Rob Fletcher | Wageningen University (original) (raw)

Books by Rob Fletcher

MayFly Books, 2023

Global biodiversity is declining at an alarming rate, leading to calls for urgent change in how h... more Global biodiversity is declining at an alarming rate, leading to calls for urgent change in how humans govern, conserve, and live with non-human species. It is argued that this change must be radical and transformative, and must challenge the structures and systems that shape biodiversity conservation. This book brings together a diverse group of authors to explore the potential for transforming biodiversity conservation, focusing on one particular proposal called convivial conservation: a vision, framework, and set of principles for a more socially just, democratic and inclusive form of biodiversity governance.

Drawing on a rich mix of disciplinary perspectives and diverse case studies centering on human-wildlife interactions, the authors demonstrate the potential for transformation in biodiversity conservation that supports human-wildlife coexistence. The authors argue that this desired transformation will only be possible if the status quo is truly disrupted, and that convivial conservation has the potential to contribute to this disruption. However, convivial conservation must evolve in response to, and in harmony with, a plurality of ideas and perspectives, and resist becoming another top-down mode of conservation. To this end, a rich mix of visions, ideas, and pathways are put forward to move convivial conservation from principles to practice.

The wealth of ideas offered in this collection provides important insights for students, academics, policy-makers, conservation professionals, and anyone who wants to think differently about biodiversity conservation and explore how it can be transformed towards a more just and abundant future.

University of California Press, 2023

Failing Forward documents the global rise of neoliberal conservation as a response to biodiversit... more Failing Forward documents the global rise of neoliberal conservation as a response to biodiversity loss and unpacks how this approach has managed to "fail forward" over time despite its ineffectiveness. At its core, neoliberal conservation promotes market-based instruments intended to reconcile environmental preservation and economic development by harnessing preservation itself as the source of both conservation finance and capital accumulation more generally. Robert Fletcher describes how this project has developed over the past several decades along with the expanding network of organizations and actors that have come together around its promotion. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, he explores why this strategy continues to captivate states, nongovernmental organizations, international financial institutions, and the private sector alike despite its significant deficiencies. Ultimately, Fletcher contends, neoliberal conservation should be understood as a failed attempt to render global capitalism sustainable in the face of its intensifying social and ecological contradictions. Consequently, the only viable alternative capable of simultaneously achieving both environmental sustainability and social equity is a concerted program of "degrowth" grounded in post-capitalist principles.

Verso, 2020

Conservation needs a revolution. This is the only way it can contribute to the drastic transforma... more Conservation needs a revolution. This is the only way it can contribute to the drastic transformations needed to come to a truly sustainable model of development. The good news is that conservation is ready for revolution. Heated debates about the rise of the Anthropocene and the current ‘sixth extinction’ crisis demonstrate an urgent need and desire to move beyond mainstream approaches. Yet the conservation community is deeply divided over where to go from here. Some want to place ‘half earth’ into protected areas. Others want to move away from parks to focus on unexpected and ‘new’ natures. Many believe conservation requires full integration into capitalist production processes.

Building a razor-sharp critique of current conservation proposals and their contradictions, Büscher and Fletcher argue that the Anthropocene challenge demands something bigger, better and bolder. Something truly revolutionary. They propose convivial conservation as the way forward. This approach goes beyond protected areas and faith in markets to incorporate the needs of humans and nonhumans within integrated and just landscapes. Theoretically astute and practically relevant, The Conservation Revolution offers a manifesto for conservation in the twenty-first century—a clarion call that cannot be ignored.

The worldwide development of ecotourism—including adventures such as mountain climbing and whitew... more The worldwide development of ecotourism—including adventures such as mountain climbing and whitewater rafting, as well as more pedestrian pursuits such as birdwatching—has been extensively studied, but until now little attention has been paid to why vacationers choose to take part in what are often physically and emotionally strenuous endeavors. Drawing on ethnographic research and his own experiences working as an ecotour guide throughout the United States and Latin America, Robert Fletcher argues that participation in rigorous outdoor activities resonates with the particular cultural values of the white, upper-middle-class Westerners who are the majority of ecotourists. Navigating 13,000-foot mountain peaks or treacherous river rapids demands deferral of gratification, perseverance through suffering, and a willingness to assume risks in pursuit of continuous progress. In this way, characteristics originally cultivated for professional success have been transferred to the leisure realm at a moment when traditional avenues for achievement in the public sphere seem largely exhausted. At the same time, ecotourism provides a temporary escape from the ostensible ills of modern society by offering a transcendent "wilderness" experience that contrasts with the indoor, sedentary, mental labor characteristically performed by white-collar workers.

Edited Volumes by Rob Fletcher

University of Arizona Press, 2020

Despite its tiny size and seeming marginality to world affairs, the Central American republic of ... more Despite its tiny size and seeming marginality to world affairs, the Central American republic of Costa Rica has long been considered an important site for experimentation in cutting-edge environmental policy. From protected area management to ecotourism to payment for environmental services (PES) and beyond, for the past half-century the country has successfully positioned itself at the forefront of novel trends in environmental governance and sustainable development. Yet the increasingly urgent dilemma of how to achieve equitable economic development in a world of ecosystem decline and climate change presents new challenges, testing Costa Rica’s ability to remain a leader in innovative environmental governance.

This book explores these challenges, how Costa Rica is responding to them, and the lessons this holds for current and future trends regarding environmental governance and sustainable development. It provides the first comprehensive assessment of successes and challenges as they play out in a variety of sectors, including agricultural development, biodiversity conservation, water management, resource extraction, and climate change policy.

By framing Costa Rica as an “ecolaboratory,” the contributors in this volume examine the lessons learned and offer a path for the future of sustainable development research and policy in Central America and beyond.

University of Arizona Press, May 2014

"Can “market forces” solve the world’s environmental problems? The stakes are undeniably high. Wi... more "Can “market forces” solve the world’s environmental problems? The stakes are undeniably high. With wildlife populations and biodiversity riches threatened across the globe, it is obvious that new and innovative methods of addressing the crisis are vital to the future of the planet. But is “the market” the answer?

As public funding for conservation efforts grows ever scarcer and the private sector is brimming with ideas about how its role can grow—along with its profits—market forces have found their way into environmental management to a degree unimaginable only a few years ago. Ecotourism, biodiversity derivatives, payment for environmental services (PES), and new conservation finance instruments such as species banking, carbon trading, and biodiversity derivatives are only some of the market mechanisms that have sprung into being. This is “Nature™ Inc.”: a fast-growing frontier of networks, activities, knowledge, and regulations that are rapidly changing the relations between people and nature on both global and local scales.

Nature™ Inc. brings together cutting-edge research by respected scholars from around the world to analyze how “neoliberal conservation” is reshaping human–nature relations that have been fashioned over two centuries of capitalist development. Contributors synthesize and contribute to a growing body of academic literature that cuts across the disciplinary boundaries of geography, sociology, anthropology, political science, and development studies to critically interrogate the increasing emphasis on neoliberal market-based mechanisms in environmental conservation. They all grapple with one overriding question: can capitalist market mechanisms resolve the environmental problems they have helped create?
"

Nova Science Publishers, 2007

This thought-provoking book is divided into two parts, each of which contains four chapters. In P... more This thought-provoking book is divided into two parts, each of which contains four chapters. In Part I, titled “Rethinking Resistance,” contributors assert that “resistance” continues to hold utility as both an analytic concept and mode of action in the world, and therefore demands renewed engagement. Part II contains essays that offer novel frames for addressing progressive social change that might serve to replace “resistance” entirely, and thus is entitled “Thinking Beyond.”

Papers by Rob Fletcher

The Routledge Handbook of Tourism Geography, 2024

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2024

Within political ecology research, a dominant focus on the hard physicality of the world limits e... more Within political ecology research, a dominant focus on the hard physicality of the world limits engagement
with how events taking place on land mediate and are mediated by other material spaces like the
atmosphere. This article engages with burgeoning research on the extraction–conservation nexus to show
how the clearly demarcated land-based boundaries on which nexus thinking relies limit an awareness of how
processes of conservation and extraction cohere and take shape in and through the aerial atmosphere. The
article substantiates this argument with case studies on Guyana and Suriname, two countries that have been
working on avoiding deforestation through Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation
for over a decade in the aim of mitigating climate change. In each case, we examine three years of news
reporting on recent, major oil finds in the Guyana-Suriname Basin. The news reports, set against longer
term research, demonstrate a narrative pivot from “green,” land-based avoided deforestation narratives to
“black,” offshore extractive ones. The reports show that reference to the competing atmospheric effects of
the mutual pursuit of these activities is scarce, even at a time of rapidly intensifying climate change. Hence,
we argue that a voluminous analysis of the extraction–conservation nexus integrating a vertical awareness of
the ever-present and unbounded atmosphere harbors potential for orienting a less contradictory politics of
climate change—one that recognizes how activities deemed oppositional on land take shape in the shared,
unbounded atmosphere. These activities consequently go on to affect other spaces and places in indirect,
often unpredictable ways.

Tourism Geographies, 2023

the necessity and consequences of the exponential growth in tourism activity experienced througho... more the necessity and consequences of the exponential growth in tourism activity experienced throughout the world over the past half-century have been increasingly questioned by an expanding body of activists and critical researchers. One of the emerging responses within this debate concerns calls for reversing the trend in pursuit of touristic 'degrowth'. this discussion has been inspired by a longstanding body of research problematizing the imperative and consequences of economic growth more generally, initiated by natural and social scientists. this article offers a state-of-the-art overview of the application of degrowth perspectives to discussions of (sustainable) tourism development and outlines a future agenda for research and praxis continuing this important line of inquiry.

Tourism Geographies, 2023

While tourism has been a core feature of the global economy for more than a century, over the pas... more While tourism has been a core feature of the global economy for more than a century, over the past several decades, it has been a central component of a worldwide process of neoliberalization in particular. Neoliberalization describes a political-economic programme of 'free trade' embodying interrelated principles of deregulation, decentralization, marketization, privatization and commodification. Grounded in a critique of the postwar welfare state, it was first introduced into public administration in the Us and Western europe in the 1980s, then spread worldwide in the next decade via structural adjustment programmes (saPs) incorporated into international development planning. as one of the world's largest industries, tourism development has been a key component of this process. in this way, tourism policy in many places has been progressively neoliberalized, while in turn tourism development has thus served as a key component of neoliberalization more generally, helping to progressively bind the world within a single integrated economy. hence, tourism can be understood not only as a key site of neoliberalization, but a central means by which neoliberalization spreads as well. in the process, tourism development has played a key role in helping to stabilize a neoliberal capitalist economy riddled with fundamental contradictions that subject it to periodic crises. this article explores how this dynamic developed, where it stands at present, and how it is likely to evolve in the future as the contradictions underlying neoliberal capitalism continue to unfold.

Tourism Recreation Research, 2023

This contribution aims to advance consideration of the potential and pitfalls entailed in discuss... more This contribution aims to advance consideration of the potential and pitfalls entailed in discussions of degrowth within tourism development. Many mass tourist destinations suffer from saturation impacting local working conditions, access to housing and the collective enjoyment of public goods, among the many common drawbacks of so-called 'overtourism'. Yet proposals to address the negative impacts of mass tourism can become contradictory or even counterproductive. In one manifestation of this dynamic, prominent industry actors increasingly claim to have embraced the agenda of touristic degrowth by focusing on what is euphemistically termed 'quality tourism' (fewer tourists who spend more money), which in reality designates elite travel by the most powerful and wealthy social classes. But just as recession is not degrowth, neither can such elitization be considered genuine touristic degrowth, because it does not address the industry's general eco-social overreach via measures to promote social and environmental justice as degrowth advocates. It could thus instead be labelled 'fake' degrowth. By contrast, fair degrowth is defined by a decrease in the flow of energy and materials per capita, in a planned and democratic way, to contribute to equitable redistribution of resource use and access.

Global Environmental Change, 2023

This article advances a novel analytical framework for investigating the influence of political-e... more This article advances a novel analytical framework for investigating the influence of political-economic processes in human-wildlife interactions (HWI) to support efforts to transform wildlife conservation governance. To date, the majority of research and advocacy addressing HWI focuses on micro-level processes, while even the small body of existing literature exploring social dimensions of such interactions has largely neglected attention to political-economic forces. This is consonant with efforts to transform conservation policy and practice more broadly, which tend to emphasize "circular" change within current political-economic structures rather than "axial" transformation aiming to transcend these structures themselves. Our analysis thus advances understanding of potential for axial transformation in HWI via confrontation with, and "unmaking" of, constraining political-economic structures. It does so through cross-site analysis of conservation policy and practice in relation to three apex predator species (lions, jaguars and wolves) in varied geographic and socio-political contexts, grounded in qualitative ethnographic study within the different sites by members of an international research team. We explore how the relative power of different political-economic interests within each case influences how the animals are perceived and valued, and how this in turn influences conservation interventions and their impact on HWI within these spaces. We term this analysis of the "production-protection nexus" (the interrelation between process of resource extraction and conservation, respectively) in rural landscapes. We emphasize importance of attention to this formative nexus both within and across specific locales in growing global efforts to transform situations of human-wildlife conflict into less contentious coexistence.

Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 2020

This paper examines the role of tourism in promoting peace around transboundary protected areas (... more This paper examines the role of tourism in promoting peace around transboundary protected areas (TBPA) in conflict-affected regions through a case study of the Virunga TBPA straddling the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. Also praised as 'peace parks', TBPAs embody the rationale that stimulating a tourism economy in shared conservation spaces will provide incentives for formerly antagonistic states and actors to cooperate. Virunga TBPA exemplifies this strategy by promoting high-end gorilla tourism in a region scarred by longstanding conflict. Drawing on twelve months of fieldwork, we found that these optimistic aspirations are contradicted by militarisation of the three National Parks constituting the TBPA, as well as prevalence of violence and political segregation among the countries. As park authorities sell 'feelings of security' by framing their neighbours as threats in order to attract visitors, intrastate competition and conflict intensifies. Peace tourism rhetoric and revenues allow the governments to justify and finance the militarisation as necessary to protect 'their' tourists while concealing their security interests in protecting national borders. This contradiction between tourism's ostensive 'peace dividend' and the violence it generates within transboundary conservation efforts poses the question: what kind of 'peace' can be generated through tourism, and for whom? ARTICLE HISTORY

Biological Conservation, 2023

This article examines the politics of emerging partnerships among big-tech corporations, big inte... more This article examines the politics of emerging partnerships among big-tech corporations, big international nongovernmental organisations (BINGOs) and bilaterals that promote the uptake and implementation of 'smart technologies' in biodiversity conservation. Despite growing global recognition of Indigenous and local peoples' rights to forests, lands, and oceans as central to socially just and successful conservation, new initiatives to conserve 30% of the Earth's territory by 2030 ('30 × 30') under the United Nations' (UN) post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework largely continue to neglect their existing customary rights and uses of biodiverse territories. The consequences of this have become evident in new global conservation partnerships that are taking a 'technological turn'. 'Smart technologies' that rely on artificial intelligence (AI) and complex hardware, such as camera traps, drones, and smartphones, enable new forms of surveillance and securitisation through and beyond conventional conservation practices. Despite their potential to exacerbate social injustices against historically marginalised groups, the situated character of smart technology impacts and outcomes often remain unquestioned by mainstream conservation actors. Our paper shows how the dominant discourses framing such technology as successful and innovative across global and local partnerships belies its potential to: 1) inflict considerable violence upon local and Indigenous peoples; and 2) neglect the main political economic drivers of biodiversity loss. Drawing on examples from Palawan Island, the Philippines, we show how these global-local governance partnerships have valorised the potential success of smart technology for biodiversity conservation in situ without considering how they may adversely impact Indigenous and local peoples' rights and livelihoods, while at the same time neglecting and depoliticising the violence of capitalist extractivist expansion.

Conservation Biology, 2016

Geoforum, 2022

Across parts of Southeast Asia, coastal governance strategies have drawn on 'ecotourism' initiati... more Across parts of Southeast Asia, coastal governance strategies have drawn on 'ecotourism' initiatives for 'sustainable development' by constructing captivating imaginaries of coastal places and people as sites of touristic production and consumption. Increasingly, representations of exotic and pristine coastal natures are reproduced virtually in support of this campaign through Web 2.0 platforms and their underlying algorithms. As ecotourism expands in the region, growing networks of social media users coproduce and consume abstract virtual natures with profound consequences for coastal peoples and ecosystems. In particular, Instagram, a popular photo sharing social media platform, has become central to reifying and distorting complex coastal realities. Drawing on a case from El Nido, Palawan Island, the Philippines, our paper examines how the virtual representation of coastal places and people on Instagram accelerate coastal transformations. Our results reveal how the political economy of coastal governance and the platform capitalism of social media converge to accelerate ecotourism in ways that realign virtual ideals and material realities. As virtual imaginaries shape coastal realities, new forms of exclusion and misrepresentation of people and places drive the displacement of local fishers, violence against activists, and coastal degradation. Bringing together research exploring (mass) ecotourism, platform capitalism and virtualism, we argue that greater scholarly attention should be placed on how new digital actors and platform algorithms influence how coastal peoples and places are imagined, consumed and subject to violence over time.

Globalizations, 2016

Central to the United Nations' post-2015 development agenda grounded in the Sustainable Developme... more Central to the United Nations' post-2015 development agenda grounded in the Sustainable Development Goals is the notion of 'decoupling': the need to divorce economic growth from its ecological impact. For proponents, decoupling entails increasing the efficiency with which value is derived from natural resources in order to reconcile indefinite economic growth with environmental sustainability. However, even advocates admit that the idea of decoupling remains poorly conceptualized and subject to scant empirical investigation. This persistent commitment to a highly questionable idea suggests the possibility of a deeper psychological dynamic at work here. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, in this article we therefore analyze decoupling as a 'fantasy' that functions to obfuscate fundamental tensions among the goals of poverty alleviation, environmental sustainability, and profitable enterprise that it is intended to reconcile. In this way, decoupling serves to sustain faith in the possibility of attaining sustainable development within the context of a neoliberal capitalist economy that necessitates continual growth to confront inherent contradictions.

Conservation and Society, 2022

Convivial conservation has been put forward as a radical alternative to transform prevailing main... more Convivial conservation has been put forward as a radical alternative to transform prevailing mainstream approaches that aim to address global concerns of biodiversity loss and extinction. This special issue includes contributions from diverse disciplinary and geographical perspectives which critically examine convivial conservation’s potential in theory and practice and explore both possibilities and challenges for the approach’s transformative ambitions. This introduction focuses on three issues which the contributions highlight as critical for facilitating transformation of mainstream conservation. First, the different ways in which key dimensions of justice — epistemic, distributive, and participatory and multi-species justice — intersect with the convivial conservation proposal, and how potential injustices might be mitigated. Second, how convivial conservation approaches the potential to facilitate human and non-human coexistence. Third, how transformative methodologies and innovative conceptual lenses can be used to further develop convivial conservation. The diverse contributions show that convivial conservation has clear potential to be transformative. However, to realise this potential, convivial conservation must avoid previous proposals’ pitfalls, such as trying to ‘reinvent the wheel’ and being too narrowly focused. Instead, convivial conservation must continue to evolve in response to engagement with a plurality of perspectives, experiences, ideas and methodologies from around the world.

MayFly Books, 2023

University of California Press, 2023

Verso, 2020

University of Arizona Press, 2020

University of Arizona Press, May 2014

Nova Science Publishers, 2007

The Routledge Handbook of Tourism Geography, 2024

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2024

Tourism Geographies, 2023

Tourism Recreation Research, 2023

Global Environmental Change, 2023

Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 2020

Biological Conservation, 2023

Conservation Biology, 2016

Geoforum, 2022

Globalizations, 2016

Conservation and Society, 2022

Meera Anna Oommen, Rosie Cooney, Madhuri Ramesh, Michael Archer, Daniel Brockington, Bram Buscher... more Meera Anna Oommen, Rosie Cooney, Madhuri Ramesh, Michael Archer, Daniel Brockington, Bram Buscher, Robert Fletcher, Daniel J.D. Natusch, Abi T. Vanak, Grahame Webb, and Kartik Shanker 1,16 ∗ Dakshin Foundation, 1818, 5th Main, 9th Cross, Sahakar Nagar C Block, Bengaluru 560092, India IUCN CEESP/SSC Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group, c/ Rue Mauverney 28, 1196, Gland, Switzerland Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, 0200 ACT, Australia PANGEA Research Center, School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia Sheffield Institute for International Development, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, South Yorkshire S10 2TN, U.K. Sociology of Development and Change, Wageningen University, De Leeuwenborch, Hollandseweg 1, 6707 Wageningen, KN, The Netherlands Department of Geography, Environmental Management and Energy Studies, University of Johannesburg, South Africa Department o...

Journal of Latin American Geography, 2017

Tourism Geographies, 2022

Critical research concerning ecotourism has revealed the activity’s socio-economic impacts, inclu... more Critical research concerning ecotourism has revealed the activity’s
socio-economic impacts, including low-wage employment-based
dependencies for many rural communities. While these dynamics
are important, a crucial aspect of the ecotourism industry that
falls outside this conventional sort of dependency is land use
dynamics, specifically land use change, sales and entrepreneurship.
We examine these dynamics in Corbett Tiger Reserve, India, where
promotion of (eco)tourism since the 1990s has influenced significant
changes in local land use. These changes were initially facilitated
by outsiders buying land and setting up hotels and resorts
in villages adjoining the Reserve. Empirical research reveals that
while this initial boom of outsiders buying land has waned, land
owning villagers are now setting up tourism enterprises on their
own land, thereby diversifying land use from agriculture to tourism.
Critical agrarian research has shown that material and symbolic
factors influence farmers’ decision-making regarding land use
change. An agrarian studies perspective thus facilitates a nuanced
understanding of tourism-related land use diversification and
change. By bringing agrarian and ecotourism studies approaches
together here, we contribute to both by emphasising the importance
of (eco)tourism in agrarian change and of attention to land
use change in ecotourism studies to understand how rural people
negotiate and navigate (eco)tourism in relation to land use. We
also contribute to tourism geographies more broadly by highlighting
how land use decision-making shapes local spaces in the
course of ecotourism development. We draw attention to the
broader processes of and impacts of ecotourism that shift generational
rural land use influenced by changing values of land outside
a protected area. Rendering land touristifiable deepens
villagers’ dependence on the market and alienates them from their
land. Ecotourism commodifies nature, and we show that this commodification extends to rural land outside of ecotourism zones
per se.

Environmental Science and Policy, 2022

News coverage of noteworthy environmental events is often fleeting, moving from one spectacle to ... more News coverage of noteworthy environmental events is often fleeting, moving from one spectacle to another and rarely retaining global attention. But in August 2019, news of Amazon rainforest fires spread seemingly as quickly as the fires themselves, with sustained global coverage and funding pouring into environmental organizations. Yet Amazon fires regularly occur and fires were simultaneously burning in other important Brazilian biomes, with some causing worse damage. What was it about the 2019 Amazon fires that elicited such a strong and persistent global response? In this paper, we draw on distinctions between slow/immediate (Nixon, 2011) and structural/direct violence (Galtung, 1969) to answer this question. We argue that the Amazon's reputation as a global treasure and its association with climate change and biodiversity through 'giantness' (Slater, 2002) meant that the fires' local spectacular violence became felt as an instant global threat, shifting perceptions of violence from slow to immediate. Moreover, as the identified instigator of the violence, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro became a sort of 'bridge' between structural and direct dimensions of violence, thus making the violence personal. These three dynamics combined to enhance visibility of the Amazon's destruction and its connection to planetary stability, thereby inspiring the 2019 fires' extraordinary reactions. Through this analysis, the paper contributes to psychological literature on perceptions of ecological crises and to discussions in political ecology/geography concerning violent environments by demonstrating how and why both the slow and structural violence of the global climate and biodiversity crises can be rendered more visible via localized effects.

World Development, 2022

A growing body of critical research interrogates the tendency within international conservation c... more A growing body of critical research interrogates the tendency within international conservation circles to present interventions as successful, even when evidence points to substantial negative impacts. The flip side of this 'selling' success is a growing emphasis on the importance of embracing and even celebrating failure. Yet this important trend in international conservation policymaking has yet to be examined in depth. We address this research gap by first tracing the origins of the embracing failure narrative, linking it to the historical handling of failure in conservation and in fields such as business management and international development. We then explore the implications of this framing of failure for international conservation policy and practice by examining relevant policy literature and illustrative case studies in Tanzania and Peru. Based on this analysis, we demonstrate how a 'right to fail' can justify both continuing and discontinuing conservation interventions in highly problematic ways. We show how the framing of failure as a positive outcome for global learning can reduce accountability for significant and long-lasting negative consequences of failed interventions. Furthermore, the emphasis on approaches to learning that employ narrow technical frames can depoliticize issues and limit possibilities to fundamentally question and transform dominant conservation models with histories of persistent failure. Consequently, we argue that by affording interventions the 'right to fail', conservation actors with a stake in dominant models have taken control of failure discourse in ways that reinforce instead of undermine their ability to 'sell' success amidst negative (or limited) local outcomes. While it is of course important to acknowledge failure in order not to repeat it, we caution against embracing failure in ways that may further exacerbate conservation injustices and hinder transformative societal change. We advocate instead for an explicitly political approach to addressing failure in conservation.

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

Conservation and Society, 2021

This article describes a case of human-bear cohabitation in the Rodopi mountains (Yagodina-Trigra... more This article describes a case of human-bear cohabitation in the Rodopi mountains (Yagodina-Trigrad area) of Bulgaria. The lack of protected areas in the region and the increasing number of brown bears (Ursus arctos) have resulted in both human-wildlife conflicts and the development of mechanisms and practices to facilitate cohabitation in the absence of formal rules to regulate coexistence of human and nonhuman species. However, these mechanisms and practices are currently undergoing transformations due to newfound protection of the species under national and EU legislation, respectively. The paper explores these dynamics through a case study of relatively successful cohabitation in the region. Our analysis identifies and outlines local adaptation and conservation mechanisms developed to live with bears as well as strategies to benefit from the bears' presence. In this way, the study contributes to current debates concerning how to best facilitate 'convivial conservation' promoting coexistence between humans and wildlife by identifying factors in this case that have facilitated a bottom-up approach to cohabitation that might be tested or adopted for use in similar situations elsewhere.

Tourism Geographies, 2021

Potential to identify and cultivate forms of post-capitalism in tourism development has yet to be... more Potential to identify and cultivate forms of post-capitalism in tourism development has yet to be explored in depth in current research. Tourism is one of the world’s largest industries, and hence a powerful global political and socio-economic force. Yet numerous problems associated with conventional tourism development have been documented over the years, problems now greatly exacerbated by impacts of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Calls for sustainable tourism development have long sought to address such issues and set the industry on a better course. Yet such calls tend to still promote continued growth as the basis of the tourism industry’s development, while mounting demands for “degrowth” suggest that growth is itself the fundamental problem that needs to be addressed in discussion of sustainability in tourism and elsewhere. This critique asserts that incessant growth is intrinsic to capitalist development, and hence to tourism’s role as one of the main forms of global capitalist expansion. Touristic degrowth would therefore necessitate postcapitalist practices aiming to socialise the tourism industry. While a substantial body of research has explored how tourism functions as an expression of a capitalist political economy, thus far no research has systematically explored what post-capitalist tourism might look like or how to achieve it. Applying Erik Olin Wright’s 2019 innovative typology for conceptualizing different forms of post-capitalism as components of an overarching strategy for “eroding capitalism” to a series of illustrative allows for exploration of their potential to contribute to an analogous strategy to similarly “erode tourism” as a quintessential capitalist industry.

Transforming Biodiversity Governance, 2022

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2020

Neoliberal conservation describes a dynamic wherein prominent organizations around the world conc... more Neoliberal conservation describes a dynamic wherein prominent organizations around the world concerned with biodiversity protection have increasingly adopted strategies and mechanisms that seek to reconcile conservation with economic development by harnessing economic markets as putative mechanisms for financing nature conservation. Since the turn of the millennium, a vibrant discussion around this topic has arisen across anthropology, geography, and related fields. Within this discussion, the rise of neoliberal conservation is generally treated as part of more widespread processes of neoliberalization occurring throughout the global economy since the 1980s, promoting a constellation of core principles including privatization, marketization, decentralization, deregulation, and commodification. Neoliberal conservation arose out of a growing concern among prominent conservation organizations to include poverty reduction and economic development within their mandates as well as to capture additional funding via partnerships with wealthy corporations. It is commonly implemented through a series of so-called market-based instruments (MBIs), including ecotourism, payment for environmental services (PES), and biodiversity and wetlands banking, as well as financial mechanisms such as green bonds.
However, evidence suggests that promotion of neoliberal conservation rarely achieves intended outcomes in actual implementation. This has led some researchers to argue that these activities are thus not neoliberal at all, while others defend this characterization within an understanding of neoliberalization as a variegated process. Researchers also point to the rise of right-wing authoritarianism as a potential challenge to neoliberal hegemony, yet the implications of this trend for conservation policy and practice remain little explored. Thus, the important open question is raised of whether neoliberal conservation was the product of a particular political era that is coming to an end, and if so, what will arise in its aftermath.

The Ecolaboratory : Environmental Governance and Economic Development in Costa Rica, 2020

Tourism in the Geopolitics of the Mediterranean. Barcelona: Alba Sud, 2019

Turistificación Global: Perspectivas Críticas en Turismo, 2019

Si bien el turismo ha sido una pieza clave de la economía mundial durante más de un siglo, en las... more Si bien el turismo ha sido una pieza clave de la economía mundial durante más de un siglo, en las últimas décadas ha sido de forma particular un componente central de un proceso mundial de neoliberalización. La neoliberalización describe un programa político-económico de «libre comercio» que integra de manera interrelacionada los mecanismos de desregulación, descentralización, mercantilización, privatización y mercantilización. Este programa se fundó sobre la crítica del Estado de bienestar durante la posguerra. Se introdujo por primera vez en la administración pública en los Estados Unidos y Euro-pa Occidental en la década de los ochenta, y luego se difundió por todo el mundo en década siguiente a través de programas de ajuste estructural (PAE) incorporados en la planificación del desarrollo internacional. Siendo una de las industrias más grandes del mundo, el desarrollo del turismo ha sido un componente clave de este proceso. De esta manera, la política turística ha sido progresivamente neoliberalizada en muchos lugares, mientras que, a su vez, el desarrollo turístico ha servido como un componente clave de la neoli-beralización en general, jugando así un papel relevante en la consolidación de una sola economía integrada a nivel mundial. Por lo tanto, el turismo puede entenderse no solo como un componente clave de la neoliberalización, sino como un medio clave a través del cual el neoliberalismo se propaga. En el proceso, el desarrollo turístico ha desempeñado un papel crucial para ayudar a estabilizar una economía capitalista neoliberal plagada de contradicciones fundamentales sometida a crisis periódicas. Este capítulo explora cómo se ha desarrollado esta dinámica, dónde se encuentra en la actualidad y cómo es probable que evolucione en el futuro a medida que continúan desplegándose las contradicciones que subyacen al capitalismo neoliberal.

The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Development, 2018

This chapter reviews the rise of and challenges faced by protected areas (PAs) aimed at biodivers... more This chapter reviews the rise of and challenges faced by protected areas (PAs) aimed at biodiversity conservation throughout Latin America over the past half century in particular. It charts a similar process throughout the region whereby a global campaign championed by international environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and financial institutions (IFIs) helped to inspire and fund the establishment of nationwide systems of PAs. While these PAs were initially administered predominantly in classic “fortress” fashion, in recent decades this approach has been complemented by introduction of a community-based conservation (CBC) strategy that seeks to enlist local residents as stakeholders and decision makers, introducing a series of market-based instruments (MBIs) including ecotourism and payment for environmental services (PES) to generate revenue to support this. More recently, this
approach has been intensifi ed by the rise of “post-neoliberal” politics in a number of societies that pursues a better integration of environmental and developmental concerns. Yet this has been challenged by the expansion of raw material extraction driven in large part by expanding
trade relations with East Asia and elsewhere. As a result, protected areas have become key sites of renewed contestation between forces of conservation and extraction. The chapter discusses these developments and their implications for the future of biodiversity conservation in the
region.

The Companion to Environmental Studies, 2018

Ecotourism is often considered of the fastest growing segments of a global tourism market that no... more Ecotourism is often considered of the fastest growing segments of a global tourism market that now rivals oil production as the world’s largest industry (UNWTO 2016). Yet what is actually being promoted under this label remains a matter of some confusion. The most widely accepted definition of ecotourism, offered by The International Ecotourism Society (TIES), defines it as “Responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and improves the well-being of local people” (cited in Honey 2008:6). Yet it must be recognized that this is not merely a factual statement, but rather a political argument intended to assert that these are the only activities that the concept should designate. In wider popular discourse, of course, the term is used to describe all manner of activities that generally endeavor to sell an encounter with “nature” very broadly defined. This promiscuous use of the term has led to criticism that it has become an empty label – or worse, a cover for “greenwashing,” allowing operators to conceal their detrimental practices beneath a veneer of social and environmental responsibility (Mowforth and Munt 2008). Efforts by TIES and others to define the term more narrowly, therefore, seek to focus attention on the ways in which the activities designated may or may not actually fulfill the social and environmental promises that they commonly make. Hence, advocates seek to distinguish “nature-based” tourism from ecotourism specifically, where the former “is defined solely by the recreational activities of the tourist” while “ecotourism is defined as well by a set of principles that include its benefits to both conservation and people in the host country” (Honey 2008: 7).

Psychoanalysis and the GlObal, 2018

The Carbon Fix: Forest Carbon, Social Justice, and Environmental Governance, 2017

Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2017

International Handbook of Political Ecology, 2015

NatureTM Inc.: Environmental Conservation in the Neoliberal Age, 2014

From Laggards to Leaders: Climate Change Governance in the Developing World, C. Roger, D. Held, and E. Nag, eds. London: Polity Press., 2013

The Ecotourism-Extraction Nexus: Political Economies and Rural Realities of (un)Comfortable Bedfellows. V. Davidov and B. Büscher, eds. London: Routledge. , 2013

In Beyond Resistance: The Future of Freedom, Robert Fletcher, ed. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2007

The negative social and environmental impacts of the global tourism industry have been widely doc... more The negative social and environmental impacts of the global tourism industry have been widely documented, yet there is still potential for tourism to function as a force of social justice. In this article I suggest that a political ecology perspective merging Marxist and poststructuralist lines of analysis can help to highlight both the key drivers of tourism’s negative impacts and ways that these can be challenged in the interest of tapping into tourism’s progressive potential. From a Marxist perspective, the tourism industry can be understood as a key mechanism by means of which the capitalist system expands and reproduces itself, while from a poststructuralist perspective it can be understood as a central element of neoliberal governance. Challenging tourism’s corrosive effects, therefore, requires confronting both of these dynamics in pursuit of a post-capitalist, post-neoliberal politics.

Paper Prepared for Symposium “Capitalism, Democracy, and Celebrity Advocacy,” University of Manchester, UK, 19-20 June 2012

The growing prominence of celebrities within the global environmental movement-and their power to... more The growing prominence of celebrities within the global environmental movement-and their power to shape and advance this movement's aims-has been a burgeoning focus of recent research. Thus far, such analysis has viewed the phenomenon primarily through a political economy lens, contending that celebrity is harnessed to further the agenda of a mainstream environmental movement that has become increasingly conjoined with neoliberal capitalism, as expressed in the mounting enthusiasm to address ecological decline through corporate partnership and incentive-based market mechanisms. This presentation draws on psychoanalytic research to offer the complementary suggestion that celebrity also functions as a form of transference helping to sustain the fantasy implicit in this neoliberal vision "that capitalist markets are the answer to their own ecological contradictions" (Büscher 2012:12). Through transference, the charismatic authority conferred to larger-than-life celebrities helps to conceal the gaps between Real and Symbolic in this vision and thus obfuscates contradictions inherent in the execution of neoliberal environmental strategies. From this perspective, cynical suspicion concerning celebrities' authenticity may paradoxically enhance their authority, and thus this analysis helps to explain counterintuitive findings that widespread ambivalence towards celebrities does little to diminish their power to shape public sentiment.

Annals of Tourism Research, 2021

Increasingly NGOs organize trips for their 'major donors' to visit development projects with the ... more Increasingly NGOs organize trips for their 'major donors' to visit development projects with the aim to enhance funding streams and fortify donor relations. Building on growing discussions of 'philanthrocapitalism' as a novel form of international development financing, we analyze such 'donor trips' as a unique tourism niche termed 'philanthrotourism'. Based on empirical research concerning two such trips to Sub-Saharan Africa, we argue that philanthrotourism allows donors to experience jouissance-a particular type of ambivalent enjoyment that includes fascination with dark and horrific elements-as a core motivation to engage in staged development spectacles via their touristic experiences and thereby affirm their commitment to philanthropy. Our analysis highlights the importance of investigating psychological underpinnings of ethical tourism more generally.

Environmental Communication, 2020

This article investigates assertions that new philanthropic web 2.0 initiatives can empower Inter... more This article investigates assertions that new philanthropic web 2.0 initiatives can empower Internet users to further social and environmental change. It focuses on two ostensibly “free” web 2.0 initiatives aimed at nature conservation: “Greenvolved” and “Safari Challenge Zoo Adventure.” With Greenvolved, clicking on one’s favorite projects is supposed to support conservation initiatives whereas in Safari Challenge users interact through gaming on the virtual African savannahs to conserve online nature, thereby supporting various offline humanitarian projects. Drawing on discussions of “philanthrocapitalism” and “nature 2.0,” our analysis demonstrates that such “popular
philanthrocapitalist” initiatives do not support empowering collective action but instead depoliticize and commodify environmental activism. Such initiatives thereby allow neoliberal capitalism to further extend its reach under the pretense of empowering those whom it marginalizes.