Relations of divergence and convergence. Political ontology at the intersection of protected areas and neoliberal conservation

Abstract

We explore how relational thinking in protected area (PA) conservation both converges with and diverges from neoliberal capitalism. Deploying political ontology as a relational mode of enquiry, we identify how modern world-making continues to undermine the goals of PA conservation by constituting it as a practice for demarcating society from nature. An emerging socio-ecological paradigm has seen PA conservation shift from protecting fortresses of nature to managing PAs as sites for selective forms of human immersion in nature. No longer overtly opposing society to ‘Nature’, this paradigm, however, continues to mask the relations that join nature’s conservation to its destruction. Arguing that embedded practices of society-nature dualism reproduce the illusion that modern worlds stand apart from the rest of reality, we explore how the protected inside of PAs is co-created with the outside that threatens them. We describe a growing reliance of PA conservation on world-making practices that create PAs as sanctuaries of scarce and spectacular ‘Nature’ that drives neoliberal capital accumulation. While inspired by Indigenous practices of human co-becoming in earthly webs, our aim is to identify opportunities within contradictory modern legacies for practices of PA conservation that can recuperate the more-than-human condition. The interplay of life and death in conservation offers one such opportunity for PA practices that revive multilateral relations between diverse lives, human and otherwise. Through this example, we advocate for modest world-making practices in PA conservation that renegotiate the political and economic realities that threaten the Earth.

Keywords

• Simon West
• Protected areas
• political ontology
• conservation
• relational approaches
• relationality