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"This book documents a growing global collaboration among states, non-state actors, and private-sector firms concerned with biodiversity preservation to promote so-called market-based instruments (MBIs) that seek to reconcile environmental preservation and economic development by harnessing preservation itself as the source of conservation finance. It describes how this project has developed over the past several decades, the expanding network of organizations and actors that have come together around its promotion, and how the project has managed to "fail forward" over time despite a consistent inability to actually achieve its lofty aims."

In this op-ed, Robert Fletcher reviews The Dasgupta Review, a report commissioned by the UK Treasury Department on The Economics of Biodiversity, which was released in February 2021. Fletcher argues that rather than offering a fresh or timely analysis of biodiversity loss and how to counter it, the Review continues a long line of similar reports that leave capitalism in the background as a given, and lay blame for what ails the world at the feet of "population." Such disavowed capital-centric Malthusianism, Fletcher argues, renders the popular report a distraction from desperately needed analyses of the political economy of biodiversity loss.

The workshop addresses the growing popularity of post-constructivist perspectives within the social sciences and humanities and explores their implications for environmental politics. These perspectives, which include ontological, posthumanist, and new materialist schools of thought, have compelled many researchers to account for the ways in which a wide range of nonhuman actors and objects influence political processes. Yet these attempts have also been criticized for contributing to or even undermining the environmental politics needed to confront the daunting threats to future of life on earth. For the workshop, Robert Fletcher explores different positions within this debate and proposes that only a via media offers a productive path forward. Taking the important challenges advanced by post-constructivist perspectives seriously, one can nonetheless ask where they advance an effective environmental politics. The workshop focuses on the so-called 'ontological turn' within social anthropology and related fields. Proponents of this perspective commonly present themselves as promoting a radical, even revolutionary politics. Yet others have seen in them a post-political intervention that may undermine the ability to take a firm stance among the various perspectives competing in today's political landscape. Fletcher suggests that a certain understanding of ontology – what he calls a 'strong ontological position' – is indeed incompatible with the type of political engagement that an effective environmental politics demands. The strong ontological option, Fletcher argues, leaves actors with only two options: brute power politics or a retreat into ontological particularity. He concludes that a strong ontological position is incompatible with – and indeed, quite detrimental to – both research and political engagement committed to social and environmental justice. ; 'The Ontological Turn: Radical Politics or Post-Political Impasse?', workshop presented at the lecture Robert Fletcher, Can the Posthuman Speak?: In Defense ...

The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's HouseAudre Lorde (1983)ABSTRACT Recently, a number of prominent conservationists have declared the last quarter century of global efforts to unite conservation and development through so‐called integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) an overwhelming failure, asserting that there are likely to be irreconcilable trade‐offs between environmental preservation and enhancing human well‐being that future policy will have to take into account. I suggest, however, that such trade‐offs may be less an inherent feature of the world than an artefact of the neoliberal governance model upon which the global conservation movement increasingly relies, as embodied in the ICDP approach. In eschewing questions of resource redistribution and instead depending on economic growth to address social inequality, neoliberal conservation strategies often paradoxically force into opposition the very conservation and development interests they ostensibly seek to reconcile. This thesis is illustrated through discussion of Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula, a celebrated biodiversity hotspot where conservation interventions increasingly emphasize neoliberal market mechanisms designed to incentivize preservation by demonstrating the economic value ofin situnatural resources.