Failing Forward

Sociologist Robert Fletcher chronicles the worldwide growth of neoliberal conservation, a movement that answers the continuing loss of biodiversity with market-based tools. Its core premise is that protecting nature can be turned into a source of conservation funding and of wider capital growth, so that environmental goals and economic expansion appear compatible.

Fletcher follows how this model has developed over several decades and how an expanding web of states, nonprofit groups, international lenders and private firms has come to promote it. He also examines how the approach has repeatedly survived its own shortcomings and kept advancing. To explain why so many powerful actors remain attracted to it, he turns to the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan.

His central claim is that neoliberal conservation is a failed attempt to keep global capitalism sustainable as its social and ecological contradictions deepen. Fletcher argues that the only realistic route to both environmental sustainability and social equity is a deliberate program of degrowth built on postcapitalist principles.