Since the 2000s, Brazil’s rural elites have engaged in “greening” the Amazon extractive frontier. Private and state-led “sustainable producer” initiatives consolidate the agro-industrial system. Scholars argue these schemes incentivize compliance and legalize deforestation and “green grabbing.” Studies on neoliberal frontier governance describe a global-local assemblage of state and non-state actors. While they mention donor agencies, there is little theorizing on how North-South environmental aid has not only reproduced but strategically constituted colonial-capitalist systems. This paper—drawing on critical state and development theory and several years of multi-site interview, participant, and archival research—considers the Pilot Program for the Conservation of Brazilian Rainforests (PPG7, 1992-2009) implemented by the Group of Seven countries and the World Bank. Against the backdrop of democratization, structural adjustment, economic liberalization and privatization in Brazil, the program guided the decentralization of environmental management along northern concepts of environmental modernization. Its central component, the Natural Resources Policy Project (SPRN) built environmental secretaries and some municipal institutions in nine Amazon states between 1995 and 2005, including economic-environmental zoning, “natural asset” inventories, and early environmental registration. The paper examines to what extent these programs, driven by donor and recipient agencies, early on tested technologies that are fundamental to the green economy even though they maintained local underlying power structures and inequalities. Particularly, the paper tracks examples such as the aid-driven testing of environmental registration that still today seeks to reconcile agricultural intensification with deforestation control, maintaining colonial-capitalist trade and the responsibility to manage its socioenvironmental costs in the global South.

United Nations (UN) treaties, laws, regulations, and norms for environmental governance, such as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity, are spaces where colonial-capitalist systems are reproduced but also spaces where these systems are increasingly challenged by Indigenous groups, environmental activists, agrarian social movements and advocates for radical, decolonial reforms to the global political economic system. Actors mobilizing human rights-based approaches seek to use the tools and legitimacy of the UN to protect environments, livelihoods, and ways of life, with varying degrees of success. Yet, these UN mechanisms are themselves rooted in neo-liberal and -colonial forms of power that continue to perpetuate the harms these strategies aim to prevent. One central area of concern is the development of emerging environmental technologies – from artificial intelligence, to blockchain, to geoengineering – that pose novel questions for rights, sovereignty, and social transformation. Particularly when connected with mega- and innovative-finance, such techno-fixes tend to foster the consolidation of environmental elites – from multinational investment banks, private companies, big technology firms, governments, and large nongovernmental environmental organizations – who see opportunities for new markets or new rationales for territorial expansion.

This session aims to explore how mechanisms embedded in capitalist and colonial histories, namely rights, sovereignty, and technology, perpetuate socio-environmental harms and injustices in global environmental governance (GEG), and how these mechanisms have been mobilized to challenge those same systems.

TITLE
The Third Pathway: Advancing a Human Rights-Based Approach through Corporatized Conservation
ABSTRACT
Many activists and conservationists alike have commended the paradigm shift to embrace Indigenous territories as conservation mechanisms encompassed in the 2022 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). As a result of concerted, organized, and effective transnational alliances, the final GBF includes multiple references to the need to respect the rights, knowledge, and other contributions of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs), as well as recognizes the role of Indigenous territories in protecting biodiversity. Drawing on a collaborative ethnography of the December 2022 Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Montreal and its preparatory meetings, we analyze how IPLC advocates advanced a human rights-based approach (HRBA) to conservation by invoking the legitimacy of the UN system, by utilizing the Covid-pandemic-impelled hybrid preparatory meetings to build a social movement, and by collaborating with states to advance specific language in multiple parts of the GBF. We argue that the rising pressure on conservation organizations to acknowledge the colonial legacies of conservation and the Covid pandemic provided a critical historical moment for this paradigm shift. Yet, this historical moment is also characterized by the rising influence of the corporate sector within the CBD, with its reliance on private, innovative finance and embrace of blended and offsetting market-based mechanisms to achieve conservation—mechanisms often associated with human rights violations. We explore the opportunities that the HRBA provides for the systemic rebalancing needed to decolonize conservation and reshaping power relations in conservation governance as well as its limitations as a legal mechanism for redistributing resource rights and wealth.
KEYWORDS
Rights-based approach, Global Biodiversity Framework, conservation finance

Individual Presentation Submission

SMART CONSERVATION? EXPLORING THE TRANSITION FROM INTIMATE GOVERNMENT TO ALGORITHMIC ONTOPOWER IN BELIZE

Key Words: SMART Technology; Conservation; Ontopower

This paper presents an analysis of the Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (SMART) and its use in terrestrial and marine protected areas in Belize. SMART is a software application used by park rangers on mobile devices to collect, store, share and analyze data on wildlife observations, poaching, arrests and other events in real-time. The most recent update to the platform (SMART 7) included the rollout of “Predictive Patrol Planning,” which uses machine learning to predict poachers’ future behavior based on patrol records and data about the physical and human geography of the protected area. In 2018, Belize adopted SMART as the country’s official monitoring system for their protected area network. Significantly, the adoption of SMART in Belize has seemingly coincided with a shift away from a focus on community-based conservation toward an emphasis on surveillance technology, law-enforcement and combatting the illegal wildlife trade. Based on a literature review, as well as interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with protected area managers, this paper describes the impacts of the Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool, and the recent adoption of SMART 7, on the practice of protected area management in Belize. Framed as a transition from “intimate government” (Agrawal 2005) to algorithmic ontopower (Massumi 2015; Büscher 2018), this paper explores what happens when protected area management decisions are increasingly determined not by humans and local knowledge, but by big data, algorithms and artificial intelligence.

Individual Presentation Submission

TITLE: Smart, Commodified and Encoded: Blockchain Technology for Environmental Sustainability and Nature Conservation.

ABSTRACT: We explore the implications of blockchain technology for conservation and environmental policy. Drawing on an analysis of 27 initiatives, we examine their goals, assumptions, visions and workings. We find that these initiatives do not yet form a coherent approach, there is too much variety in their environmental focus, and the role of blockchain technology in achieving their goals. However, they share a faith in environmental-commodity markets, a penchant for surveillance and upward accountability, and lack a critical analysis of the main causes of environmental problems. Blockchain initiatives are forming a growing community of praxis and deepen ongoing trends in neoliberal environmental governance, characterised by the increased commodification and global accounting, surveillance and marketisation of environmental goods, services and outcomes. We suggest these services and outcomes fail to challenge the actual root causes of environmental degradation. At the same time, they are not all necessarily flawed by these characteristics. They can render information held by communities financially valuable in ways those communities may find useful. Future research should focus on exploring whether blockchain initiatives may at least translate in concrete environmental outcomes and contribute to the well-being of natural resource managers.

KEYWORDS: blockchain technology; distributed ledger; commodification; surveillance; trustlessness; cypherpunk

Indigenous communities throughout the world are increasingly deploying technologies primarily used by the state to counter spatial narratives. In this paper, we depict the necessity, strategies and challenges for a nomadic pastoralist community- the Van Gujjars, whilst they engage in counter mapping practices for the assertion of rights in a landscape wherein the state too engages in technocratic models of conservation. We explore if the adoption of digital technologies can foster greater participation of youth, provide strategies to resist dispossession, engender new forms of evidence for claim making, as well as engage in effectively depicting an indigenous sense of place. We also discuss if digital technologies have the potential to reify dominant notions of ownership and property for nomadic van gujjars thereby alienating existing common land use strategies. Finally, we argue that the use of such tools for mobilization and assertion of rights can democratize technical knowledge and access for forest dwellers as well as cultivate plural imagination of land use, rights and sovereignty.