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.