Hackett, Ryan. Review of Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics, by Jessica Dempsey. Conservation & Society 16, no. 1 (2018): 102-03. doi: 10.4103/cs.cs_17_59.
Frustrated by previous failures to protect biodiversity, the conservation community has increasingly come to believe that in order to make conservation “work,” it must be made economically viable, or at least that is the hope. Enterprising Nature charts the emergence and development of a conservation paradigm founded in a series of ecological accounting techniques intended to expose the latent economic value of non-human nature and to provide objective, politically neutral information to guide “smart” environmental policy and governance. In doing so, Jessica Dempsey provides detailed analysis of the decades of interdisciplinary work needed to create and stabilise the conditions for this paradigm, one that she ultimately characterises as a goal “always just out of reach” (pp 237). (Excerpt from author’s review)
© Ryan Hackett 2018. Conservation & Society is available online only and is published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 2.5).