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Environmental NGOs and Protected Area Conservation in Australia: The Political Consequences of Aligning with Private Interests

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posted on 2024-02-21, 02:20 authored by B Cooke, Lilian PearceLilian Pearce, A Davison
This article examines the political consequences of environmental nongovernment organization (ENGO) involvement in protected area conservation in Australia. Rapid growth of a nongovernment protected area (NGPA) estate this century has involved a range of individuals, communities, First Nations, and ENGOs, and has been closely tied to government policy and private finance. Although NGPA conservation achievements have been profound, there has been limited examination of what expanded nongovernment involvement, responsibility, and leadership mean for the practice and governance of nature conservation. Thematic analysis of twenty-four key informant interviews and selective gray literature identifies how financing, accountability, and partisan politics are emerging as key domains in shaping an NGPA estate that reflects a closer alignment with capital and market forces. ENGOs are playing a key role in crafting new political conditions for protected area conservation, where their role in neoliberal governance is not just service delivery, but statecraft and agenda setting. ENGOs are increasingly casting protected area conservation as apolitical, and thereby a bipartisan activity, driven by a “pragmatic” agenda that seeks to secure private financing for land ownership and management obligations. Frameworks of accountability to donors shape ENGO practices and conceptions of conservation through exposure to novel market mechanisms. As a result, ENGO operation permits limited space for plural, ideological, and structural debate about protected area conservation, the public interest, and the root causes of ecological crises to which it responds. The embrace of conservation led by nongovernment actors marks a substantive shift from the formative politics of ENGOs in Australia.

History

Publication Date

2024-02-01

Journal

Annals of the American Association of Geographers

Volume

114

Issue

2

Pagination

18p. (p. 334-351)

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

ISSN

2469-4452

Rights Statement

© 2023 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

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