Bram Büscher

My research and writing look at different aspects of nature-society relations in their political-economic, social and historical contexts. Most fundamentally, I have been interested in empirically investigating and theoretically exploring the intersections between contemporary neoliberal or ‘late’ capitalism and the environment. I start from the assumption that neoliberal capitalism has deeply yet unevenly influenced the ways humans exploit, conserve or otherwise relate to nonhuman natures and that this process fundamentally influences broader dynamics of development and change. Methodologically, I combine multi-level, engaged ethnography with discourse analysis and ‘deep reading’ to capture how actors and their lived realities co-constitute and are co-constituted by structural power dynamics over time.

From this starting point, I have developed several research projects. My PhD research focused on transfrontier conservation in Southern Africa and explored the effects of emerging transnational governance structures on local and regional socio-ecological realities in the Maloti-Drakensberg between Lesotho and South Africa, as well as other ‘peace parks’ in the southern African region. This work culminated in my book ‘Transforming the Frontier‘, published in 2013 by Duke University Press. After this, I developed a project that received funding through a Dutch Research Foundation ‘VENI’ grant, entitled Nature 2.0. This research  investigated how new online media and web 2.0 tools are changing global and local environmental politics and how this relates to forms of (post-truth) politics and platform capitalist power. The book resulting from this project,  ‘The Truth about Nature. Environmentalism in the Age of Post-Truth Politics and Platform Capitalism‘, was published by University of California Press in 2021.

Another project, which arose out of my postdoctoral fellowship with the University of Johannesburg, focused on the political economy of energy in relation to fossil and timber resource extraction. Its primary aim was to understand the local and regional socio-ecological impacts of increasing energy and resource investments by (emerging) global powers in Southern Africa. A paper on this research appeared in the European Journal of Development Research in 2015. A spin-off project, undertaken together with Dr. Veronika Davidov, looked at the nexus between resource extraction and ecotourism, which resulted in an edited volume with Routledge in 2013.

Through these various projects, I have further explored how both the conservation and the exploitation of nature relate to and function within broader structures of capitalist power, and how they relate to each other. This has resulted in various empirical and theoretical papers, including a theoretical piece in the open access journal New Proposals, entitled Nature on the Move. This paper is part of a triptych of papers that also include work by Jim Igoe and Sian Sullivan. Another outcome of this work is an edited volume that I co-edited with Wolfram Dressler and Robert Fletcher with the University of Arizona Press (2014).

Since 2015, I have built on this work to investigate the violent impacts of recent surges in wildlife crime and resource extraction on ecosystems and wildlife. This research has been funded through a Dutch Research Foundation VIDI grant, entitled ‘Crisis Conservation: Saving Nature in Times and Spaces of Exception‘. Together with two postdocs and three PhDs, we have studied crisis conservation situations in Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa, as well as globally. One major outcome of this project is the idea of ‘convivial conservation’: a new conservation paradigm that moves beyond markets and protected areas to address the fundamental unsustainability of our contemporary, hegemonic development model. This has resulted in a book entitled ‘The Conservation Revolution’, co-authored with Robert Fletcher and published by Verso Press in 2020, and a major Belmont Forum/Norface project ‘Towards Convivial Conservation’, where we examine grounded examples of how convivial conservation could take root and be promoted more generally.

In the coming years, I hope to contribute to building a larger research and political platform dedicated to pushing the frontiers of political ecology, critical development studies and amplifying potentials for environmental and social justice.