Robert Fletcher

Neoliberal Environmentality: Towards a Poststructuralist Political Ecology of the Conservation Debate

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

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 AbC and argue that it should be seen as a denial of the negative environmental impacts of ‘business as usual’ capitalism. We evaluate AbCs 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.

Ecotourism discourse: challenging the stakeholders theory

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 in which ecotourism discourse is perceived and negotiated by local actors. The analysis is illustrated through ethnographic analysis of ecotourism development in a community in southern Chile.

The Emperor’s New Adventure: Public Secrecy and the Paradox of Adventure Tourism:

This study suggests that successful commercial adventure tourism requires the construction of a “public secret”—something commonly known but not articulated—whereby tourists are able to maintain the contradictory perceptions that they are simultaneously safe and at risk. Previous research has observed that adventure tourism appears to embody a paradox in its attempt to deliver a planned, controlled version of an activity usually defined as dangerous and unpredictable. In order to explain how adventure tourism can succeed despite this paradox, researchers suggested that providers emphasize one aspect of the paradox (risk or safety) while concealing the other. By contrast, the author contends that providers attempt to sell both risk and safety simultaneously, a situation sustained by the fact that the inconsistency between these images, while openly displayed, remains veiled by public secrecy. The author illustrates this analysis through ethnographic research undertaken on whitewater rafting trips in California and Chile.

Nature Is a Nice Place to Save but I Wouldn't Want to Live There: Environmental Education and the Ecotourist Gaze.

This article explores the role of ecotourism in the neoliberalisation of environmental education. The practice of ecotourism is informed by a particular ‘ecotourist gaze’ in terms of which the ‘education’ that providers characteristically offer is implicitly framed, embodying a culturally specific perspective in which western society is depicted as alienating and constraining and immersion in ‘wilderness’ is understood as a therapeutic escape from the reputed ills of industrial civilisation. While in the past, these educational aspects of ecotourism delivery have often contradicted the activity’s promotion as a quintessential neoliberal conservation mechanism, increasingly this education has become neoliberalised as well in its growing emphasis on the environment’s role as an instrumental provider of ‘ecosystem services’ for human benefit. In conclusion, this analysis calls for transcendence of these limitations in pursuit of a more inclusive environmental education encompassing diverse ethnic and socioeconomic dimensions of the human community.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the market: virtualism, disavowal, and public secrecy in neoliberal environmental conservation

There is often a substantial gap between ‘vision’ and ‘execution’ in neoliberal governance, yet this gap is rarely acknowledged within neoliberal discourse. In the realm of environmental governance this has manifested in increased reliance on neoliberal conservation strategies despite mounting evidence concerning their common failure to perform as intended. This paper seeks to explain this contradictory situation, drawing on Foucaultian as well as Lacanian theorization via Žižek to suggest that neoliberal conservations ‘virtualistic’ vision commonly necessitates antineoliberal regulation, for the deeply flawed understandings of human behavior and social action in which it is grounded frequently compel intervention contrary to free market principles in order to preserve the goals that market mechanisms are intended to achieve. I contend, further, that neglect of the characteristic disjuncture between vision and execution in neoliberal conservation may take the form of ‘fetishistic disavowal’, functioning as a ‘public secret’ (something generally known but not generally articulated) in terms of which explicit identification of the disjuncture, paradoxically, intensifies its obfuscation. This analysis is illustrated through discussion of prominent conservation strategies in Latin America, particularly ecotourism and payment for environmental services, which are commonly described as neoliberal market mechanisms yet in practice operate quite differently.

Barbarian hordes: the overpopulation scapegoat in international development discourse

Despite sustained critique of a neo-Malthusian focus on ‘overpopulation’, the issue continues to resurface regularly within international development discourse, particularly with respect to ‘sustainable’ development in relation to growing environmental security concerns. This suggests that the issue defies purely rational evaluation, operating on a deeper psychodynamic register. In this paper we therefore analyse the population question as a ‘scapegoat’, in the psychoanalytic sense of a fantasmatic construction concealing the gap between the symbolic order of international development and its persistent failure in practice. By conjuring the age-old image of animalistic barbarian hordes breeding inexorably and therefore overflowing their Third World confines to threaten the security – and enjoyment – of wealthier nations, the overpopulation bogeyman helps to displace attention from systemic issues within the political economy of development, namely, the futility of pursuing sustainable development within the context of a neoliberal capitalism that characteristically exacerbates both economic inequality and environmental degradation.

The Art of Forgetting: imperialist amnesia and public secrecy

Abstract This article explores the implications of a phenomenon that, following Renato Rosaldos influential discussion of ‘imperialist nostalgia’, I call ‘imperialist amnesia’: the fetishistic disavowal of the legacy of European colonisation within contemporary postcolonial societies. I describe the manifestation of this amnesia in discourses as diverse as academic scholarship, international development and travel writing. Observing the recurrence of imperialist amnesia in the face of persistent attempts to historicise postcoloniality, I propose that the disavowal of colonialism functions as what Michael Taussig calls a ‘public secret’—something commonly known but not generally acknowledged—helping to efface the grim realities of the colonial enterprise. Public secrecy by its nature defies most attempts at disclosure; hence efforts to publicise colonialisms contemporary influences may paradoxically reinforce their obfuscation by perpetuating the very imperialist amnesia they seek to dispel.

Of Words and Things Reply to Williams

■ This article responds to Williams recent critique within this journal of a Foucault-inspired perspective on resistance, espoused by myself and others, that seeks to collapse the distinction between power and resistance. Drawing on ethnographic research with alternative globalization activists in France, Williams observes that his informants tend to describe their activities as a self-conscious attempt to gain `autonomy from something they explicitly label `power and thus contests my view of resistance as itself a function of power. I suggest, however, that Williams critique argues past my analysis, for it fails to recognize the conceptual and epistemological differences involved in competing definitions of the term `power and ignores the fact that my position was primarily intended to draw attention to the important issue of the origin of resistance, efforts largely neglected by research to date, Williams included.