Introduction: Accumulation by restoration and political ecologies of repair

Abstract

Accumulation by Restoration (AbR) represents a shift from a conservationist ‘mode of production’ emphasizing sustainability and preservation to a ‘growth economy of repair’ in which nature becomes valued not just for its use but also for its potential for repair or restoration. The ‘repair mode’ mobilizes the assumption, imagery and mythology of degradation juxtaposed with the promise of economic and ecological redemption. Through rationalization, restoration, re-creation and/or re-cultivation, it aims to generate new, better-disciplined, more legible, ‘substitutable’ natures to multiple accumulative ends. Bridging political ecology, critical agrarian studies and science and technology studies, contributions to this themed issue explore transformations associated with AbR at across scales and involving variegated alliances, discourses, technologies and institutional dynamics giving rise to ecologies of repair. We demonstrate how the dynamics and contradictions of the repair mode are mediated and enacted through the performative, spectacular and metrological rendering of ‘mitigation’, ‘equivalence’, ‘neutrality’ and ‘repair’ as instruments and object, simultaneous means and ends. These dynamics have given rise to new materialities and technologies of governance and new intensities and spatialities of resource control and accumulation, as what were consequences of growth have become strategic goals and the foundation of a new growth economy.

Biocircularities: New Formations of Embodied Time

“…In this mode, circularity constitutes a 'myth' that allows toxic and polluting industries to be maintained while their products are reused, repurposed and recirculated (O'Hare, 2021). Circles are deeply implicated in the 'repair mode': a form of thinking and acting within which natures are instrumentalised and mobilised to remediate harm (Huff and Brock, 2023). Circles are not innocent images in these evocations; circular imaginaries can serve as warrant or alibi for the reproduction of the status quo.…”