This year’s Wageningen Political Ecology PhD Spring School takes stock of important political ecology of conservation debates from a variety of different angles. Specifically, it focuses on three interconnected elements in these debates: 1) extinction struggles; and 2) neoliberal natures and 3) new visions for how we can do conservation (as well as relate to nonhumans) differently in more hopeful, politically astute and convivial ways.

The five-day intensive PhD workshop ‘Political Ecologies of Conservation: extinction struggles, neoliberal natures and convivial alternatives’ will be held from 8-12 April 2024 in Wageningen University, the Netherlands. The workshop gives motivated PhD students the chance to deepen their knowledge on diverse political ecological approaches to contemporary environmental crises, strategies for conservation and environmentalism in response to the crises, and the broader processes of transformation these are part of. One of the main crises relates to biodiversity, the very foundations of life on our planet, and the swiftly-changing conservation discourses, practices and ideologies that aim to respond to the crisis. Given rapidly changing material dynamics and academic and public debates that really go to the heart of contemporary extinction struggles and whether indeed the crisis is so severe that it endangers human societies themselves, it is important to take stock of where conservation is at and where it is going. Building on the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, there seems to be a renewed sense of purpose and direction in the international community, yet this is based on proposals that neatly resemble earlier protected areas based and neoliberal forms of conservation. At the same time, it became clear that indigenous and alternative conservation ideas have starting influencing the mainstream, if perhaps only in discourse so far, but certainly backed by a growing network of organisations and people aiming to do conservation differently. The political ecology of conservation has been a lively debate for the past decades, but needs constant updating and and rethinking to do justice to empirical changes and emerging themes and debates.

• Political Ecologies of Conservation: Extinction struggles, neoliberal natures and convivial alternatives
• Mon 8 April – Fri 12 April, 2024
• Leeuwenborch, Wageningen

More info.