What the book argues

Büscher and Fletcher organize their book around a diagnosis of three dominant conservation paradigms: fortress conservation, neoliberal conservation and neoprotectionism (Büscher & Fletcher Reference Büscher and Fletcher2020, pp. 14–22). They argue that all three reproduce capitalist logics of enclosure, commodification and managerial control even when they appear ideologically opposed (pp. 18–31). Conservation, in their account, has increasingly become an accumulation frontier structured by tourism, biodiversity offsets, ecosystem services, carbon markets and financialized valuation (pp. 29–31, 80–98). Early chapters trace the genealogy of wilderness thinking, protected area expansion and rewilding, showing how nature–culture dualisms persist even within ostensibly progressive reforms (pp. 47–58). Subsequent chapters develop a political–economic critique grounded in Marxian geography and critical political ecology, framing conservation as embedded within processes of uneven development, accumulation by dispossession and the production of fictitious value (pp. 80–88, 102–110, 124–129).

The constructive turn of the book proposes ‘convivial conservation’, drawing inspiration from Ivan Illich’s notion of conviviality, commons governance traditions, degrowth economics and decolonial critiques (pp. 159–166). Convivial conservation emphasizes embedded value rather than exchange value, democratic governance, reparative justice, participatory cocreation and the dismantling of conservation’s dependence on capitalist growth (pp. 171–176, 182–190). The authors explicitly present their proposal as provisional and open-ended rather than as a policy blueprint (pp. 147, 182–183). Overall, the book functions primarily as a conceptual intervention: a manifesto for re-politicizing conservation and reconnecting ecological futures to broader struggles over political economy, social justice and planetary limits (pp. 199–205). The book succeeds in demonstrating that conservation cannot be treated as a technical or managerial domain divorced from capitalism and geopolitics (pp. 78–110). Its synthesis of political economy and conservation history and critique of market environmentalism provide analytical clarity and intellectual ambition. It refuses the de-politicization of conservation, insisting that conflicts over land, labour, governance and value cannot be engineered away through better metrics or incentives (pp. 32–35, 173–176).

What follows evaluates the analytical and empirical limits that emerge when a planetary critique is mobilized without commensurate attention to epistemic plurality, place-based grounding and cross-domain ecological diversity.

Epistemic positioning

The citational architecture of The Conservation Revolution materially shapes what it can see, what it can credibly claim as universal and whose knowledge is authorized to define the future of conservation. The theoretical backbone is dominated by European and North American political economy, Marxian geography and critical theory (pp. 50–53, 80–88, 124–129). While women scholars are present and lightly engaged, the structural scaffolding of the argument remains anchored in a largely male, Euro-American canon that sets the terms of abstraction, causality and solution-making.

A review of the book’s bibliography makes this gendered asymmetry more concrete. Of the c. 180 unique authors cited in The Conservation Revolution, c. 125–135 are men (c. 70–75%) and 40–45 are women (c. 25–30%), with a small remainder unclassifiable based on publicly available self-identification. Male authors dominate the most frequently cited and structurally central theoretical touchstones, particularly in political economy, Marxian geography and critical theory (e.g., Harvey, Lefebvre, Moore, Malm, Hornborg, Brockington and Igoe; pp. 50–53, 80–88, 124–129). Women scholars, including feminist political ecologists and science studies scholars such as Haraway, Tsing and Sullivan, are substantively engaged but appear less often as sources of analytic generalization, more frequently serving to nuance or ethically inflect an already-established theoretical frame (pp. 95–100, 147, 159–163). Taken together, these patterns do not negate the importance of women’s scholarship in the book but indicate that its epistemic centre of gravity remains disproportionately male, reinforcing a citational hierarchy in which authority over abstraction and causal explanation is unevenly distributed.

Citations actively produce epistemic authority and delimit the horizon of legitimate explanation (pp. 44–46). By positioning metropolitan theory as the primary source of analytic generalization, the book implicitly reproduces a hierarchy in which knowledge generated in the Global South or Indigenous intellectual traditions is more often mobilized as illustration or ethical confirmation rather than as theory capable of reorganizing the conceptual architecture itself (pp. 147, 159–163). The result is that a project framed as globally transformative remains epistemically provincial in its foundations. This citational politics matters because it structures who is imagined as capable of diagnosing planetary crisis and who is positioned primarily as the object of reform.

The problem of place

The book’s most significant analytical weakness lies in its limited engagement with sustained, place-based empirical material. While the critique of neoliberal and fortress conservation is richly theorized and supported through secondary literature and emblematic references (pp. 47–63, 78–101), the proposed alternative – ‘convivial conservation’ – remains largely untested against the messiness of real governance, conflict, institutional inertia and ecological constraint (pp. 159–176, 182–189). Named sites function primarily as symbolic placeholders rather than as deeply situated social–ecological worlds followed over time. The book asks readers to accept a transformative political horizon without demonstrating how that horizon survives friction, compromise and unintended consequences (pp. 182–183). Without thicker empirical grounding, the proposal risks remaining rhetorically compelling but operationally indeterminate.

Equally consequential is the near-total absence of marine environments in the book. The empirical imagination is overwhelmingly terrestrial: protected areas, forests, rewilding landscapes, agricultural mosaics, urban ecologies and land-based carbon markets dominate the analysis (pp. 13–46, 47–77, 78–114). Oceans, fisheries, coastal systems, maritime labour regimes and marine protected areas are largely invisible. For interdisciplinary audiences working across oceanography, fisheries science, maritime law, political economy and coastal anthropology, this omission has concrete analytical consequences. Marine systems operate through radically different spatial ontologies (fluidity, mobility, depth and volume rather than surface area), governance regimes (international waters, overlapping jurisdictions, weak enforcement capacity) and political economies (industrial fleets, distant-water subsidies, transnational labour exploitation, port and logistics infrastructures, flags of convenience).

Core concepts mobilized in the book, such as enclosure, embedded value, participatory governance and spatial planning, are developed almost entirely through land-based political ecologies (pp. 47–63, 171–176). These do not translate cleanly from land to sea. Marine enclosure often occurs through quota systems, licensing regimes, surveillance technologies and data infrastructures rather than fences and territorial exclusion; displacement is frequently livelihood-based rather than village-based; and ecological dynamics are shaped by mobility, climate-driven regime shifts and transboundary flows that exceed place-bound governance models.

Because these dynamics are not engaged, the book cannot demonstrate whether convivial conservation can meaningfully address fisheries overcapacity, industrial fleet power, migrant labour precarity, ocean commons governance or the interaction between climate change and marine biodiversity. The absence therefore functions not merely as a missing case domain but as a structural limitation on the scope of the theory itself. A framework that aspires to reimagine conservation writ large yet remains grounded almost entirely in terrestrial political ecologies leaves a substantial portion of the biosphere, and its distinctive governance challenges, analytically under-theorized.

The politics of voice

Across the book, an implicit collective subject emerges through appeals to what ‘we’ must recognize, confront or transform (pp. 3–5, 32–35, 199–203). This ‘we’ is never explicitly defined, yet it appears consistently as a politically capable, theoretically literate and normatively aligned actor able to diagnose capitalism, critique conservation orthodoxy and participate in the reimagining of governance futures. Conservation transformation is framed as a shared political obligation, as when the authors assert that ‘the question is how we understand the pressures and help direct imminent radical change towards something positive’ (p. 1), or when they suggest that the Anthropocene ‘forces humans’ to assume collective responsibility for planetary stewardship (p. 5).

In practice, this collective voice closely tracks the book’s primary epistemic community: critical conservation scholars, policy-orientated academics and reform-minded practitioners largely situated within European and North American institutional networks. Global environmentalism often depends on rhetorical dispossession: persuasive representations that render landscapes empty, endangered or outside history, thereby legitimizing external intervention (West Reference West2016, pp. 5–7). The book, while opposing neoliberal conservation, reproduces this structure through a ‘revolutionary we’ that invites a generalized political subject into solidarity while eliding the colonial and racialized histories that differentially constitute that subject. Because this ‘we’ presumes a shared theoretical literacy, political sensibility and institutional location, other ways of knowing and governing conservation are positioned as external to conservation itself, appearing as broader postcapitalist movements rather than as co-equal sources of conservation thought (pp. 147, 159–163). By framing their intervention as translating these movements into conservation (p. 159), plural ontologies, customary governance, Indigenous sovereignties and non-academic conservation practices become empirical terrain to be incorporated rather than analytic frameworks capable of reorganizing conservation’s conceptual foundations. The collective ‘we’ thus operates as a gatekeeping device, stabilizing a shared critical horizon while narrowing who is authorized to define legitimate transformation.

Critical scholarship helps illuminate how such universal political subjects are historically produced rather than neutrally assembled. Scholars have shown that appeals to planetary responsibility often universalize Euro-modern epistemologies, obscure differentiated relations of power and vulnerability and erase the racialized and colonial histories that structure contemporary ecological crisis (Rocheleau et al. Reference Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter and Wangari1996, Quijano Reference Quijano2000, Wynter Reference Wynter2003). Anthropological and Indigenous scholarship further demonstrates that ecological responsibility frequently emerges through kinship, reciprocity and place-based accountability rather than abstract global stewardship (Rose Reference Rose2004, Li Reference Li2007, De la Cadena Reference De la Cadena2015, TallBear Reference TallBear, Radin and Kowal2017). Read through this lens, the book’s collective ‘we’ speaks confidently about what must change while leaving limited space for disagreement over what transformation should mean, who should lead it and according to which epistemic commitments.

Although the authors explicitly acknowledge uneven responsibility and critique universalized Anthropocene narratives (pp. 37–40, 124–126), the book’s rhetorical structure nonetheless operates at the scale of planetary transformation. Appeals to collective political agency risk reproduce a similar flattening by presuming a unified constituency capable of diagnosing and implementing systemic change. As a result, the book’s political vision remains ambitious but institutionally underdeveloped, offering limited engagement with how convivial governance would function amid transboundary regulation, capital mobility, geopolitical asymmetry and conflict among heterogeneous actors.

Situated alternatives

Across many regions, communities already sustain conservation through customary governance, relational accountability and locally embedded ethical economies. These practices do not await systemic rupture to operate responsibly; instead, they foreground slow transformation, place-based labour, negotiated authority and everyday stewardship. Long-term Indigenous-led conservation in Papua New Guinea offers a particularly clear illustration. Rather than treating conservation as a corrective intervention imposed upon social life, this scholarship documents it as an expression of Indigenous sovereignty, kinship and spiritual obligation (Aini et al. Reference Aini, West, Amepou, Piskaut, Gasot and James2023, West & Aini Reference West and Aini2026a, Reference West and Aini2026b). In New Ireland, conservation is inseparable from the revitalization of traditional fishing practices, customary authority and intergenerational knowledge transmission, and it is enacted through long-standing Indigenous institutions rather than externally defined metrics of success or polemical calls for revolution. These efforts do not reject science or global environmental concerns but insist that ecological care must be grounded in relational sovereignty and locally governed ethical commitments. Conservation here is neither technocratic nor utopian; it is an ongoing practice of responsibility enacted within historically specific social worlds (West et al. Reference West, Collins, Aini, Piskaut, Almais and Sauri2025). While Büscher and Fletcher persuasively argue for moving beyond exclusionary and market-driven conservation, their emphasis on systemic transformation risks flattening the diversity of ways conservation is already practised outside dominant frameworks. Indigenous-led conservation in New Ireland demonstrates that alternatives are not only emergent futures but lived presents, sustained through kinship, ceremony and negotiated governance rather than revolutionary rupture.

Parallel insights emerge from applied research on human–elephant coexistence and community-based conservation in Botswana and the Okavango region. This literature shows that coexistence is achieved not through abstract commitments to harmony but through pragmatic, locally responsive strategies shaped by vulnerability, livelihood needs and institutional context (Buchholtz et al. Reference Buchholtz, McDaniels, McCulloch, Songhurst and Stronza2022, Vogel et al. Reference Vogel, Songhurst, McCulloch and Stronza2022). Farmers’ decisions about crop choice, planting strategies and mitigation uptake are shaped by food security, cultural preference, material access and risk perception rather than conservation objectives alone (Matsika et al. Reference Matsika, Adjetey, Obopile, Songhurst, McCulloch and Stronza2024). Research on land access, settlement policy and elephant connectivity further shows how conservation interventions can intensify vulnerability when they fail to account for local governance and social organization (Naidoo et al. Reference Naidoo, Beytell, Brennan, Kilian, McCulloch and Stronza2022, Redmore et al. Reference Redmore, Katholo, Sene-Harper, Songhurst, McCulloch and Stronza2023). Policies designed to facilitate wildlife movement – such as fencing, corridor designation or resettlement – often produce uneven burdens borne by those with the least institutional power. At the same time, locally developed interventions, including community-designed transport systems and negotiated land-use arrangements, demonstrate how coexistence can be incrementally improved through attention to everyday risk, care and mobility rather than sweeping structural reform (Songhurst et al. Reference Songhurst, Baitseng, Lalley, Lupton, Molathegi and Mosupi2023).

Taken together, these literatures suggest that effective alternatives to dominant conservation paradigms do not converge on a single model of conviviality but instead reveal plural pathways shaped by historical relations, governance structures and ethical commitments. These insights resonate with the critique advanced by The Conservation Revolution while tempering its universalizing ambitions, demonstrating that ethical conservation is not achieved through systemic overhaul alone but through fragile, situated practices sustained by ongoing negotiation, accountability and care. Importantly, many initiatives in Papua New Guinea and Botswana predate the emergence of ‘convivial conservation’ as a formal concept, already advancing embedded value, local sovereignty, democratic governance, reparative justice and co-creation outside capitalist conservation logics.

Rather than asking how conservation might be revolutionized everywhere, this scholarship instead asks how existing place-based stewardship practices can be supported without being subsumed into new theoretical or policy hegemonies. From Indigenous sovereignty in Papua New Guinea to agrarian decision-making in elephant landscapes, conservation emerges as the practice of living with others – human and more-than-human – under conditions of constraint, uncertainty and uneven power. Conservation politics attentive to justice and sustainability must therefore remain open to multiplicity, resist singular solutions and recognize that transformation often unfolds through the cumulative work of sustaining relationships in place.