In Power and Conservation: Environmental Anthropology Beyond Political Ecology, Carol Carpenter takes the reader through theories and application of power to improve conservation research and practice. She provides an overview and explanation for theories of power combined with real-world application, presenting a conservation toolbox to disrupt prevailing conservation paradigms. Carpenter encourages readers to (1) ask how power is exercised, (2) use ethnography to dig into the specific, (3) see power and economy as always working in tandem, and (4) re-centre local ecologies.
Carpenter uses each chapter to reveal and apply aspects of power as advanced by Foucault: discourses; governmentality, discipline, sovereignty and the triangle; subject formation; and neoliberal governmentality. In the first three chapters, Carpenter examines how the rich field of nature and human–nature relations joins the ‘complex project of conservation interventions’ (p. 23) in the developing world. She argues that these discourses are neither static nor truly controlled by any state or institution, but that we have constructed them and imbued them with power. Three seminal works in the mid 1990s, by Ferguson, Escobar, and Fairhead and Leach demonstrate the power of conservation discourses to warp policy in ways that lead to project failure. These authors have animated an anthropology of development and conservation that continues to influence modern paradigms of practice. Along the same line of the power of discourse, Carpenter uses the work of historian Cronon in chapter 4 to show how environmental historical narratives of nature have the power to ‘silence and erase but also make us care’ (p. 49).
In chapters 5 and 6, Carpenter explores Foucault's three models (sovereignty, discipline and governmentality) which she argues all occur in conservation. Sovereignty is characterized by simple laws that divide the permitted from the prohibited and link prohibitions to punishments and a territory as the seat of the sovereign. Although sovereignty does not govern life, discipline and governmentality both do through ‘the body and the population’ (p. 72). Carpenter suggests that discipline is the governing of the body, and governmentality the governing of the population. Applying these concepts to conservation, she considers parks to be territorial units where sovereignty is deployed in conservation. The exclusion of local people from protected areas, and surveillance, regulations and enforcement, all embody the disciplinary and governmentality of power. When governments set up protected areas, they tend towards disciplinary control because people are considered a threat to nature. Thus, conservation governs people with the aim of maximizing benefits for natural habitats or wildlife. These arguments lead Carpenter to ask readers ‘what would conservation without government look like?’ (p. 81).
This question challenges the basis of much of conservation practice and policy. Throughout the rest of the book, Carpenter proposes that the answers can be uncovered through ethnography. She presents ethnographies that explore the articulation of processes of neocolonial and neoliberal governmentality conservation projects with local ecologies, traditional knowledge, culture and peasant economies. Governmentality and capitalism stimulate identity formation that coalesce around communities to support conservation and receive benefits. Using case studies, Carpenter demonstrates how communities are cultivated as environmental and neoliberal subjects. She argues that the assumptions upon which these programmes are founded are flawed. Although conservationists rarely question these assumptions, ethnographers do. By including select ethnographies, Carpenter also encourages readers to think about the economy outside the economic discipline and to re-centre peasant economics in conservation. She reminds us that in peasant theories all economies are ecologies. Thus, unveiling peasant discourse can disrupt the prevailing power of traditional economic approaches driving conservation and development intervention. Even though her arguments may suggest that local people have little control over their lives, Carpenter explains that the implementation phase of conservation programmes offers a space that is ‘full of politics and power, but also full of freedom’ (p. 160) for local people to shape outcomes.
Carpenter uses each theory as a building block to explain the behaviours of conservation actors, as well as their cultural beliefs, material uses and values. She weaves between the theoretical and applied, using seminal works on power in conservation to demonstrate how her four tools can improve conservation practice by bringing in historical and landscape perspectives and by showcasing the role of government and local people in shaping and enacting policies. In showing how conservation research and theories of power are mutually shaped, Power in Conservation is an important companion to any graduate level course on conservation social science or political ecology. Carpenter also offers synthesized insights to guide improved conservation practice. She not only shows new ways to understand prevailing conservation paradigms, but suggests a better future for conservation practice that can free local people from the reigns of established power relations and their role as conservation subjects.
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