Fixing extraction through conservation : on crises, fixes and the production of shared value and threat

We are currently witnessing a global trend of intensifying and deepening relationships between extractive companies and biodiversity conservation organisations that warrants closer scrutiny. Although existing literature has established that these two sectors often share the same space and rely on similar logics, it is increasingly common to find biodiversity conservation being carried out through partnerships between extractive and conservation actors. In this article, we explore what this cooperation achieves for both sectors. Using illustrative examples of extractive-conservation collaboration across sub-Saharan Africa, we argue that new entanglements between extractive and conservation actors are motivated by multiple purposes. First, partnering with conservation actors serves as a spatial and socio-ecological fix for extractive companies in response to multiple crises that threaten the sector's productivity. Second, new forms of collaboration between extractive and conservation actors create pathways for both sectors to produce new value from nature. For the extractive sector, creating new value from nature works as a further fix to capitalist crises whereas, for the conservation sector, producing value through nature amounts to new opportunities for capital accumulation. Importantly, working together to produce shared value from nature within and beyond extractive concessions secures both sectors' control over the means of production. Theoretically, our analysis links literature on value in capitalist nature with that on spatial and socio-ecological fixes

Modelling sustainability performance to achieve absolute reductions in socio-ecological systems

As the world’s natural resources dwindle and critical levels of environmental pollution are approached, sustainability becomes a key issue for governments, organisations and individuals. With the consequences of such an issue in mind, this paper introduces a unifying approach to measure the sustainability performance of socio-economic systems based on the interplay between two key variables: essentiality of consumption and environmental impact. This measure attributes to every system a ‘fitness’ value i.e. a quantity that reflects its ability to remain resilient/healthy by avoiding ecological, social and economic collapse as it consumes the available resources. This new measure is tested on a system where there is a limited supply of resources and four basic consumption types. The analysis has theoretical implications as well as practical importance as it can help countries, organisations or even individuals, in finding better ways to measure sustainability performance

Challenges towards renewable energy : an exploratory study from the Arabian Gulf region

Considering the importance of energy for social and economic development, access to clean, affordable and reliable energy has been adopted as one of the United Nations sustainable development goals that all countries aim to achieve by 2030. However, much of the world's energy is still produced from fossil fuels and thus the progress towards clean and renewable energy is slow. This paper explores the key challenges towards renewable energy in Gulf Cooperation Council countries blessed with plenty of oil and gas reserves. The key challenges identified through literature review were ranked using a quantitative approach through the data collected from a selective sample across the six countries. These challenges in order of importance were found to be policies and regulations, manpower experience and competencies, renewable energy education, public awareness, costs and incentives for renewable energy and government commitment. The findings could be helpful to decision makers and government organisations in the region to develop strategies to overcome these identified challenges