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.     

Aquinas’s Ecological Vision: Natural Law and Friendship in Contemporary Environmental Political Thought

This article examines Aquinas’s thinking about law and nature to show that for Aquinas natural law is not about deriving or finding normative rules (standards) in the order of the cosmos or requirements of practical rationality. Rather, I argue that for Aquinas, natural law is a distinctive way of theorizing relationality and embodiment in the “sublunary realm”: one that aims at “friendship” across species lines (STI-II99.2-3). The word Aquinas uses to describe this ecological practice is synderesis. For Aquinas, synderesis is both the human-creaturely capacity to grasp the analogical structuring of reality and the “disposition” that allows us to work on transforming this reality into belonging-together through our participation in natural law (STI79; DV15-17). Synderesis is thus of central importance to Aquinas’s account of natural law, yet it is largely overlooked by modern natural law theorists. The article concludes by exploring how Aquinas’s natural law thinking might contribute to an environmental politics of friendship.     

Is French defence policy becoming more Atlanticist?

France is one of the most prominent European military powers and a strong proponent of an independent European military capability. Yet, France’s actions since 2009 suggest that it may be prioritizing the transatlantic relationship over the development of the European Union’s Common Security and Defence Policy. Does this signal a fundamental Atlanticist shift in the way that France envisions its future defence and security, or does it simply signal a temporary re-evaluation of French Europeanist security ambitions? Our analysis attempts to answer whether there is presently an Atlanticist shift evident in French foreign policy, and whether any such shift is rooted in a desire to preserve French influence through international institutions such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. This paper combines elite interviews with content analysis of French media comparing the current time with the mid-1990s to determine whether there is a shift in how defence and security issues are discussed and, if so, whether that signals a fundamental change. We find that, while there is a shift, it does not necessarily indicate a more Atlanticist posture, but suggests rather a pragmatic move to further French security goals through the most effective institutional mechanisms available.     

Formalization and consistency heighten organizational rule following: Experimental and survey evidence

This study examines the attributes of organizational rules that influence rule following. Rule following fosters organizational effectiveness by aligning individual behaviours with organizational preference. While a range of theoretical explanations have been offered for rule following, the characteristics of rule design and implementation have received less empirical attention. Borrowing from the green tape theory of effective rules, this study examines the influence of two particular characteristics—rule formalization and rule consistency—on rule following. Three studies, which include two vignette experiments and a survey of two local government organizations, provide the data for the research. The results suggest that rule formalization and rule consistency independently increase rule following, with mixed evidence of interaction effects. The broad implication is that public managers must attend to both rule design and implementation to foster organizational rule following.     

Political Decentralization and Technological Innovation: Testing the Innovative Advantages of Decentralized States

Are politically decentralized states better at fostering long‐run technological innovation than centralized states? Societies with decentralized governments are widely seen as agile, competitive, and well structured to adapt to innovation's gale of creative destruction. Meanwhile, centralized states, even when democratic, have come to be viewed as rigid and thus hostile to the risks, costs, and change associated with new technology, or prone to cling too long to foolhardy or outdated technological projects. Therefore government decentralization is often perceived as a necessary institutional foundation for encouraging long‐run technological innovation. However, in this article, I analyze data on international patent activity, scientific publications, and high‐technology exports, and show that there exists little evidence for an aggregate relationship between government structure and technological innovation.     

Capitalizing on Criminal Accomplices: Considering the Relationship between Co-offending and Illegal Earnings

This study investigates whether co-offending offers an avenue towards criminal success. Specifically, it considers if current and prior co-offending experience is related to the probability of reporting illegal earnings as well as the amount of these earnings. Using data from the Pathways to Desistance Study, we estimated fixed-and random-effects models to test whether co-offending experience is related to self-reported illegal earnings. The models also estimated whether “historical” co-offending experience predicted current illegal earnings. Across both modeling strategies, current and historical co-offending predicted the probability of reporting non-zero illegal earnings, net of offending frequency and controls. There is minimal evidence of a relationship between co-offending experience and the amount of illegal earnings, however. These findings lead us to conclude that access to a relatively common criminal connection—the co-offender—offers tangible benefits to adolescent offenders, primarily by affecting their ability to translate criminal opportunities into monetary gain.     

Labeling effects of initial juvenile justice system processing decision on youth interpersonal ties*

The juvenile justice system can process youth in myriad ways. Youth who are formally processed, relative to being informally processed, may experience more public and harsh sanctions that label youth more negatively as “deviant.” Drawing on labeling theory, the current study evaluates the relative effect of formal justice system processing on the interpersonal dynamics of youth peer networks. Using data from the Crossroads Study, a multisite longitudinal sample of first-time adolescent offenders, the current study applies augmented inverse probability weighting and generalized mixed-effects models to estimate the effects of formal processing on friendship selection processes of homophily and withdrawal and considers whether these effects vary by race and ethnicity. Consistent with expectations of homophily, formally processed youth acquire more new deviant peers and fewer nondeviant peers during the 3 years after their initial processing decision compared with informally processed youth. The findings suggest no differences exist across processing types in withdrawal from friends. These effects were consistent across racial and ethnic groups. Ultimately, this study explores the dynamic interpersonal mechanisms associated with labeling theory and offers additional insight into the negative effects of formal processing.