Dear colleagues, Hope this email finds all of you well. With the FIFA world cup soccer on the way in South Africa, I thought you, or your students, might be interested in the below paper that recently came out in Third World Quarterly. It takes a critical look at the massive 'Boundless Southern Africa' world cup legacy programme that aims to promote conservation benefits around the current world cup. A copy can be downloaded through the below link, or if it doesn't work, let me know and I can email a PDF directly.
If anybody else has written on the link between the world cup and the environment (or knows of writings on the topic), I'd be grateful if you could share it with me. Thanks and all the best, Bram Derivative Nature: interrogating the value of conservation in ‘Boundless Southern Africa’ Many conservationists nowadays talk about the urgent need to value nature. To bring out the ‘true value’ of nature and make conservation compatible with poverty reduction, so the argument goes, it must be appropriated into the realm of commodities and priced in monetary terms. By employing the concept of ‘derivative nature’, this paper explores the consequences of this neoliberal move. Derivatives are financial mechanisms whose monetary value is literally derived from the value of underlying assets. They were originally devised to reduce risk in the marketplace, but have actually made the global financial market immensely more complex and created more systemic risk and uncertainty because of their susceptibility to speculation. The paper suggests that similar processes can be seen in the arena of conservation. It argues that both nature and ‘the poor’ are increasingly becoming ‘underlying assets’ for what has become the ‘real’ source of value of neoliberal conservation, namely images and symbols within the realms of branding, public relations and marketing. Empirically grounded in a discussion on transfrontier conservation in Southern Africa in the run-up to the 2010 soccer World Cup, the paper examines the consequences of ‘derivative nature’ and calls for critical thinking to start facing these consequences. Weblink: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a920963596 --------------------------------------------- Dr. Bram Büscher Lecturer in Environment & Sustainable Development International Institute of Social Studies Erasmus University Kortenaerkade 12 2518 AX The Hague The Netherlands T +31 (0)70 4260 596 [email protected] http://www.iss.nl/buscher Please refer to: http://www.iss.nl/content/view/full/2873 for ISS’ email disclaimer.
