Political ecology and conservation policies: some theoretical genealogies

This article explicitly connects a growing body of specific literature, the political ecology of conservation, tosome of the often overlooked, main conceptual components emerging from political anthropology andgeography (sources of legitimacy, governmentality, territoriality, or state making), political economy(commoditization, market integration, niche markets, or gentrification), and cultural studies of theenvironment (cultural transformations of nature, cultural heritage and landscapes, taste, and identity politics).All these concepts and literary fields are at the basis of the contemporary social analysis of conservationpolicies and their consequences. The article also provides an updated large bibliography on the conceptspotentially relevant to a political ecology of conservation.