BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

    The elephant in the room? Problematizing ‘new’ (neoliberal) biodiversity conservation

    Sullivan, Sian (2006) The elephant in the room? Problematizing ‘new’ (neoliberal) biodiversity conservation. Forum for Development Studies 33 (1), pp. 105-135. ISSN 0803-9410.

    [img] Text (Refereed)
    Article_Sullivan.pdf - Published Version of Record
    Restricted to Repository staff only

    Download (1MB) | Request a copy

    Abstract

    As argued recently in Forum for Development Studies, a ‘back to the barriers’ approach to biodiversity conservation is again prevalent, after some two decades of emphasis on ‘community-based’ initiatives. This involves the establishment and expansion of national parks from which people are variously excluded. In this article, however, I suggest that community-based approaches such as Community-Based Natural Resources Management (CBNRM) remain important, and in many ways simply constitute the other side of the same coin of modern conservation practice under the political and economic, and cultural, value-frame of neoliberalism. My aim is to highlight some shared conceptualisations and rationalisations regarding perceptions of ‘the environment’ and of people–environment relationships that inform both of these two broad-brush policy and practical orientations towards ‘biodiversity conservation’. The article thus draws on a Foucaultian analytics to ‘problematise’ the contemporary and globalising neoliberal episteme within which both these approaches are produced; and to open a space where orientations (towards ‘the environment’) that are ‘othered’ and thereby silenced by this frame might be articulated.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): biodiversity conservation, neoliberalism, Foucault, problematise, episteme, community-based natural resources management (CBNRM), environment, globalisation, ‘other’, incommensurable values, sustainability
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences
    Depositing User: Dr Sian Sullivan
    Date Deposited: 01 Feb 2013 12:19
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:01
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/6017

    Statistics

    Activity Overview
    6 month trend
    1Download
    6 month trend
    338Hits

    Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.

    Archive Staff Only (login required)

    Edit/View Item Edit/View Item