Convivial Conservation

Historical development

The proposal grew out of the authors’ critiques, from political ecology, of conservation based on markets, sometimes called “neoliberal conservation”. It also responded to two other debates. Peter Kareiva and others launched the argument over “new conservation” in 2012. E. O. Wilson and the “Nature Needs Half” movement proposed setting aside half the earth, which the authors criticised as fortress thinking on a planetary scale.

The Conservation Revolution framed conservation’s choice as one between “neoprotectionism” and “new conservation”, and offered convivial conservation as a third way. A 2019 article in Conservation and Society had already set out its elements. The Convivial Conservation Centre and related projects have since tried it out in practice, including in southern Africa and Europe.

Principal claims

• Capitalism drives the loss of biodiversity. Human presence as such does not. Conservation that accepts capitalism cannot succeed.
• Protected areas that exclude people are unjust, and on the scale that half-earth proposes they could not work.
• Nature should be governed as a commons by the people who live with it, with democratic participation at every level.
• People who live with wildlife should be paid for it without conditions, through a conservation basic income. Markets in ecosystem services are the wrong tool.
• Human and non-human nature should be brought together. “Wild” and “cultivated” are the wrong categories.
• Conservation has to go hand in hand with degrowth and a wider change in the economy.

Policy implications

The programme turns protected areas into promoted areas where residents have rights, introduces a conservation basic income and builds democratic institutions to govern landscapes. It ends the removal of people for conservation, limits tourism and offsets, and moves conservation money to communities. It supports coexistence with wildlife and a transition to an economy that does not depend on growth.

Internal disagreements

The proposal is recent and has few practitioners, so many questions are open. How would strict protection of the most sensitive places fit a model of promoted areas? How would people live safely alongside dangerous wildlife? How would the basic income be paid for before the post-capitalist transition it assumes has happened?

Criticisms and controversies

Conservation biologists argue that the proposal underrates the need for places free of human pressure, and that its evidence on coexistence is thin. Critics from both mainstream and new conservation call it utopian, because it depends on an economic transformation nobody expects soon. Some practitioners of community conservation see it as a radical restatement of what they already do.

The authors answer that the alternatives have failed and that they offer a direction, not a blueprint.

Relationships to other traditions

Convivial conservation is the radical, post-capitalist form of community conservation. It draws on political ecology, degrowth, ecosocialism and decolonial ecology. It is openly opposed to fortress conservation and to market-based conservation, and critical of half-earth and of much rewilding.