A faultline in neoliberal environmental governance scholarship? Or, why accumulation-by-alienation matters

Abstract

This article identifies an emerging faultline in critical geography and political ecology scholarship by reviewing recent debates on three neoliberal environmental governance initiatives: Payments for Ecosystem Services, the United Nations programme for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries and carbon-biodiversity offsetting. These three approaches, we argue, are characterized by varying degrees of contextual and procedural – or superficial – difference, meanwhile exhibiting significant structural similarities that invite critique, perhaps even rejection. Specifically, we identify three largely neglected ‘social engineering’ outcomes as more foundational to Payments for Ecosystem Services, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries and carbon-biodiversity offsetting than often acknowledged, suggesting that neoliberal environmental governance approaches warrant greater critical attention for their contributions to advancing processes of colonization, state territorialization and security policy. Examining the structural accumulation strategies accompanying neoliberal environmental governance approaches, we offer the term ‘accumulation-by-alienation’ to highlight both the objective appropriations accompanying Payments for Ecosystem Services, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries and offsetting and the relational deficiencies accompanying the various commodifying instrumentalizations at the heart of these initiatives. We concur with David Harvey’s recent work proposing that understanding the iterative and consequential connections between objective/material and subjective/psychological dimensions of alienation offers ‘one vital key to unlock the door of a progressive politics for the future’. We conclude (with others) by urging critical geography and political ecology scholars to cultivate research directions that affirm more radical alternatives, rather than reinforcing a narrowing focus on how to improve Payments for Ecosystem Services, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries and offsetting in practice.

Negative emissions and the long history of carbon removal

“…Critics have described the reductionist tendencies in environmental knowledge production, and the forms of policy making it serves, as a form of depoliticization, arguing that it confines the space of public deliberation on contested policies and gives priority to a managerial logic where decision-making is seen as the exclusive remit of experts and technocrats (Lövbrand et al, 2015;Swyngedouw, 2010Swyngedouw, , 2011. In so doing, it forecloses opportunities for more radical social, political and economic change and serves to uphold, and reproduce, dominant interests (Dunlap & Sullivan, 2019;Felli, 2015;Methmann, 2013;Swyngedouw, 2013).…”

Bureaucratic land grabbing for infrastructural colonization: renewable energy, L’Amassada, and resistance in southern France

“…Severe dependency leads to infrastructural selfidentification. Infrastructural systems and urbanism are the new habitat (Vidalou, 2017), causing disconnection and systematic betrayal of ecosystems and nonhuman populations (Dunlap and Jakobsen, 2020;Dunlap and Sullivan, 2019;Springer et al, forthcoming). The psychopolitical power of infrastructural colonization is "hidden like a sewage system, an undersea cable, a fiber optic line running the length of a railway" says The Invisible Committee (TIC), 2015: "Power is the very organization of this world, this engineered configured, purposed world."…”

Securing accumulation by restoration – Exploring spectacular corporate conservation, coal mining and biodiversity compensation in the German Rhineland

“…Maron et al, 2015;Niner et al, 2017;Pawliczek and Sullivan, 2011;Robertson, 2004Robertson, , 2006. These are grounded in and further exacerbate what Dunlap and Sullivan (2019) call 'accumulation by alienation'. This alienation -grounded in indifference -promotes separation and lies at the hearth of market relationships to nature that allows destructive economic choices and associated accumulation processes.…”

“…by indifference, instrumentalization, reification/fetishism, absurdity, artificiality, isolation, dissociation, disconnection, meaninglessness and impotence' (Dunlap and Sullivan, 2019: 17). The resulting disconnection underlies the separation, reduction and abstraction of nature that is necessary for nature's commodification and making nature 'offsettable'; the abstraction and extraction of value from ecosystems, and the consequent deepening -rather than refraction -of the alienations underpinning the ecological breakdown (Dunlap and Sullivan, 2019). Accumulation by restoration plays into the very same 'entanglement of alienation with commodification' (Dunlap and Sullivan, 2019: 17), based on the objectification and quantification which feminists have long criticised (e.g.…”