Fixing extraction through conservation: On crises, fixes and the production of shared value and threat

Abstract

We are currently witnessing a global trend of intensifying and deepening relationships between extractive companies and biodiversity conservation organisations that warrants closer scrutiny. Although existing literature has established that these two sectors often share the same space and rely on similar logics, it is increasingly common to find biodiversity conservation being carried out through partnerships between extractive and conservation actors. In this article, we explore what this cooperation achieves for both sectors. Using illustrative examples of extractive-conservation collaboration across sub-Saharan Africa, we argue that new entanglements between extractive and conservation actors are motivated by multiple purposes. First, partnering with conservation actors serves as a spatial and socio-ecological fix for extractive companies in response to multiple crises that threaten the sector's productivity. Second, new forms of collaboration between extractive and conservation actors create pathways for both sectors to produce new value from nature. For the extractive sector, creating new value from nature works as a further fix to capitalist crises whereas, for the conservation sector, producing value through nature amounts to new opportunities for capital accumulation. Importantly, working together to produce shared value from nature within and beyond extractive concessions secures both sectors' control over the means of production. Theoretically, our analysis links literature on value in capitalist nature with that on spatial and socio-ecological fixes.

Crisis conservation and green extraction: biodiversity offsets as spaces of double exception

“…Many studies of extraction come from, or relate to political ecology approaches, especially as a result of the commodity boom initiated in the early 2000s (Bridge 2004), exposing uneven power relations in resource control and extractive governance (Peluso 1992), the ambivalent attitudes and effects of extraction (Bebbington 2008;Bridge 2008), the various forms of violence associated with extraction (Navas et al 2018;Watts 2001), the numerous struggles against extractivism (Condé and Le Billon 2017;Temper et al 2015), and increasingly common biodiversity conservation partnership between extractive and conservation actors (Enns et al 2019). Following a brief background description of extraction and conservation, I then provide an overview of their interactions.…”

“…Secondly, this neoliberalization provided the extractive sector facing a double crisis of legitimacy and exhaustibility with a spatial fix, opening up new lands and reserves, and an ecological fix, flipping conservationists from opponents to partners through market solutions (Enns et al 2019;O'Connor 1988). In short, conservation organizations could save nature by helping corporations bring it to markets (Adams 2017;Büscher et al 2012).…”

“…Extraction-conservation partnerships connect a wide array of organizations, objects, narratives, and practices, including extractive companies, conservation organizations, local communities, government authorities, geological formations, ecosystems, protected areas, carbon sinks, and endangered species lists. As discussed below, extraction and conservation partnerships have a broad set of costs and benefits (Adams 2017) and create unevenly distributed potential and realized values (Enns et al 2019). Building on a growing political ecology literature investigating the articulation of extraction and conservation, I focus on the transformation of affinities and enmities across these two sectors.…”

“…Political ecology studies have extensively considered both resource extraction and biodiversity conservation, but more rarely their interactions (Huff and Orengo 2020). Here, I seek to contribute to the growing literature addressing this gap through a discussion of the political ecologies of extraction and conservation (Adams 2017;Büscher and Davidov 2016;Enns et al 2019;Norris 2017;Purwins 2020;Symons 2018;). Building on studies from within political ecology and other disciplines (see Sonter et al 2018), I hope to help map out -both conceptually and literally -some of the main extraction-conservation relations.…”

“…From a conceptual perspective, I draw on political ecology -including inputs from 'new materialism', 'post-developmentalism', and epistemic 'decolonization' efforts (Schulz 2017) to discuss relations between extraction and conservation, with a focus on the ways extractive corporations and conservation organizations co-create spaces of double exception to secure their activities and realize value out of 'nature', whether out of commodity extraction, carbon credits, or ecotourism (Enns et al 2019). For this, I briefly review some of the main current paradigms and trends in extraction and conservation, focusing on relations of affinity and enmity between the two and towards 'Others', focusing on local communities standing in the way of industrial extraction and neoliberal conservation.…”