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.