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

Enterprising Nature is a detailed and thoughtful exploration of the tensions underpinning neoliberal biodiversity conservation efforts. The book reports on Jessica Dempsey’s multi-sited ethnography and intellectual history of the global conservation movement, as well as her many prior years of engagement as a practitioner. The book provides a wealth of empirical detail explored with clarity, and the analysis is thought provoking. Dempsey delivers three key insights into the project of enterprising nature that help explain its utopian outlook and arrested development. That is, the ongoing pursuit of forms of conservation that try to make themselves entrepreneurial and relevant to markets persistently fail to operate in ways that are envisioned in the reams of science and economic modelling dedicated to this idea.

First, Dempsey illustrates that enterprising nature, the idea of assigning a monetary value to nature, is contradictory. The processes of valuing nature are riddled with contradictions. But exactly how these contradictions play out and with what political and material implications is often harder to pin down. Enterprising Nature provides a fascinating picture of how such tensions fuel all sorts of political economic and politicized knowledge problems. There are multiple contradictions, or tensions, as Dempsey prefers to put it, throughout the book: for instance, the dualist notions of nature-culture and intrinsic-extrinsic values in Western environmentalism. Drawing on anti-colonial critiques, Dempsey contends that this kind of distinction is a product of Western Enlightenment thinking and conservation strategies that are insensitive to the values and economies of people in the South (p. 33–35). It seems the most fundamental tension that Dempsey explores arises between capital and non-human nature. She notes that because externalization of nature is essential to political economic power, any “efforts to alter externalization mean[s] confronting these formidable forces” (p. 235). However, efforts to realize enterprising nature have studiously avoided a confrontation with capital.

Second, Dempsey demonstrates that enterprising nature is hard work, and mostly unsuccessful. Convincing states and capital to internalize nature (even an “enterprising nature”) has proven difficult. Others have made this important point, but few in the same detail and focus on the politics of environmental knowledge discussed here. Much to the chagrin of many advocates, environmental valuation techniques lack a coherent economic logic. Dempsey observes, via her interviewees, that not all valuation techniques are explicitly intended to commodify nature. Major problems defining units of analysis worry experts who themselves hold little political or economic power, and green financial innovations are stymied by state inaction. These dynamics lead Dempsey to observe that the promise of de-politicization through enterprising nature is utopian. She writes:

Instead, Dempsey’s analysis shares ground with other critics of the “anti-political” effects of neoliberal environmental governance (Bryant 2016; McCarthy 2012; Pearse 2018). The tragedy of liberal environmentalism is premised on the smooth operation of rational politics. But socio-ecological and political economic realities do not permit such an end-of-history vision to come about.

Third, Dempsey illustrates how the intellectual projects of enterprising nature “articulate” with imperial and capitalist agendas. The intellectual origins of ecosystems science in the connection between biotechnology and the US government departments’ agendas for trade and intellectual property reform is a case in point (Cooper 2008), as are the multiple corporate ventures, trade fairs, and business-sponsored conferences detailed in the book. Dempsey’s theorization of the neo-colonial organization of knowledge production and circulation is less developed. She describes the “southward gaze” of mostly Global North biodiversity market entrepreneurs (p. 167) and discusses the reception of de-colonial environmental thought in the North. For instance, she argues that responses to Vandana Shiva’s “disruptive” critiques of Western science and green developmentalism have been contradictory: dismissive at many points, and glowing at others. Nevertheless, she might have more explicitly critiqued and theorized these North-South tensions as born of problems endemic to the unequal global structure of environmental knowledge.

Dempsey’s knowledge politics invites more questions about positionality and global inequalities embedded in environmental knowledge. Following Anna Tsing’s approach to ethnography of global connection (Tsing 2005), she identifies her position in “the middle of things,” that is, in the middle of global networks of biodiversity experts and entrepreneurs across the globe. The social practices and organization of knowledge documented in this book are implicitly framed as occurring within the global North (including sites of elite knowledge-brokering in Southern nations). Her focus on mobile expert networks is interesting and important. But there is a larger set of people involved in global ecosystems, enrolled in a neo-colonial division of intellectual labor. I’m thinking here of the research assistants, rural people, and less mobile Southern scientists engaged in collective efforts behind the datasets and other forms of knowledge necessary for enterprising nature. Theory from the North dominates the generation of knowledge, but gathering it relies upon participants in bureaucracies and diverse lands of the South (Connell 2007; Hountondji 2002). Investigating the ideas and practices of a broader set of knowledge workers might have invoked a different framing of problems than the ones so strongly influenced by Anglo-European eco-entrepreneurs at meetings in New York.

In summary, this book speaks to political economy debates over nature’s commodification as well as to discussions about the neo-colonial organization of environmental knowledge politics. Dempsey’s thoughtful analysis is rich with insights into both. In particular, she has documented the fragility of enterprising nature in valuable detail. The knowledges that make up “enterprising nature” in so many respects express capitalist and colonial logics, but they have failed to impose order upon on an unruly world, marked by stark inequalities and “uncooperative” natures (Bakker 2003). The elusive character of this environmental-economic project has been beautifully captured. Enterprising Nature is a must read for any student of green political economy.