The Genealogy of Contemporary Nature/Forest Conservation

Abstract

We seek to understand the contemporary adaptive co-management framework of natural/forest resource conservation. To do this we trace the genealogy of adaptive co-management and its call for the “democratic participation” of “all stakeholders”. We show how this inserted commercial agents as stakeholders, thus providing contemporary neoliberal accumulation regimes with a problem-solving framework for natural/forest conservation shaped by, and amenable to, their characteristic managerial discourse of “flexibility”, “innovation”, “voluntary self-regulation”, “incentivization”, “partnership”, “network(ing)”, “social learning” and “local knowledge”.