JOBNAME: Bryant PAGE: 1 SESS: 4 OUTPUT: Tue Jun 23 09:18:16 2015 26. Nature TM Inc.: nature as neoliberal capitalist imaginary Robert Fletcher, Wolfram Dressler and Bram Büscher The global conservation movement is currently ‘reinventing’ itself to a degree that is not yet clearly understood. What is clear, however, is that this reinvention is aligned with broader dynamics in neoliberal capitalism (Igoe et al., 2010). This convergence is represented by mechanisms such as ecotourism, payments for ecosystem services and biodiversity derivatives, and enabled through various financial and technological instruments such as species and wetlands banking, carbon trade and conservation social media. With wildlife populations and biodiversity riches threatened the world over, new and innovative methods of addressing these threats are necessary – and none, we are told, are newer and more innovative than those drawing and/or relying on ‘the market’. As public funding for conservation grows scarcer and organizations increasingly turn to the private sector to make up the shortfall, market forces have found their way into conservation policy and practice to a degree unimaginable only a decade ago. Building on Arsel and Büscher (2012), we refer to this trend as ‘Nature Inc.’ With much at stake, it is critical to investigate how Nature Inc. is reshaping human–nature relations fashioned over two centuries of capitalist development. Drawing on critical political ecology, this chapter examines the role of inequality in access to wealth, and the natural resources on which wealth is based, as one of the principal drivers of the interrelated dynamics of human discord and ecological degradation. Our analysis also reflects a characteristic political ecological concern to elucidate the interconnection among the various actors involved in environmental governance at different levels or scales – from the global to the regional to the national to the local – within seemingly spatially bounded contexts, as well as contestation among actors at each of these levels (Watts, 2000). In its fusion of a Marxist political economy with a Foucaultian concern with governmentality, the chapter represents an engagement both with the original (post-)Marxist strain within political ecology as well as the alternate poststructuralist current that has, in recent years, developed concur- rently and in dynamic discussion (see, e.g., Escobar, 2008; Peet and Watts, 1996; Peet et al., 2011). (This chapter is a synopsis of material presented in our recent edited volume, Büscher et al., 2014). We begin by outlining the growing academic literature analyzing contemporary neoliberalism, describing how this analysis has been applied to environmental policy and to describe the phenomenon we refer to as Nature Inc. We then trace the development of Nature Inc. over the past several decades, identifying a trend toward increasing abstraction and financialization in order to facilitate the global circulation of ‘natural capital’. This grounds our call for consideration of ‘Vital Alternatives’, wherein we outline a variety of emerging perspectives and possibilities that may help us to 359 Columns Design XML Ltd / Job: Bryant-International_handbook_political_ecology / Division: 26-chapter26Fletcheretal07052015ts /Pg. Position: 1 / Date: 19/6