Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets, and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics

Enterprising Nature tracks the rise of a powerful idea in global biodiversity conservation. Many ecologists, bureaucrats, and activists now believe that the only way to slow the decimation of nonhuman life on earth is to translate conservation into an economically rational—even profitable—set of policies and practices. “In order to make live,” goes the ascending mantra, “one must make economic.” Enterprising Nature analyses this mantra’s origins and the international alliances that enable it to spread. Through multi–site analysis, Jessica Dempsey explores the drive to produce a nature that can prove its value in economic terms, a nature that can compete in the marketplace and the cost–benefit accounting of modern governance. An enterprising nature. Can enterprising nature provide a way out of the biodiversity crisis? Dempsey’s research addresses this question through lively, firsthand accounts of scientific, political, and economic struggles in places like London, Nagoya, Nairobi and New York. Far from an ‘easy fix’, she demonstrates that enterprising nature faces challenges of operationalization at every turn. What’s more, Dempsey argues, the “will to enterprise” is a powerful, end of history call that signals trouble for the possibility of a democratic and decolonized environmental politics. At the centre of this will is a desire for a neutral, objective, efficient and, almost automatic relationship with the many creatures that share our planet, a relationship to be defined through ecological–economic calculus. While it is a project that holds laudatory goals of opening space for diverse nonhumans within dominant political economies, it aims to achieve them through instrumentalized frameworks and practices that, ultimately, increase human domination, producing new rankings and hierarchies of life. Enterprising Nature provides critical and timely insight into the workings of a massive international project that’s changing how we value the natural world. The book is essential reading for scholars, activists, and policymakers interested in the complex and expanding relationships between ecology and economics in contemporary international environmental politics.

Jessica Dempsey is an Assistant Professor at the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her research interests include global biodiversity politics, ecosystem services, and financial risk and biodiversity. With the CBD Alliance, she has participated in over a dozen major negotiations of biodiversity law and policy and worked with many NGOs and social movements to develop analysis and position papers on global biodiversity issues. She has published articles in leading geography and political ecology journals, including Environment and Planning A , Geoforum, and Progress in Human Geography .