Conservation, biopolitics, and the governance of life and death

The politics of environmental conservation has long been a key concern for human and environmental geographers. Recently, geographers have begun to employ Foucauldian insights on biopower and biopolitics to understand conservation's changing agendas, techniques, and logics, focusing on the specific ways in which non‐human nature is ordered, ranked, and promoted. This review examines how four domains of conservation—endangered species management, conservation breeding and genetics, protected areas, and rewilding—have been conceptualized as biopolitical. In each domain, different sets of scientific practices and understandings produce valuations of life that appear natural, universal, and technically derived even as they are particular and normative. Thus, we find that there is not a single “conservation biopolitics” but instead an entanglement of overlapping and contradictory logics and techniques. At its best, the Foucauldian biopolitical approach can help to parse the range of possible logics and techniques that constitute conservation and to expand who is authorized to take part in debates and decisions about what life should be protected, how, why, and for whom.