Saving the Planet with Class: Professional-Managerial Virtue and the Emergence of Neoliberal Conservation

Abstract

Conservation's moral significance for capitalist reproduction has been vividly evident through its neoliberal formations, in which conservationists exalt the virtues of “natural capital” for “saving the planet.” Political ecologists and human geographers have critically engaged conservation's neoliberalization but not explained how and why conservation emerged as a prominent and durable realm of capitalist virtue-making. To address these questions, we focus on the relationship between neoliberal conservation's emergence, capitalist class formations, and their moral ideologies, particularly the convergent ascendance of conservation and the professional-managerial class (PMC) following WWII. We trace how modern conservation became a key domain of PMC virtue-making during this period and continued as such through the shift from state-centric managerialism to market-centric technocracy that began in the 1970s. During the late twentieth-century neoliberal policy turn, PMC actors refashioned their virtue-making around market logic, enabling mainstream conservation to endure and expand as a prime source of capitalist moral authority. Its prospects appear less certain amid rising authoritarianism.