This article proposes a Foucaultian poststructuralist framework for understanding different positions within the contemporary debate concerning appropriate biodiversity conservation policy as embodying distinctive 'environmentalities'. In a recently-released work, Michel Foucault describes a neoliberal form of his familiar concept 'governmentality' quite different from conventional understandings of this oft-cited analytic. Following this, I suggest that neoliberalisation within natural resource policy can be understood as the expression of a 'neoliberal environmentality' similarly distinct from recent discussions employing the environmentality concept. In addition, I follow Foucault in describing several other discrete environmentalities embodied in competing approaches to conservation policy. Finally, I ask whether political ecologists' critiques of mainstream conservation might be viewed as the expression of yet another environmentality foregrounding concerns for social equity and environmental justice and call for more conceptualisation of what this might look like.

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There is an emerging recognition that the diversity of life comprises both biological and cultural diversity. In the past, however, it has been common to make divisions between nature and culture, arising partly out of a desire to control nature. The range of interconnections between biological and cultural diversity are reflected in the growing variety of environmental sub-disciplines that have emerged. In this article, we present ideas from a number of these sub-disciplines. We investigate four bridges linking both types of diversity (beliefs and worldviews, livelihoods and practices, knowledge bases and languages, and norms and institutions), seek to determine the common drivers of loss that exist, and suggest a novel and integrative path forwards. We recommend that future policy responses should target both biological and cultural diversity in a combined approach to conservation. The degree to which biological diversity is linked to cultural diversity is only beginning to be understood. But it is precisely as our knowledge is advancing that these complex systems are under threat. While conserving nature alongside human cultures presents unique challenges, we suggest that any hope for saving biological diversity is predicated on a concomitant effort to appreciate and protect cultural diversity.

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The concept of ecosystem services (ES) has taken the environmental science and policy literature by storm, and has become almost the approach to thinking about and assessing the nature-society relationship. In this review, we ask whether and in what way the ES concept is a useful way of organising research on the nature-society relationship. We trace the evolution of the different versions of the concept and identify key points of convergence and divergence. The essence of the concept nevertheless is that the contribution of biotic nature to human well-being is unrecognised and undervalued, which results in destruction of ecosystems. We discuss why this formulation has attracted ecologists and summarise the resultant contributions to research, particularly to the understanding of indirect or regulating services. We then outline three sets of weaknesses in the ES framework: confusion over ecosystem functions and biodiversity, omission of dis-services, trade-offs and abiotic nature, and the use of an economic valuation framework to measure and aggregate human well-being. Underlying these weaknesses is a narrow problem frame that is unidimensional in its environmental concern and techno-economic in its explanation of environmental degradation. We argue that an alternative framing that embraces broader concerns and incorporates multiple explanations would be more useful, and outline how this approach to understanding the nature-society relationship may be implemented.

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Environmental conservation finds itself in desperate times. Saving nature, to be sure, has never been an easy proposition. But the arrival of the Anthropocene - the alleged new phase of world history in which humans dominate the earth-system seems to have upped the ante dramatically; the choices facing the conservation community have now become particularly stark. Several proposals for revolutionising conservation have been proposed, including 'new' conservation, 'half Earth' and more. These have triggered heated debates and potential for (contemplating) radical change. Here, we argue that these do not take political economic realities seriously enough and hence cannot lead us forward. Another approach to conservation is needed, one that takes seriously our economic system's structural pressures, violent socio-ecological realities, cascading extinctions and increasingly authoritarian politics. We propose an alternative termed 'convivial conservation'. Convivial conservation is a vision, a politics and a set of governance principles that realistically respond to the core pressures of our time. Drawing on a variety of perspectives in social theory and movements from around the globe, it proposes a post-capitalist approach to conservation that promotes radical equity, structural transformation and environmental justice and so contributes to an overarching movement to create a more equal and sustainable world.

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The term 'amenity migration' describes a broad diversity of patterns of human movement to rural places in search of particular lifestyle attributes. This review of international literature, drawn from the authors' own prior research and searches on relevant databases, synthesises findings on the implications of amenity migration for the creation and distribution of environmental harms and benefits. Further, we critique common framings of amenity migration-related environmental transformations and offer suggestions for future research. Analysis is positioned within a review of five common themes reflected in the cases we consider: land subdivision and residential development; changes in private land use; cross-boundary effects; effects on local governance institutions; and displacement of impacts. Within each of these themes, we discuss the uneven geographies of environmental transformation formed by diverse conceptions of 'nature', patterns of local management of amenity-driven transformations, and ecological contexts. We conclude that, through both intended and unintended environmental consequences of dominant activities and land uses, amenity migration results in a redistribution of environmental harms and benefits at multiple scales, as rural landscapes are (partially and incompletely) re-created in line with the ideals and expectations of amenity migrant populations.

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Rising urban prosperity is escalating demand for wild animal products in Vietnam. Conservation interventions seek to influence consumer demand, but are based on a limited understanding of consumers and consumption behaviour. This report presents key findings of a structured survey (n=915) and semi-structured interviews (n=78) to investigate the social context of consumption of wild animal-derived products among the population of central Hanoi. Wildmeat is the product most commonly reported consumed-predominantly by successful, high-income, high-status males of all ages and educational levels-and is used as a medium to communicate prestige and obtain social leverage. As Vietnam's economy grows and its population ages, demand for wildmeat and medicinal products is likely to rise. Given the difficulties of acting on personal rather than collective interests and the symbolic role of wildmeat in an extremely status-conscious society, reducing demand is challenging. Influencing consumer behaviour over the long term requires social marketing expertise and has to be informed by an in-depth understanding, achieved using appropriate methods, of the social drivers of consumer demand for wild animal products. In the meantime, strengthened enforcement is needed to prevent the demand being met from consumers prepared to pay the rising costs of finding the last individuals of a species.

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Global concern about deforestation caused by fuelwood shortages prompted the introduction of Prosopis juliflora to many tropical areas in the 1970s and 1980s. P. juliflora is a hardy nitrogen-fixing tree that is now recognised as one of the world's most invasive alien species. The introduction and subsequent inva­sion of P. juliflora in the Lake Baringo area of Kenya has attracted national media attention and contra­dictory responses from responsible agencies. This paper presents an assessment of the livelihood effects, costs of control and local perceptions on P. juliflora of rural residents in the Lake Baringo area. Unlike some other parts of the world where it had been introduced, few of the potential benefits of P. juliflora have been captured and very few people realise the net benefits in places where the invasion is most ad­vanced. Strong local support for eradication and replacement appears to be well justified. Sustainable utilisation will require considerable investment and institutional innovation.

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Forest tenure reform has opened economic and livelihood opportunities for community forestry management through the devolution of management rights under broader decentralisation reforms. However, the transfer of rights and associated power to forest communities is usually partial. The view of property as composed of 'bundles of rights' allows for the disaggregation of rights transferred from government to local people. In practice, it is common that rights held by natural resource stakeholders encompass only part of the rights bundle. This partial transfer of rights shapes community forestry institutions and the manner in which they function. When communities and state agencies share responsibilities and benefits of forest management, they collaborate within co-management systems. Co-management systems are attractive to governments because they open avenues for local participation in resource governance and more equitable benefit-sharing while maintaining some level of state control. However, co-management systems can place a greater burden on community level actors without providing the corresponding benefits. As a result, co-management can fail to meet expectations. In response, the promotion of community forestry may require greater emphasis on adjusting forest regulatory frameworks, institutions, and agencies, to allow more freedom by community-level actors in developing forest management systems.

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Focusing on the most impoverished populations, we critically review and synthesise key themes from dominant frameworks for assessing the relationship between well-being and ecosystem services in developing countries. This requires a differentiated approach to conceptualising well-being that appropriately reflects the perspectives of the poorest-those most directly dependent on ecosystem services, and their vulnerability to external and policy-driven environmental change. The frameworks analysed draw upon environmental sciences, economics, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, and were selected on the basis of their demonstrated or potential ability to illustrate the relationship between environmental change and human well-being, as well as their prevalence in real world applications. Thus, the synthesis offered here is informed by the various theoretical, methodological, and hermeneutical contributions from each field to the notion of well-being. The review highlights several key dimensions that should be considered by those interested in understanding and assessing the impact of environmental change on the well-being of the world's poorest people: the importance of interdisciplinary consideration of well-being, the need for frameworks that integrate subjective and objective aspects of well-being, and the central importance of context and relational aspects of well-being. The review is of particular interest to those engaged in the post-2015 development agenda.

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Encounters between humans and wildlife that result in human fatalities can generate public anxiety and increase pressure on conservation managers and governments for risk mitigation. Low probability-high consequence events such as shark bites on humans attract substantial media attention for short time periods, but how the media react when several of these rare but fatal events occur in quick succession has seldom been subject to quantitative analysis. Understanding media portrayal of such encounters is important because it both reflects and influences public perceptions of risks, mitigation measures, and conservation policies. This study examined media portrayals of sharks between 2011 and 2013 in the state of Western Australia during which six shark bites resulting in fatalities occurred. We analysed 361 shark-related articles published in major Western Australian newspapers over 26 months to trace changes in media reporting about sharks prior to, during, and after the six fatalities. The findings indicate that when rare, but fatal human-wildlife events occur in quick succession, negative framing by media of wildlife behaviour and threats can exaggerate public anxiety about the pervasive presence of wildlife predators and high risk of human fatalities. The study highlights the need for government agencies and conservation scientists to better engage with media to provide accurate and effective information and advice to swimmers and surfers about shark ecology and behaviour.

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This essay offers a critical engagement with the ideal of policy relevant environmental knowledge. Using examples in environmental governance and conservation, it argues that by packaging knowledge in terms and categories that are considered politically salient, scientists do not just inform policy-making by providing information about presumed pre-existing objects in nature and environment; rather, science is constitutive of those objects and renders them amenable for policy and governance. These political implications of scientific knowledge imply a need for critical scrutiny of the interests that science serves and fails to serve as well as mechanisms to ensure the accountability of science. This essay is a modified and expanded version of the inaugural lecture with the same title that was delivered on June 2, 2016 at Wageningen University, the Netherlands.

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Market-based approaches to environmental management, such as payments for ecosystem services (PES), have attracted unprecedented attention during the past decade. In this article, we review 26 case studies on PES from 11 countries in Asia and Latin America to help improve the understanding of the factors affecting PES schemes at the local level. We assess outcomes of the PES interventions in relation to four outcomes: equity, participation, livelihood, and environmental sustainability. Although we consider economic efficiency of these schemes to be crucial for informing policy debates, assessing it was not under the scope of this review. Our analysis shows the importance of property rights and tenure security, transaction costs, household and community characteristics, effective communication about the intervention, and the availability of PES-related information with regard to the sustainability of ecosystem service markets. The review suggests that PES schemes could target improvements in more than one outcome dimension. Focusing on the above five areas can lead to the continued provision of ecosystem services and improvements of the well-being of local inhabitants.

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Despite dramatic transformations in conservation rhetoric regarding local people, indigenous rights, and community-oriented approaches, conservation in many places in Tanzania today continues to infringe on human rights. This happens through the exclusion of local people as knowledgeable active participants in management, policy formation, and decision-making processes in land that 'belongs' to them and on which their livelihoods depend. In this paper, I focus on a relatively new conservation area designed on the Conservation Trust Model-Manyara Ranch in Monduli district in northern Tanzania. I present this case as a conservation opportunity lost, where local Maasai who were initially interested in utilising the area for conservation, have come to resent and disrespect the conservation status of the area, after having lost it from their ownership and control. I illustrate how the denial of Maasai memories, knowledge, and management practices in Manyara Ranch threaten the future viability of the place both for conservation and for Maasai use. The paper contributes to a growing literature as well as a set of concerns regarding the relationship between conservation and human rights.

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Payments for ecosystem/environmental services (PES) interventions aim to subject ecosystem conservation to market dynamics and are often posited as win-win solutions to contemporary ecological, developmental and economic quagmires. This paper aims to contribute to the heated debate on PES by giving contrasting evidence from the Maloti-Drakensberg area, a crucial site for water and biodiversity resources in southern Africa. Several PES initiatives and studies, especially those associated with the Maloti-Drakensberg Transfrontier Project (MDTP), claim that an 'ecosystem services' market in the area is feasible and desirable. Based on empirical research in the area between 2003 and 2008, the paper challenges these assertions. It argues that the internationally popular PES trend provided an expedient way for the MDTP implementers to deal with the immense socio-political and institutional pressures they faced. Following and in spite of, tenuous assumptions and one-sided evidence, PES was marketed as a 'success' by the MDTP and associated epistemic communities that are implicated in and dependent on, this 'success'. The paper concludes that PES and the process by which it was marketed are both inherent to 'neoliberal conservation'-the paradoxical idea that capitalist markets are the answer to their own ecological contradictions.

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During a time of intensifying competition for land, Protected Areas (PAs) are coming under increasing pressure to justify their status. Positive local attitudes to a PA are a potentially important component of any such justification, especially in the developing world where human pressure on natural resources is often high. However, despite numerous studies our understanding of what drives positive attitudes to PAs is still exceedingly limited. Here, we review the literature on local attitudes towards PAs in developing countries. Our survey reveals a highly fragmented research area where studies typically lack an explicit conceptual basis, and where there is wide variation in choice of statistical approach, explanatory and response variables, and incorporation of contextual information. Nevertheless, there is a relatively high degree of concordance between studies, with certain variables showing strong associations with attitudes. We recommend that PA attitude researchers in developing countries adopt a more rigorous model building approach based on a clear conceptual framework and drawing on the extensive empirical literature. Such an approach would improve the quality of research, increase comparability, and provide a stronger basis to support conservation decision-making.

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Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) programmes are designed to ensure that rural residents benefit from conservation initiatives. But where human-wildlife conflict threatens life and livelihood, wildlife impacts can undermine the goals of CBNRM. Based on research on women's experiences in Namibia's Kwandu Conservancy, we examine both the visible and hidden impacts of human-wildlife conflict. In Kwandu Conservancy, the effects of human-wildlife conflict are ongoing, reaching beyond direct material losses to include hidden impacts such as persistent worries about food insecurity, fears for physical safety, and lost investments. Existing vulnerabilities related to poverty and marital statuses make some women more susceptible to wildlife impacts, and less able to recover from losses or to access compensation. This process may actually deepen the vulnerability of women whose economic status is already marginal. Because the benefits of wildlife conservation accrue at multiple scales, we recommend that the cost of human-wildlife conflict be better distributed, with additional resources for prevention and compensation made available for conservancy residents.

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Tourism and the sharing of the associated revenues with local people have been increasingly fronted as key instruments for maintaining protected areas (PAs) globally. This paper focuses on a tourism revenue sharing scheme employed in Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, involving rural farmers. We find that the scheme faces difficulties in integrating with the existing local historical, socio-economic, and institutional landscapes. Similar experiences from other cases suggest that these challenges are generic, and relate to lack of real local participation; an insignificant scale of economic returns to local people relative to costs; inept institutions in charge of planning, managing and evaluation efforts; and an institutional complexity that constrains most activities. We conclude that although tourism revenue sharing is an appealing concept, and its oft-quoted logic of promoting conservation and rural development is difficult to ignore, it is challenging to plan and implement in competent ways. We do not suggest abandoning tourism revenue sharing, but rather believe that a more concerted effort to overcome the mechanism's economic and institutional shortcomings, as identified in this paper, may be more appropriate. The overall findings indicate that problems are not with tourism revenue sharing as an ambition, but with the difficulties encountered in putting it into practice.

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This paper is addressed to academics, conservation agencies and governments primarily in developing countries, faced with the need to protect species from poaching by global syndicates or local groups that threaten the survival of species. The argument of this paper is that while military intervention may provide short to medium terms gains, these have to be weighed against the likely medium to long term financial and socio-economic costs of military activity on people, including the military themselves, and conservation. These costs are likely to be significant and may even threaten the sustainability of conservation areas. While the analysis is developed in relation to the military intervention to inhibit rhino poaching in the Kruger National Park, South Africa, the literature review reveals that similar challenges occur internationally and the South African case study may be applicable to a wide range of anti-poaching conservation efforts and military options throughout the developing world. A multi-pronged approach, where all components are strongly implemented, is necessary to combat poaching.

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The 2015 United Nations Paris Agreement on Climate reinforces actions to conserve and enhance forests as carbon reservoirs. A decade after sub-national demonstration projects to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) commenced, we examine why many REDD+ schemes appear to have fuelled social conflict while having limited success in addressing the drivers of forest loss and degradation. Our analysis is two-tiered: first we synthesise findings from a set of ethnographic case studies of REDD+ in Mainland Southeast Asia, conducted by the authors; second, we explore whether the insights from our regional synthesis apply globally, through a comparative review of published qualitative research on REDD+ field experiences. Our results reveal three major implementation dynamics that can undermine REDD+ in practice, which we conceptualise from science and technology studies and critical political ecology as follows: 1) problems with the enrolment of governments, civil society, and local forest users in REDD+ governance; 2) the prevalence of overly simplified codification systems for REDD+ implementation that mismatch targeted societies and landscapes; and 3) the consequent dissonance between REDD+ objectives and outcomes. Together, these problematic dynamics reveal how and why REDD+ so often misses its targets of reducing deforestation and delivering community benefits. In effect, it appears that REDD+ in the course of implementation maps onto local power structures and political economies, rendering it blunt as tool for change. The potential of REDD+ as a 'solution' in the global climate regime must therefore be scrutinized, along with other similar mechanisms espoused by the green economy.

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Like conservation-induced displacement, human-wildlife conflict (HWC) has potentially negative implications for communities in and around protected areas. While the ways in which displacement emerges from the creation of 'wilderness' conservation landscapes are well documented, how the production of 'wilderness' articulates with intensifications in HWC remains under examined both empirically and conceptually. Using a political-ecological approach, I analyse increases of HWC in Mozambique's Limpopo National Park (LNP) and the subsequent losses of fields and livestock, as well as forms of physical displacement suffered by resident communities. While intensifications of encounters between wildlife on the one hand and people and livestock on the other result in part from increases in wildlife populations, I argue that HWC and the ways in which it constitutes and contributes to various forms of displacement results more centrally from changing relations between wildlife and people and the power and authority to manage conflict between them. Both of these contributing factors, moreover, are the consequence of practices that aim to transform the LNP into a wilderness landscape of conservation and tourism. HWC and its negative impacts are thus not natural phenomena, but are the result of political decisions to create a particular type of conservation landscape.

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Biodiversity conservation, in practice, is defined through the institutionalised association of individuals, organisations, institutions, bodies of knowledge, and interests. Events like the World Conservation Congress (WCC) constitute political sites where much of that institutionalisation is rendered legible and where struggles over the organisational order of conservation are acted out. Over the past decade one source of struggle has been the role of private sector actors and markets. This paper treats the WCC as a site where tension over market-based mechanisms of conservation becomes visible and where it becomes possible to watch durable institutional arrangements form and enter standard operational practice of organisations like IUCN. This paper builds upon recent work on the performative aspects of governance and analyses the WCC as an integral mechanism in achieving a renegotiated 'order' of conservation with 'private sector engagement' as a core operational practice. It describes how this performative work is predicated, in part, on the act of meeting; and the ways meetings serve both as sites for the formation of associations and as vehicles that privilege certain positions in renegotiating an organisational order under which the interests of capital accumulation receive an unparalleled degree of access and consideration in conservation planning and practice.

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The idea that the support of local people is essential for the success of protected areas is widespread in conservation, underpinning various conservation paradigms and policies, yet it has rarely been critically examined. This paper explores the circumstances which determine whether or not local opposition to protected areas can cause them to fail. It focuses on the power relations between protected areas and local communities, and how easily they can influence one another. We present a case study from the Dominican Republic, where despite two decades of resentment with protected policies, local people are unable to significantly challenge them because of fears of violence from guards, inability to reach important political arenas, social ties with guards, and the inability to coordinate action. It concludes by arguing that there are often substantial barriers that prevent local people from challenging unpopular conservation policies, and that local support is not necessarily essential for conservation.

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Community-based conservation is being increasingly recognised as a major global force in the protection and sustainable management of ecosystems and species. Yet documentation of its main achievements and shortcomings, and the key issues it faces, is still at a nascent stage. This paper introduces the concept and experience of two forms of community-based conservation: Collaborative Management of Protected Areas (CMPA), and Indigenous Peoples' and Local Community Conserved Territories and Areas (ICCAs). It explores the emergence of these approaches in the context of global international conservation policy. Reviewing four case studies that were presented at a symposium convened at the Bowdoin College (Maine, USA, in November 2008), and drawing from the discussion during that session, it identifies some key lessons and principles that are likely to be applicable to community-based conservation across the world.

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