Natural capital must be defended: green growth as neoliberal biopolitics

ABSTRACT

This contribution addresses the growing global trend to promote ‘natural capital accounting’ (NCA) in support of environmental conservation. NCA seeks to harness the economic value of conserved nature to incentivize local resource users to forgo the opportunity costs of extractive activities. We suggest that this represents a form of neoliberal biopower/biopolitics seeking to defend life by demonstrating its ‘profitability’ and hence right to exist. While little finance actually reaches communities through this strategy, substantial funding still flows into the idea of ‘natural capital’ as the basis of improving rural livelihoods. Drawing on two cases in Southeast Asia, we show that NCA initiatives may compel some local people to value ecosystem services in financial terms, yet in most cases this perspective remains partial and fragmented in communities where such initiatives produce a range of unintended outcomes. When the envisioned environmental markets fail to develop and benefits remain largely intangible, NCA fails to meet the growing material aspirations of farmers while also offering little if any bulwark against their using forests more intensively and/or enrolling in lucrative extractive enterprise. We thus conclude that NCA in practice may become the antithesis of conservation by actually encouraging the resource extraction it intends to combat.     

ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM IN NEW SOUTH WALES UNDER GOVERNOR DARLING

As a governor, Ralph Darling is remembered more for his authoritarian behaviour and harsh rule than for his administrative achievements. Only recently have historians shown much awareness of the important reforms which he made in the machinery of government. Yet, although attention has been drawn to this aspect of his work it has not been adequately examined. The tendency is still to concentrate on the colourful and controversial features of his regime, pushing to one side its more mundane developments. Admittedly, there are exceptions. J. W. Cell included an interesting section on Darling in British Colonial Administration in the Mid-Nineteenth Century , as did J. J. Eddy in Britain and the Australian Colonies. The first of these treatments is too brief, however, and the second concentrates on those aspects affected by the attempts of the British Treasury to exert more influence over colonial administration. Despite these books, the valuable thesis on the Colonial Secretary's Office by G. D. Richardson and the helpful prefaces that appear in the various guides to the records of government departments, prepared by the State Archives of New South Wales, much remains to be done. Most of the departments that existed under Darling still await detailed treatment both in themselves and in relation to the overall changes that were made between 1825 and 1831. As matters stand, there is a gap not only in what was a vital era in the administrative history of New South Wales, but also in Darling's own record. The present paper attempts to repair this omission.     

Books in review

has taught at the universities of London and York. He is author of The Making of Sociology, The Shaking of the Foundations: Family and Society,and The Abolitionists—The Family and Marriage under Attack.Fletcher’s own book on Burt, Science, Ideology, and the Media,will be issued by Transaction in 1991.     

Investigating the theoretical construct and invariance of the self-control scale using confirmatory factor analysis

Low self-control is at the heart of Gottfredson and Hirschi's (1990) general theory of crime and had been extensively investigated with the Grasmick, Tittle, Bursik, and Arneklev (1993) self-control scale. An advanced analytical tool, confirmatory techniques, had been recently applied to elucidate the underlying theoretical structure of the self-control construct. Most of these studies were limited, as they did not compare competing factorial measurement models. Furthermore, measures such as the Grasmick et al. scale had been used widely with diverse population groups and it was essential that the invariance of the measure be examined. The few studies that had performed this had addressed the invariance of the scale's factorial structure, but neglected to examine the invariance of the latent means structures. Testing the invariance of the latent means eliminates spurious results that may be artifacts of biased responding. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the structure of self-control by comparing three measurement models using confirmatory factor analysis and to explore the invariance of self-control across multiple groups from New Zealand. Two male groups were used: prison inmates and university students. The overall findings supported the Grasmick et al. scale as usefully represented by both a hierarchical order and a multidimensional structure. The measure was found to be generalizable across disparate groups, although differences in latent means were found between the two groups on the self-control dimensions.