The entrepreneurial Sunshine State: Neoliberalism, growth management and environmental conservation in Florida

ABSTRACT

The severity of anthropogenic environmental change demands swift and effective conservation action in order to maintain the Earth’s essential life support systems. In particular, long-standing best practice in conservation sciences suggests that integrated action both within and between levels of social organization is necessary to ensure coordinated efforts capable of dealing with the cross-boundary nature of environmental challenges. The increasingly hegemonic influence of neoliberal policy reform, broadly aimed at promoting competition and individual autonomy in governance arrangements, however, has been cast by environmental and social critics as running counter to those efforts aimed at conserving the collective environment for the public good. Focusing on the case of multistage restructuring of Florida’s famed Growth Management Act (GMA), I articulate how the compounding effects of neoliberalization reform efforts have led to the complete transformation of the GMA’s potential to facilitate adequate large-scale environmental management, precluding the possibility of achieving needed conservation results. From this, I conclude with reflections on the major challenges facing advocates of conservation in the coming decades, in particular the need to resist the dismantling of existing and promote the establishment of new mechanisms capable of facilitating coordinated and collaborative conservation in line with scientific best practice.

Acknowledgments

The article was significantly improved with the help of two anonymous reviewers. I also appreciate extremely helpful comments from Turaj Faran, Eric Clark, Dimitris Milonakis, and Anne Jerneck on earlier versions of this article.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this research was provided through the LUCID research school as part of a grant from the Swedish Research Council FORMAS (Grant Number 259-2008-1718).

Notes on contributors

Chad Stephen Boda

Chad S. Boda is currently a PhD candidate in Sustainability Science at Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies and the Lund University Centre of Excellence for Integration of the Social and Natural Dimensions of Sustainability. He holds a master of science degree in Environmental Studies and Sustainability Science from Lund University and a bachelor of science degree from Florida State University.