Buying nature to save it? From neoliberal failure to markets-at-hand

Abstract

Failure has become an important analytical theme in the Neoliberal Natures literature. Failures of various neoliberal conservation schemes are often theorized in reference to inherent limits to neoliberal ideologies or in terms of place-based complexities in constructing market mechanisms. We extend this analysis by centering attention on the state and its dual relations with traditional industries such as oil and gas as well as with the emergent conservation industry. Much has been written about the state's role in promoting environmental markets, but there is room to understand how the state produces demand, primarily by making traditional industries pay for their environmental harm. Empirically, we analyze the use of market approaches to enforce the US Endangered Species Act. We show that the rise and fall of a market solution such as biodiversity offsetting is not primarily driven by efforts to commodify nature, but to resolve temporal and spatially localized barriers to accumulation. Rather than a sweeping roll-out of market forms, we observe the buildup of markets-at-hand – conditions where the market option is in reserve and can be mobilized on short notice as and when political economic conditions oblige regulated industries to seriously account for their environmental harms. Failure is not a bug, but a feature of neoliberal conservation.