Conservation, biopolitics, and the governance of life and death

Abstract

The politics of environmental conservation has long been a key concern for human and environmental geographers. Recently, geographers have begun to employ Foucauldian insights on biopower and biopolitics to understand conservation's changing agendas, techniques, and logics, focusing on the specific ways in which non‐human nature is ordered, ranked, and promoted. This review examines how four domains of conservation—endangered species management, conservation breeding and genetics, protected areas, and rewilding—have been conceptualized as biopolitical. In each domain, different sets of scientific practices and understandings produce valuations of life that appear natural, universal, and technically derived even as they are particular and normative. Thus, we find that there is not a single “conservation biopolitics” but instead an entanglement of overlapping and contradictory logics and techniques. At its best, the Foucauldian biopolitical approach can help to parse the range of possible logics and techniques that constitute conservation and to expand who is authorized to take part in debates and decisions about what life should be protected, how, why, and for whom.

Rewilding forestry

“…The concept of rewilding has gained significant popularity amongst conservationists and ecologists (Pettoreilli et al 2019), as it has with academic geographers (Biermann and Anderson 2017) and environmental historians and philosophers (Jørgensen 2015; Drenthen 2018). Use of the term in titles and abstracts of scientific papers has increased enormously, commonly featuring in conservation-oriented life sciences journals.…”

“…Wynne-Jones et al 2018). Despite these ongoing debates, areas of consensus are emerging These are that rewilding is guided foremost by an aspiration to enhance ecological function and trophic complexity and that this should be achieved by means of reductions in human management (Biermann and Anderson 2017;Torres et al 2018).…”

From colonial fortresses to neoliberal landscapes in Northern Tanzania: a biopolitical ecology of wildlife conservation

“…Life-sustaining landscapes of conservation are politically and emotionally supercharged with agendas, responsibility, meaning and purpose. When life itself is object of intervention and improvement, certain life forms must be protected (made live) while others can be abandoned (let die) (Biermann and Anderson 2017;Foucault 2003).…”

“…To explain this historical shift and to illustrate its contemporary implications, I offer a biopolitical analysis of colonial and post-colonial wildlife preservation and conservation in Tanzania, thereby pursuing two interrelated objectives. Firstly, drawing on recent debates on green governmentality and biopolitics (Biermann and Anderson 2017;Mansfield 2014, Cavanagh 2014;Lorimer 2015;Nel 2015;Rutherford 2007) my theoretical-analytical ambition is to situate a historical political ecology (Offen 2004) of wildlife conservation interventions (Brockington 2002;Neumann 1998) in its biopolitical context to highlight the changing role that preservation and conservation rationalities and initiatives have played in governing rural people, wildlife and spaces in a shifting biopolitics of "making live" and "letting die." Secondly, I advance a much needed and slowly emerging political ecological critique of the nascent but growing landscape conservation approach to illustrate what kind of biopolitical rationalities emerge in this conservation governmentality (Clay 2016;McCall 2016;Waage and Benediktsson 2010).…”

Topographies of security and the multiple spatialities of (conservation) power: Verticality, surveillance, and space-time compression in the bush

“…Keeping the nonhuman safe from threatening human circulations is the biopolitical imperative that underpins anti-poaching and is one that differentiates it from other contexts of war and policing. Building on a rich literature on conservation biopolitics (Bluwstein, 2018;Büscher & Fletcher, 2018), this is a multi-faceted imperative tied to the inherent valuing of nonhuman life (Biermann & Anderson, 2017), biodiversity as an economic asset (Cavanagh et al, 2015;Massé et al, 2018), and the framing of commercial poaching and the illegal wildlife trade (IWT) as a threat to national security (Duffy, 2014(Duffy, , 2016Lunstrum, 2014;Massé et al, 2018). The latter two concern how IWT ostensibly undermines tourism and wildlife economies, has links to transnational organised crime and the putative, but unsubstantiated, links that certain forms of commercial poaching funds terrorist groups (Duffy 2016;Kelly et al, 2018).…”