Conservation, Neoliberalism, and Social Science: a Critical Reflection on the SCB 2007 Annual Meeting in South Africa

Conservation biology is actively reinventing itself to fit the neoliberal world order: the increasingly all-pervasive trend to conform social and political affairs to market dynamics. This much is clear from attending the 21st annual meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB), with the theme “One World, One Conservation, One Partnership,” which was held in July 2007 in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Here I offer a critical reflection on the meeting in which I argue 2 points. First, in their drive to conserve biodiversity, conservation biologists are too eager to realign their field with seductive neoliberal win–win visions. As a consequence, discourses are created that ultimately reinforce an ideological system that is inherently unsustainable. Second, this realignment leads conservation biology increasingly into the social sciences, whereby conservationists oddly seem to throw overboard 2 scientific principles they have always held so dear: acknowledging and critically analyzing complex realities and grounding arguments with rigorous empirical research. Attending a large conference such as the SCB annual meeting provides one with several entry points for learning. The most obvious one is through what is presented in paper and poster presentations. A second, probably equally important, yet less familiar, way is through participatory observation: studying the conference as a confluence of social and political dynamics from the perspective of an insider. As a social scientist studying the effects of neoliberalism on conservation-development interventions, I gained many insights during the annual meeting. Many of these were based on the latter mode of learning: participatory observation. I paid particular attention to the types of discourses that seemed dominant during the meeting and the various networks that supported these. This amounts to a “snapshot” of one conference, which rarely provides a good methodological basis for generalizations. Nevertheless, although I accept the limitations of the approach, the fact remains that the SCB meeting is arguably the largest and most important of its kind and should therefore provide a rich microcosm of the trends that occur in conservation biology at large. Neoliberalization as such means that more and more facetsof life are becoming embedded within a competitive-market framework whereby goods, services, and agency can be traded monetarily (commercialization). Relationships, for instance between humans and nature but also among humans, that were previously free from commerce are transformed into commercial relationships, whereby the laws of demand and supply increasingly determine values. I consider these trends problematic for conservation biology. From this perspective, one central, worrying trend stood out: the overwhelming neoliberalization of the field of conservation biology. As stated earlier, neoliberalism can be described as a social order characterized by the urge to bring everything into the sphere of the market. Neoliberalism, thus, is more than a model. It is an ideology about how social and political life should be organized that is explicitly global in its ambitions and therefore notoriously hard to define. Better, then, to focus on some of its modalities—competition and commercialization— that are increasingly leaving their mark on conservation science and practice. To be sure: I am not against conservation biology or biodiversity conservation. Like many social scientists, I am a concerned academic who is deeply convinced that our current way of treating the planet is not sustainable, that something must be done about this, and that we must continue to hope that reversing the current unsustainable trend is possible. Nevertheless, I am also convinced that sustainability—in its multiple interpretations—is ultimately not feasible within a politico-ideological framework of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, despite its ability to incorporate and deal with many systemic contradictions, ultimately devours the resources it depends on for its continued existence. One merely has to think about the commercial possibilities unleashed by environmental degradation (e.g., those benefiting from and marketing