to mediate the Polanyian destruction of society
and accommodate the countermovement, ecotourism being the quintessential
17
 Bram Büscher & Robert Fletcher

expression of this dynamic; Fletcher and Neves 2012). To give but one example,
according to the late Anton Rupert, one of South Africa’s wealthiest capitalists in
his days, and a staunch supporter of conservation in Africa:

Embedded deep in the psyche of man is the oldest symbol of all, the
Garden of Eden. This is a place of peace and reflection free from
divisive barriers and physical constraints. Affluent Western man
needs for the health of his soul to take time off from the frenetic
treadmill of his existence to return to the Garden for refreshment
and contemplation, and the growth of tourism to wilderness areas
endorses this. (PPF 2000: 2)

Interestingly, the booming trend of capitalist, fortified ‘wildlife estates’ in South

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Africa also plays into exactly this feeling, providing elites with a space ‘to
escape the rat race and get away into nature for a while’.16
Second, it facilitates the infusion of a deeper capitalistic logic within nature, the
capitalisation of nature ‘all the way down’ (Smith 2007). This, interestingly, links
in with the commercialisation model described above, in that nature is progress-
ively imbued with capitalist qualities it apparently always possessed. Third, con-
servation helps to overcome the metabolic rift by ostensibly offering an
experience of ‘nature –culture unity’ to counter the sense of alienation produced
by capitalist social and labour relations (Fletcher and Neves 2012).
All of this leads to strange contradictions. For example, capitalists are incred-
ibly eager to stimulate ‘out of the box thinking’, which is what they claim is
needed to tackle the ‘green challenge’. As hedge fund manager Stanley Fink
states of the effort to commodify carbon forest stocks:

To seize this $18 trillion business opportunity, valuing the services of

our rainforest will not only require innovation in market-based mech-
anisms but also unprecedented global cooperation between the
brightest minds of the nations of our world. Many structures and
mechanisms will need to be created, but it should be our expertise
that defines them, and our appetite for these markets that forces pol-
itical support for them. (Cited in Brockington and Duffy 2010b: 469)

Yet the ‘box’ they talk about is actually a money container that needs continuous
enlarging to capture the accumulation of capital that is and remains the number
one priority. Moderate critics often emphasise the paradox of mainstream
approaches to sustainable development, the futility of championing an economic
model of growth in a world of finite resources, yet the foundation of this growth
model in the basic structure of capitalist accumulation is rarely highlighted
(Büscher et al. 2012). As with any form of accumulation, such contradictions
can be overcome for a time through spatial and/or temporal displacement
(Harvey 1989), but eventually this capacity for expansion will be exhausted and
the contradictions rendered unavoidable. Hence, while in the recent past main-
stream environmentalists pursued continued expansion of the global conservation
‘estate’ grounded in unerring faith that concerns for conservation and
18
 Accumulation by Conservation

development could be reconciled through market mechanisms, of late these trends

have reversed themselves, with conservationists, for example, calling for the con-
solidation and prioritisation of the conservation estate (Fuller et al. 2010) –
acknowledging that this estate is far bigger on paper than in actual practice
(e.g. the WWF’s so-called Protected Area Downsizing, Degrading, and Degazet-
ting (PADDD) study17) – or concluding that 30+ years of experimentation with
integrating conservation and development have shown the effort to be an over-
whelming failure (McShane et al. 2011). Although conservationists do not often
explicitly acknowledge this themselves, what these calls are pointing to, we
contend, is the more fundamental inability of AbC to successfully capitalise on
conserved nature despite decades of determined effort, a failure that is provoking
a profound rethinking of the dominant strategies pursued over the last century and
a retraction in conservation’s erstwhile globalisation.
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After all, the move to financialisation characterising fictitious conservation,

various theorists show, is usually something of a last-ditch effort to recover
profit when concrete commodity markets have exhausted their potential
(Harvey 1989, Braudel 1992, O’Connor 1994, Arrighi 2009, Moore 2010). As
O’Connor describes this strategy:

Money capital abandons the ‘general circuit of capital’ – that is,

the long and tedious process of leasing factory space, buying
machinery and raw materials, renting land, finding the right kind
of labor power, organizing and implementing production, and mar-
keting commodities – and finds its way into speculative ventures of
all kinds. Money capital, based on the expansion of credit, or
money that cannot find outlets in real goods and services, jumps
over society, so to speak, and seeks to expand the easy way – in
the land, in stocks and bond markets, and in other financial
markets. Hence the present economic anomaly: the value of
claims on the surplus or profits grows at the same moment that
the real value of fixed and circulating capital stagnates or declines.
(1994: 8)

Arrighi concurs that

financial expansions are taken to be symptomatic of a situation in

which the investment of money in the expansion of trade and pro-
duction no longer serves the purpose of increasing the cash flow to
the capitalist stratum as effectively as pure financial deals can.
(2009: 8)

O’Connor contends, however, that this strategy ‘is as simple as it is economically

self-destructive’, for it ‘tends to make a bad economic situation worse’ by causing
‘growing indebtedness and the danger of financial implosion’ (1994: 8). Arrighi
goes further, describing the turn to financialisation in the world-system as a
‘signal crisis’ of the end of a given accumulation cycle, ‘a symptom of maturity
of a particular capitalist development’ (2009: 5), or ‘a sign of autumn’, in
19
 Bram Büscher & Robert Fletcher

Braudel’s (1992: 246) phrasing. As Arrighi explains, the move from an MC to a

CM′ phase characterising financialisation indicates that ‘growth along the estab-
lished path has attained or is attaining its limits, and the capitalist world-
economy “shifts” through radical restructurings and reorganizations onto
another path’ (2009: 9).
In these terms, the rise of fictitious conservation can be seen as something of a
last, desperate hope to finally successfully harness the long-promised capacity of
conserved nature to pay for itself and deliver a profit that heretofore it has failed to
exhibit on a significant scale. Until now, global conservation has functioned
mostly as a (global) subsidy system, redistributing resources to support conserva-
tion under the recurring assurance that this is merely a short-term support for the
effort to generate self-sustaining markets, to eventually be withdrawn once such
markets finally materialise (see Fletcher and Breitling 2012). When these global
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markets fail to develop – as they have until now – the system turns to financia-
lisation instead to try to capture the promised potential that conservation has
proven unable to deliver to this point. Signs of the potential signal crisis this
dynamic points to include: growing assertion of inherent conservation/develop-
ment trade-offs as well as calls for conservation estate consolidation and
PADDD, noted above; reduction of funding for conservation due to the economic
crisis conditioned by loss of frontiers for displacement of accumulation crisis and
increased production costs due to resource depletion; impending ecological col-
lapse due to loss of unpolluted space in which to externalise production costs;
an increased rich– poor gap despite attempts to alleviate crisis; recent stagnation
of global and regional carbon markets (Bond 2011, Coelho 2012) and so forth.
Observing all of this, Moore concludes in no uncertain terms that ‘neoliberalism
has reached the limits of developmental possibilities, the financial crises and
inflationary crescendo of 2008 marking the “signal” crisis of the neoliberal order-
ing of relations between humans and the rest of nature’ (2010: 391).

Conclusion
The preceding analysis has important implications for both research concerning
AbC and for understanding the process itself. As noted above, ecological Marxists
like O’Connor (1988, 1994) and Bellamy Foster (2000) have demonstrated that
attempts to incorporate sustainable resource use and conservation have been
central to planning and thinking about capital accumulation since the nineteenth
century, as exemplified by the German forest industry (Scott 1998), the US con-
servation movement, colonial protected area creation and so on. But these ecologi-
cal Marxists, while pointing out capitalism’s so-called second contradiction
between the imperative for continual growth and finite resources, do not really
describe the logic by which environmental conservation functions as an attempt
to resolve both this second contradiction and the first one (the growth imperative
conditioned by the need to displace accumulated capital created by overproduc-
tion crisis) on which the second is predicated (Brockington et al. 2008). This is
something that neoliberal conservation scholars, the present authors included,
have been starting to do. Yet this analysis has been limited to date since it has
not yet sought to situate the process within a global world-system perspective,
20
 Accumulation by Conservation

demonstrating the fundamental logic and trajectory of the process as a strategy of

capital accumulation along the same lines as commodity extraction and industrial
processing. By bringing together diverse literatures addressing capitalism-as-a-
whole, our analysis pursues a novel synthesis, offering a new way of understand-
ing the common process these approaches seek to investigate.
In terms of understanding AbC itself, our analysis suggests that the process
should be seen as the ultimate denial of the negative environmental impacts of
the capitalist mode of production. This point is essential, for by ‘ultimate’ we
mean that what AbC denies at root is that the fundamental unsustainability of capi-
talist production threatens the future not only of the contemporary world-system
but of the basis for the existence of life, both human and non-human, in much
of the globe (Bellamy Foster and Clark 2012). We want to make it clear,
however, that we are not claiming that the failure of AbC would necessarily
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mean the end of the capitalist world-system altogether, replicating an all-to-

common tendency among world-system analysts, extending back to Wallerstein
(1974) himself, to repeatedly predict the imminent end of a ‘late’ capitalism
whose expiration date, in the face of a stubborn resilience, is continually
revised forward. On the contrary, it is just as likely that the system would find
another basis for renewed accumulation that, while further intensifying its eco-
logical contradictions, would be able to stave off the long-anticipated ‘limits to
growth’ imposed by these contradictions for some time to come.
More than denial, even, AbC is an effort to obfuscate the daunting implications
of capitalist production by claiming that capitalism has the ability to effectively
address these problems through the same mechanisms that created them. In this
sense, AbC can be viewed as something of a ‘pre-emptive strike’ precluding
any possible chance for the development of sane, animated nature– society
engagements (Sullivan 2009, 2014). This paper has sought to highlight the
inherent limitations of this approach posed by dynamics intrinsic to the accumu-
lation process. Highlighting this dynamic’s foundation in what we are calling
AbC, we hope to have provided a new perspective on our contemporary situation
and open a door to envisioning new possibilities for thinking and acting beyond it.

Acknowledgements
We 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
1. 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, ecosys-
tems, water bodies and so forth).
4. But see Brockington and Scholfield (2010) and Holmes (2010) for cautionary notes about the power and
dominance of these BINGOs.

21
 Bram Büscher & Robert Fletcher
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 2009: 8, Harvey 2010). This means that
‘accumulation’ is not accidental to capitalism; it is, according to Marx’s famous quote, ‘Moses and the pro-
phets!’ 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, Pana-
sonic, Nike, Nokia and – again – Coca Cola. See http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/how_we_work/
Downloaded by [Erasmus University] at 13:00 23 July 2014

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 discus-
sions with CI CEO Peter Seligmann: http://news.walmart.com/executive-viewpoints/how-we-came-to-
embrace-sustainability (accessed 20 March 2013).
11. Graeber (2011) 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 (2012).
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 struc-
tural trends. Moreover, these periods are indications only: in empirical reality, the characteristics and mech-
anisms of the different regimes and conservation approaches are interspersed and overlapping.
14. Brockington et al. (2008), 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 Mech-
anism, Joint Implementation, etc.) introduced via the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. As Bumpus and Liverman
(2008: 132) describe:

The Kyoto Protocol recognized that emission reductions in the industrial world would prob-
ably 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 econ-
omic 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).

Notes on contributors
Bram 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 Man-
agement 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).

22
 Accumulation by Conservation
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 Univer-
sity Press, 2014) and co-editor of NatureTM Inc: Environmental Conservation in the Neoliberal Age (University of
Arizona Press, 2014).

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