Peace Parks and the Politics of Neoliberal Conservation in Southern Africa (Duke University Press, 2013) and, with Wolfram Dressler and Robert Fletcher, editor of Nature TM Inc: New Frontiers of Environmental Conservation in the Neoliberal Age (University of Arizona Press, 2014). He is the author of Transforming the Frontier. He studies and teaches the political economy of conservation, environment, development and energy, with most of his empirical work based in southern Africa. Notes on contributorsīram Büscher is Associate Professor of Environment and Sustainable Development at the Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University and holds visiting positions at the Department of Geography, Environmental Management and Energy Studies, University of Johannesburg and Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, University of Stellenbosch in South Africa.
We sincerely thank the reviewers of the paper for the constructive comments and the participants of a seminar at the Institute of Social Studies, where the ideas in this paper were first presented. We evaluate AbC's attempt to compel nature to pay for itself and conclude by speculating whether this dynamic signals the impending end of the current global cycle of accumulation altogether. In the paper, we conceptualise and interrogate the grand claim of AbC and argue that it should be seen as a denial of the negative environmental impacts of ‘business as usual’ capitalism. Under slogans such as payments for environmental services, the Green Economy, and The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, public, private and non-governmental sectors seek ways to turn the non-material use of nature into capital that can simultaneously ‘save’ the environment and establish long-term modes of capital accumulation. Arguably the most promising is what we call ‘Accumulation by Conservation’ (AbC): a mode of accumulation that takes the negative environmental contradictions of contemporary capitalism as its departure for a newfound ‘sustainable’ model of accumulation for the future.
Governments, business leaders and other elite agents are frantically searching for a new, more stable mode of accumulation. Following the financial crisis and its aftermath, it is clear that the inherent contradictions of capitalist accumulation have become even more intense and plunged the global economy into unprecedented turmoil and urgency.
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