[Conference 2013 CfP] Environment Working Group

Panel title: Producing Environmental Conservation: Crises, Conflicts and Possible Alternatives

Panel Organisers: Bram Büscher, Michela Marcatelli and Alonso Ramirez (Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University)

CFP: Environmental conservation has over the past two decades become central to the global political economy. Going ‘green’ is no longer something that tree-huggers do, but has literally become ‘serious business’. Contemporary policy initiatives such as those around the ‘green economy’ or ‘The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity’ (TEEB) have become part of mainstream ways of dealing with the ongoing financial crisis, while many businesses, NGOs and governments are trying to change their operations in a more sustainable direction. Central in these discussions is the idea of changing ‘production processes’, while the ‘production’ of environmental conservation itself is also seeing radical changes within the context of the uneven dynamics of the global political economy.

This panel session aims to interrogate and better understand ideas, practices and discourses related to the production of environmental conservation and the rendering more sustainable of production processes. We invite papers that aim to critically assess these processes and place them in an explicit political economic framing in relation to – for example, the global financial and ecological crises, resource conflicts and possible alternatives. As such, we invite papers that are interested in, but not limited to, the following questions:

• How has the production of environmental conservation changed historically and what does this mean for different groups involved in these changes?
• How can we apply the theses of the ‘production of nature’ and the ‘production of space’ (Neil Smith) fruitfully to debates and practices of environmental conservation?
• How can we understand production in environmental conservation theoretically, and how does the concept relate to theories and practices around circulation, distribution and consumption?
• What type of production processes are being subjected to what type of conservation measures, how do these work out in practice and to what kind of territorializations do they lead?
• Why do companies and other actors engage in the ‘greening’ of production processes and how does this relate to current ideas about the ‘green economy’?
• What types of resources conflicts come out of these attempts and how are they mediated?
• How are processes of financialization affecting the greening of production processes and the production of environmental conservation?
• What types of alternative, non-capitalist ways of thinking about producing environmental conservation and production processes exist or might be engendered?

Please send your abstract and contact details to buscher@iss.nl before 10 February 2013