Bram Büscher

Oscar Salemink

Elisabet Dueholm Rasch

Michiel Köhne

Engaged Encounters: Thinking about Forces, Fields and Friendships with Monique Nuijten is a festschrift celebrating the scholarly, professional and personal contributions and insights of Monique Nuijten. As a creative scholar, Monique is known for her theoretical contributions to the study of development, social movements, the state, organizations, and corruption - to name a few topics. She inspires many senior and junior colleagues, as well as students, with innovative concepts like 'force fields' and development as a 'hope-generating machine'. Nuijten grounds her theoretical interventions in fine-grained ethnographic observations with a keen and sympathetic eye for the diverse actors that inhabit the structures of power and patterns of inequality she encounters. For Nuijten, theoretical and ethnographic endeavors are deeply interwoven with personal and political engagements, most recently illustrated through her research on social movements in urban settings in Brazil and Spain. The intersection of these three integrated dimensions in Monique Nuijten's oeuvre and life - the theoretical, collegial and personal - are brought out clearly in the forty contributions that each in their own way, acknowledge her unique combination of intellectual sharpness and personal warmth. As such, Monique Nuijten's scholarly life embodies an exemplary model of engaged scholarship.

Thinking about Forces, Fields and Friendships with Monique Nuijten

Engaged Encounters

Robert Fletcher

Wolfram Dressler

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—along with its profits— can grow, market forces have found their way into environmental management to a degree unimaginable only a few years ago. Ecotourism, 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 “NatureTM 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. NatureTM 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 add 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?

Environmental Conservation in the Neoliberal Age

Nature Inc.

How should we share the truth about the environmental crisis? At a moment when even the most basic facts about ecology and the climate face contestation and contempt, environmental advocates are at an impasse. Many have turned to social media and digital technologies to shift the tide. But what if their strategy is not only flawed, but dangerous? The Truth about Nature follows environmental actors as they turn to the internet to save nature. It documents how conservation efforts are transformed through the political economy of platforms and the algorithmic feeds that have been instrumental to the rise of post-truth politics. Developing a novel account of post-truth as an expression of power under platform capitalism, Bram Büscher shows how environmental actors attempt to mediate between structural forms of platform power and the contingent histories and contexts of particular environmental issues. Bringing efforts at wildlife protection in Southern Africa into dialogue with a sweeping analysis of truth and power in the twenty-first century, Büscher makes the case for a new environmental politics that radically reignites the art of speaking truth to power.

Environmentalism in the Era of Post-truth Politics and Platform Capitalism

The Truth about Nature

International peace parks—transnational conservation areas established and managed by two or more countries—have become a popular way of protecting biodiversity while promoting international cooperation and regional development. In Transforming the Frontier, Bram Büscher shows how cross-border conservation neatly reflects the neoliberal political economy in which it developed. Based on extensive research in southern Africa with the Maloti-Drakensberg Transfrontier Conservation and Development Project, Büscher explains how the successful promotion of transfrontier conservation as a "win-win" solution happens not only in spite of troubling contradictions and problems, but indeed because of them. This is what he refers to as the "politics of neoliberal conservation," which receives its strength from effectively combining strategies of consensus, antipolitics, and marketing. Drawing on long-term, multilevel ethnographic research, Büscher argues that transfrontier conservation projects are not as concerned with on-the-ground development as they are purported to be. Instead, they are reframing environmental protection and sustainable development to fit an increasingly contradictory world order.

Peace Parks and the Politics of Neoliberal Conservation in Southern Africa

Transforming the Frontier

Veronica Davidov

Ecotourism and natural resource extraction may be seen as contradictory pursuits, yet in reality they often take place side by side, sometimes even supported by the same institutions. Existing academic and policy literatures generally overlook the phenomenon of ecotourism in areas concurrently affected by extraction industries, but such a scenario is in fact increasingly common in resource-rich developing nations. This edited volume conceptualises and empirically analyses the 'ecotourism-extraction nexus' within the context of broader rural and livelihood changes in the places where these activities occur. The volume's central premise is that these seemingly contradictory activities are empirically and conceptually more alike than often imagined, and that they share common ground in ethnographic lived experiences in rural settings and broader political economic structures of power and control. The book offers theoretical reflections on why ecotourism and natural resource extraction are systematically decoupled, and epistemologically and analytically re-links them through ethnographic case studies drawing on research from around the world. It should be of interest to students and professionals engaged in the disciplines of geography, anthropology and development studies.

Bram Büscher

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