Centre for Space, Place and Society

Neoliberal conservation is based on the assumption that only the market-based valorization of nature can motivate governments and communities to conserve nature. The literature suggests that this is a relatively new phenomenon, the result of an ideological shift that has accompanied the rise of neoliberalism since the 1980s. Some scholars have even claimed that international conservation NGOs such as IUCN or WWF initially “fostered imaginaries of wilderness as spaces that lay beyond capitalism’s final frontier”, and that conservation and business were organised in strictly separate, at times oppositional worlds” before this shift (Greiner & Bollinger 2023). But concerns about the future of wildlife and national parks after decolonization already led to several early experiments aimed at turning wildlife into an irreplaceable economic asset that could compete with other forms of land-use as far back as in the 1950s and 60s. It was also these fears that sparked the emergence of a vast nongovernmental conservation sector in Africa in the first place (Kniewel 2025). Without exception, these organizations reimagined wildlife as a renewable natural resource to be exploited for human benefit through such aggressive measures such as cropping, the commercial “harvest” of wildlife for meat and trophies, in order to convert the supposedly ignorant African population to their cause. Using the example of leading international conservation NGOs, that even back then received a large portion of their funding from Western industrialists, I will examine how these organization came to embrace technocratic market-based conservation practices long before the global rise of neoliberalism, how  they enshrined them in international treaties such as the African Convention on the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources of 1968, and how these ideas still shape nature conservation today.

Global environmentalism foregrounds issues such as concern over biodiversity conservation, greenhouse gas emissions, and deforestation. Yet environmental thought and activism from Africa remains marginal in these international debates and in resultant policymaking. This presentation starts from some of the most polluted places on the continent – the gold mines in Johannesburg, the copper mines of Zambia, and the oil-rich Niger Delta – proposing that understandings of what environmentalism is need to be fundamentally rethought. Paying attention to everyday acts of care, spirituality, and grassroots environmental activism demonstrates that awareness of pollution and environmental harm have been longstanding in these localities. Relying on oral history, ethnography, photography, and the analysis of literature and music allows us to broaden and reassess what counts as environmental thought and environmental politics in Africa.

This talk introduces my new SNSF-funded research project Curated Escapes and Derelict Landscapes in Times of Climate Change, which examines how climate change is producing new, highly unequal geographies of elite escape and dereliction. While environmental change render certain areas increasingly uninhabitable – both effectively and rhetorically –  wealthy elites are creating exclusive “curated escapes”—from private islands and luxury wildlife estates to off-grid shelters and virtual havens. The project investigates the historical and political conditions under which such landscapes are made possible, and how they relate to broader dynamics of dispossession, environmental control, and social inequality. The presentation also offers a brief introduction to my recently co-published book (with Bernard C. Moore) Space is the Ultimate Luxury. Capitalists, Conservationists and Ancestral Land in Namibia which served as a point of departure for the new project. This book explores the history, ecology, and society of a seemingly inhospitable stretch of land southern Namibia, where a group of African farmers have succeeded to stay on their land through decades of colonialism and apartheid. In the 21st century, however, new actors that want to evict the farmers have emerged—super-wealthy individuals and companies acquiring massive swaths of land under the guise of nature conservation, transforming them into their private, exclusive and well-curated landscapes, emptied of people and livestock.

Conservationists are among the staunchest members of the professional-managerial class (PMC). They exalt the virtues of ‘natural capital’ to ‘save the planet’ while consistently avoiding language that suggests economic redistribution. Political ecology and human geography literatures have critically engaged conservation’s neoliberalization but not explained why conservation emerged as a prominent capitalist virtue. By tracing neoliberal conservation’s roots to competing 1940’s ideologies, this presentation shows how the shift from state-centered managerialism to market-driven technocracy transformed conservation and subordinated PMC virtue to a reinvigorated capitalist class. This renewed ‘class virtue’ allowed conservation to become a prime source of moral authority despite persistent failure.