Governance rescaling and the neoliberalization of nature: the case of biodiversity conservation in four EU countries

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate how processes of rescaling biodiversity governance downwards, upwards and outwards are interlinked with the increased global and European trends toward the neoliberalization of nature conservation. We furthermore explore who wins and who loses from this interrelationship. We focus on the European Union and specifically on England, Finland, Greece, and Poland, and we pay particular attention to the effects of the ongoing economic crisis. We draw on Marxist-influenced political ecology and geography literatures and use primary empirical data obtained through focus groups and interviews as well as analysis of legal and policy documents. Our analysis shows that EU states have mobilized a range of political strategies intended to expand and intensify the alignment of conservation with capitalist interests within a distinctively neoliberal framework. However, the variation in governmental strategies in the case study countries reveals that variegated neoliberalizations are intertwined with variegated rescaling processes. Thus despite the increasing homogenization of conservation, the historical evolution of governance forms and their legacy as well as differing socioeconomic and political contexts play a pivotal role in current dynamics. We argue that unraveling the different roles of the rescaling of biodiversity governance is crucial in exposing the contradictions inherent in the relationship between conservation and capitalism and in showing that the consensus-driven neoliberal rhetoric is increasingly lapsing into authoritarian governance in the era of one of the most severe capitalist crises.

Keywords:

• biodiversity governance
• conservation policy
• neoliberalism
• economic crisis
• payments for ecosystem services
• biodiversity offsets
• TTIP
• neoliberal hegemony

Acknowledgments

We thank many people and organizations involved for providing us with information necessary for our research. The language of this paper was improved vastly by Jonathan Smith.

This study was supported by (1) the SCALES project (Securing the Conservation of biodiversity across Administrative Levels and spatial, temporal, and Ecological Scales) funded by the European Commission as a Large-scale Integrating Project within FP 7 under grant 226 852 (www.scales-project.net), (2) an honorary fellowship (‘Aristeia’) awarded to Dr Apostolopoulou from the Research Committee of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2013, and (3) a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship within the 7th European Community Framework Programme (PIEF-GA-2013-622631, Conservation and Ecosystem Services in the New biodiversity Economy – CESINE) awarded to Dr Apostolopoulou in March 2014.

Notes

1. It should be pointed out that the selection of key documents has been based on an extensive policy analysis conducted from October 2009 to June 2013 in the context of the EU FP7 project ‘SCALES’ (http://www.scales-project.net).

2. By nature conservation, we refer to a set of policies and practices which aim to conserve, protect, restore, or sustainably manage natural ecosystems and, in more recent decades, biodiversity.