Abstract: In this paper I emphasise the financialisation of environmental conservation as 1. the turning of financiers to conservation parameters as a new frontier for investment, and 2. the rewriting of conservation practice and nonhuman worlds in terms of banking and financial categories. I introduce financialisation as a broadly controlling impetus with relevance for environmental conservation. I then note ways in which a spectacular investment frontier in conservation is being opened. I highlight the draw of assertions of lucrative gains, combined with notions of geographical substitutability, in creating tradable indicators of environmental health and harm. I disaggregate financialisation strategies into four categories—nature finance, nature work, nature banking and nature derivatives—and assess their implications. The concluding section embraces Marx and Foucault as complementary thinkers in understanding the transforming intensifications of late capitalism in environmental conservation, and diagnosing their associated effects and costs.

(2012). Towards a Synthesized Critique of Neoliberal Biodiversity Conservation. Capitalism Nature Socialism: Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4-30.

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 modem conservation practice under the political and economic, and cultural, value-frame of neoliberalism. My aim is to highlight some shared conceptualizations 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 contemporaly 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.

Biodiversity offsets are part of a new suite of biodiversity conservation instruments designed to mitigate the impacts of economic developments on species, habitats and ecosystems. Led by an international collaboration of representatives from companies, financial institutions, governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the Business and Biodiversity Offsets Programme (BBOP) of the market-oriented Forest Trends group, has created a global framework through which principles and standards for biodiversity offsets are being established. These enable the apparently unavoidable harm caused by development to be exchanged for investment in conservation activities both at different geographical locations and in the future. Offsets can also be traded via bespoke markets for environmental conservation indicators. Given a globalizing ‘green economy’ discourse that conservation can be a profitable enterprise if guided by market-based mechanisms and the entwining of ecological with economic spheres, biodiversity offsets are becoming key to current entrepreneurial interest in biodiversity conservation. The ‘green rush’ of my title refers to both this interest in conservation activities that can be marketized, and to an associated appetite in business and financial sectors for incorporating biodiversity offsets as part of a strategy for ‘greening’ the environmental harm caused by developments. I illustrate the uses to which biodiversity offsets are being put, through a case study connecting the extraction of uranium in Namibia for the generation of nuclear power in the UK. Biodiversity offsets are invoked to satisfy requirements for off-site mitigation of environmental harm at points of both extraction and ‘consumption’ of uranium in this case. I highlight some of the (anti-)ecological assumptions guiding calculations of complex ecological assemblages so that they can become biodiversity offsets, and draw attention to the intensified distributions of new environmental values with which biodiversity offsets may be associated.