In the categorical approach to the foundations of quantum theory, one begins
with a symmetric monoidal category, the objects of which represent physical
systems, and the morphisms of which represent physical processes. Usually, this
category is taken to be at least compact closed, and more often, dagger
compact, enforcing a certain self-duality, whereby preparation processes
(roughly, states) are inter-convertible with processes of registration
(roughly, measurement outcomes). This is in contrast to the more concrete
"operational" approach, in which the states and measurement outcomes associated
with a physical system are represented in terms of what we here call a "convex
operational model": a certain dual pair of ordered linear spaces -- generally,
{\em not} isomorphic to one another. On the other hand, state spaces for which
there is such an isomorphism, which we term {\em weakly self-dual}, play an
important role in reconstructions of various quantum-information theoretic
protocols, including teleportation and ensemble steering. In this paper, we
characterize compact closure of symmetric monoidal categories of convex
operational models in two ways: as a statement about the existence of
teleportation protocols, and as the principle that every process allowed by
that theory can be realized as an instance of a remote evaluation protocol ---
hence, as a form of classical probabilistic conditioning. In a large class of
cases, which includes both the classical and quantum cases, the relevant
compact closed categories are degenerate, in the weak sense that every object
is its own dual. We characterize the dagger-compactness of such a category
(with respect to the natural adjoint) in terms of the existence, for each
system, of a {\em symmetric} bipartite state, the associated conditioning map
of which is an isomorphism