Market-based conservation’s colonial legacies vs. Indigenous-led ecological sovereignty: Who decides nature’s value?
Original framing: “Just transformative conservation requires challenging existing structures and strengthening local agency” — Phys.org
The Phys.org framing erases the voices of those most affected by conservation policies, such as the 2020 *Land Degradation & Development* interviews with Kenyan pastoralists who lost grazing rights to carbon offset projects, or the 2022 *Journal of Rural Studies* case study of Brazilian *quilombola* communities whose lands were converted into 'private reserves' under the 2012 Forest Code. Marginalized voices also include conservation workers themselves: the 2021 *Conservation Biology* survey found that 70% of rangers in Africa and Latin America report burnout due to underfunding and political interference, yet their labor is framed as 'volunteerism' in market-based models. The dissertation must center these voices, not as 'beneficiaries' but as co-designers of conservation systems—akin to the 2019 *Pastoralism* journal’s call for 'herder-led rangelands management.'
The crisis in conservation is not a failure of ambition but a failure of imagination—one that repeats the same colonial and neoliberal scripts under new guises.
Varumo’s work reveals that the 'transformative' potential of conservation lies not in tinkering with market mechanisms but in dismantling the power structures that treat nature as a commodity and Indigenous peoples as obstacles. The historical dimension exposes how today’s biodiversity offsets are the heirs to 19th-century enclosure acts, while the cross-cultural lens demonstrates that the most effective conservation models already exist in Indigenous stewardship systems, yet are systematically excluded from global finance. The trickster reading cuts through the solemnity of 'just sustainability' to ask: What if the real innovation is not a new market but the radical act of returning land to those who have always protected it? The solution pathways demand confronting the uncomfortable truth that 'transformative conservation' cannot be achieved without confronting who profits from the status quo—and who has been resisting it for centuries.