Intimate Mediations of For‐Profit Conservation Finance: Waste, Improvement, and Accumulation

Abstract

How to understand the marriage between accumulation and conservation? The paper draws from extensive research into one value chain, from the advisor in New York City to a wildlife-friendly cattle business in Kenya. Making this enterprise return in money requires intimate and relentless efforts to transform wasteful conduct across a range of institutions and people; we focus on the attempted production of NGO economicus, homo economicus plus, and bos Taurus economicus. Drawing from feminist and postcolonial theorists of capitalism, we emphasise how green capitalist value production does not always hinge on extinguishing other-than-capitalist-social relations but rather attempts to mobilise and harness such differences, including non-profit-seeking values, logics and relations. The paper concludes by reflecting on the temporal challenges facing for-profit conservation finance, including those posed by previous regimes of accumulation that it relies on but also wants to overcome.

The Internet of Landlords: Digital Platforms and New Mechanisms of Rentier Capitalism

“…This literature has shown how the old story of treating land as a financial asset is being updated through the application of new systems of rent extraction and property management in order to maximise both profit from and power over the entire value chain (Dempsey and Bigger ). Kay () likens this to a “hostile takeover of nature” along the lines of Wall Street corporate raiders.…”

Impact investing in biodiversity conservation with bonds: An analysis of financial and environmental risk

“…Finance from the private sector is increasingly advocated to address this shortfall (Credit Suisse and McKinsey, 2016). However, investors are only likely to finance conservation projects that are capable of delivering a financial return alongside positive environmental impact—something termed ‘for‐profit conservation’ (Dempsey & Bigger, 2019). Impact investments in biodiversity conservation have been touted to play a key role in this effort to bolster conservation finance with return‐seeking capital (Credit Suisse and McKinsey, 2016; Fitzgerald et al, 2020).…”

Infrastructural nature

“…West (2016) analyzes this motion by reading Luxemborg’s theory of imperialism through Smith’s rent gap, emphasizing the tidal character of exploitation – a spatial fix that requires periodic redefinition of external nature and the types of accumulation it can be enrolled to support. Through this process spaces, species, and people surplus to the immediate needs of capital accumulation become discursively coded as waste in need of the rectifying power of investment ( Dempsey and Bigger, 2019 ), which can increasingly be structured as infrastructural investment. Infrastructural nature emerges through these dynamics of de- and revaluation.…”