Presentation short abstract

This paper uses the metaphor of a “living monolith” to examine the emotional and political decay of neoliberal conservation. It argues that moral authority, financialised environmentalism and technocratic hope now persist as hollow structures, shaping illiberal transitions and post-liberal futures.

Presentation long abstract

This paper introduces the Living Monolith as a metaphor for understanding the emotional and political afterlives of neoliberal conservation in an increasingly illiberal world. The image derives from a diseased tree cut back to its trunk yet left standing, still upright but largely hollow. I suggest that neoliberal conservation resembles such a monolith: a once-confident edifice built on financialisation, digitalisation, multicultural virtue, and green consumerism, now structurally weakened and misaligned with rising authoritarian, nationalist, and patronage-based political currents.

Drawing on Stephen Grosz’s psychoanalytic insight that unspoken trauma repeats itself in action, I interpret contemporary conservation’s contradictions as symptoms of a system unable to articulate its own crisis. The emotional terrain surrounding conservation—polarisation, moral fatigue, ecological anxiety, and disillusionment with technocratic promises—reveals the extent to which its liberal foundations have decayed. These emotions are not side-effects but political forces shaping the emergent landscape of illiberal environmentalism.

From my professional experience in global finance and my current research in sustainability leadership, I argue that the financial and moral architectures of neoliberal conservation now persist as hollow structures. They retain institutional presence yet lack the moral alignment required for legitimacy within shifting political economies of inequality.

The Living Monolith framework offers a way to recognise this post-liberal moment without nostalgia or denial. It asks how conservation might navigate decline with honesty, how emotional reflexivity might replace technocratic moralism, and how spaces of care and responsibility might survive beyond liberal reason.

Presentation short abstract

Through Ecuador’s FONAG case in Quito’s páramos, this paper examines how neoliberal conservation adapts within illiberal landscapes, reinforcing local hierarchies while enabling community counter-conducts that contest authority and reshape hydrosocial territories.

Presentation long abstract

This paper explores how neoliberal conservation persists and transforms amid increasingly illiberal political and social landscapes through the case of the first water fund in the world (FONAG) and its conservation agreement with Virgen del Carmen, a community in Quito’s páramos. Framed as participatory, market-based mechanisms to safeguard water sources, such agreements operate through hybrid governmentalities that entangle neoliberal, disciplinary, and sovereign forms of power. Drawing on fieldwork (2023–2024), the paper shows how FONAG’s conservation agreement—implemented through incentives, monitoring, and technical assistance—has reinforced existing intra-communitarian hierarchies, centralizing authority in local elites while marginalizing collective governance. Yet, these dynamics also provoke everyday negotiations and counter-conducts, such as emerging initiatives in community tourism, through which residents seek to reclaim autonomy and redefine the meanings of conservation.

By situating this case within debates on neoliberal conservation and governmentalities, the paper argues that water funds exemplify the mutation of neoliberal rationalities in an era increasingly shaped by illiberal turns, where technocratic, moral, and exclusionary logics converge. Yet, rather than signaling the mere persistence of these rationalities, the case of FONAG reveals how they are reworked and re-legitimated through local moralities and territorial struggles. In a context where liberal ideals of participation and inclusion falter, conservation becomes a field where illiberal and neoliberal forms of rule intertwine, producing both exclusions and new forms of agency. This perspective highlights conservation not simply as an instrument of technocratic governance, but as a contested political terrain where community, and market rationalities are negotiated and redefined.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines conservation’s postwar formation as a realm of capitalist moral authority, which sustained it through turn-of-the-millennium neoliberal transformations. It concludes that the moral economy underpinning this authority may now be its undoing under intensifying authoritarianism.

Presentation long 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 have not explained how and why conservation emerged as a prominent and durable realm of capitalist virtue-making. To address these questions, we resituate neoliberal conservation within longer ideological and class formations, with particular attention to the ascendance and consolidation of the professional-managerial class (PMC) and its early neoliberal critiques following WWII. We trace how modern conservation, as a key domain of PMC virtue, shifted after the 1970s from state-centric managerialism to market-centric technocracy, yet managed to endure as a prime source of capitalist moral authority. This resilience depended on the liberal aid and governance infrastructures that produced PMC expertise and moral standing, and that positioned conservation NGOs as key implementers of environmental responsibility. With the illiberal turn of ascendant authoritarianism, these institutional systems and their power have come increasingly under threat from actors openly hostile to both PMC virtue and environmental care. The 2025 dismantling of USAID exemplifies this shift, as a rapid contraction of a significant institutional source of PMC authority and a disruption to the global circuits through which conservation’s technocratic legitimacy has been maintained. In this emerging political terrain, the long-standing pattern of “failing forward” can no longer be taken for granted.

Presentation short abstract

Ethnographic research over the past 30 years shows that the notion of conserving pure nature is, from a local emic perspective, schizophrenic. However, how can this be addressed when the term involves significant discursive and ontological dimensions that are central to conservation capitalism?

Presentation long abstract

The presentation will discuss the need to move beyond the term 'conservation', as requested by indigenous and local representatives, and address their view that the term includes an insane element. Exposing this aspect could strengthen radical alternatives. Drawing on long-term fieldwork experience in protected areas in Africa, such as Kafue Flats in Zambia, Lewa in Kenya and Niokolo-Koba Biosphere in Senegal, the talk will illustrate how the same idea of pure nature and conservation, in its various forms ranging from 'fortress' to 'participatory' conservancies, including zoos and cultural and biosphere heritage sites, comes with a double-bind way of thinking and strange but economically productive strategies that leave local people puzzled. It is not only that people's previous commons are seized and their resource governance institutions undermined, but also that landscapes are misread as pure nature, and local people are blamed for their very identity as creators and caretakers of the world in which they live. This is often accompanied by the criminalisation and infantilisation of local communities, which is often supported by billionaires. The presentation also shows how local actors try to react to this form of productive pathology of conservation from their view. This ranges from strategies discussed by James Scott as 'weapons of the weak' to what could be termed 'new politics machines', rephrasing James Ferguson's 'Anti-Politics Machine'.

Presentation short abstract

AI monitoring, platforms, and biodiversity credits recast nature as tradable ‘units’. Though it promises transparency and efficiency, digitisation trends in conservation are yielding illiberal valuation regimes. A Lacanian reading explains the appeal of an opaque technical approach to conservation.

Presentation long abstract

The liberal promises of transparency, rational management, and market efficiency have long organised neoliberal conservation, while digitisation and datafication are familiar handmaidens to its eternally deferred promises to arrive at competitive markets that finally integrate the proper ‘value’ of nature. Yet the rise of digital monitoring, AI-driven ecological modelling, and platform-mediated certification for trading in ‘fictitious capital’ is reshaping conservation in ways that sit uneasily with these liberal norms.

To understand whether, how, and why digitisation trends in conservation are contributing to an illiberal sea change requires examining much more than the technologies themselves. In contemporary biodiversity market initiatives, big technology firms, state governments, and international NGOs are collaborating to create a new asset class – the “unit of nature” – the latest promise to attract private capital into conservation. I argue that rather than delivering competitive markets or transparency, the emerging digital assemblages illiberally centralise authority in private platforms that determine what counts as nature, how it is measured, and which ecological claims qualify as tradable value.

To account for the appeal and legitimacy of these opaque valuation systems, I draw on psychoanalytic political ecology, particularly Jodi Dean’s Lacanian account of the decline of symbolic authority in illiberal contexts. The erosion of shared, public criteria of ecological truth produces new attachments to opaque technical systems, which are embraced as authoritative precisely because their internal workings are inscrutable. Digitisation thus becomes an unlikely stabiliser of illiberal conservation: a fetishised black box that masks and reproduces the political-economic dynamics enabling it.

Presentation short abstract

This paper advances the concept of 'platform policing in green' to highlight an ongoing shift away from neoliberal, community-based conservation, toward enforcement-first approaches to protected area management that utilize digital monitoring and surveillance platforms in Belize.

Presentation long abstract

Building on Francis Massé’s concept of ‘police power in green,’ this paper advances the concept of 'platform policing in green' to highlight an ongoing transition in Belize from a neoliberal, community-based model of conservation toward an increasingly automated and authoritarian regime structured around digital surveillance and policing. From the 1990s through the early 2010s, Belize was widely acclaimed as an exemplar of neoliberal conservation, characterized by the devolution of protected area management responsibilities to NGOs and community groups, and the widespread promotion of ecotourism. In doing so, it framed community knowledge and engagement as essential components of effective, efficient, and equitable conservation.

Over the past decade this neoliberal model has been increasingly displaced through escalating discourses of environmental and national “crisis" linked to the illegal wildlife trade, foreign poachers and criminal networks, and the subsequent embrace of policing-oriented and technological approaches to conservation. A central feature of this regime is the adoption of digital law enforcement tools and platforms such as the Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (SMART), which are marketed in neoliberal terms as making protected area management more effective, efficient, and accountable through standardized data collection, automated analysis and reporting, and predictive patrolling, that privilege the supposed “objectivity” of big data and algorithmic analysis over community-based forms of knowledge, experience, and participation. This paper argues that platform policing in green subjects both conservation organizations, as well as the environments and communities they monitor and manage, to illegible and illiberal forms of algorithmic government characteristic of platform/surveillance capitalism.