Branching out: trees, hegemony and natural capital

Keywords: natural capital, governance, austerity, trees, Greater Manchester
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

In the UK, over the last decade, natural capital has shifted from being an arcane accounting technique to a national policy framework underpinning all aspects of environmental planning and management. Indeed, natural capital has become the lingua franca of the environment sector as a whole, transforming not only the governance of nature, reframed as an economic asset, but the nature of governance, delivered through public-private partnerships in the context of local state retrenchment. That natural capital became embedded in environmental policy the year after austerity was introduced by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government is no coincidence, this paper argues, where it has provided a technical basis for public reform in the sector. This paper will trace how natural capital accounting, a neoliberal technology par excellence, was spread throughout the environment sector at the behest of central government, reprogramming how local authorities, NGOs, conservationists and scientists relate to one another and the natural world, mediated increasingly by accounting and financial practices. What natural capital has achieved is widespread cultural change, which thereby offers a novel way to understand how hegemony operates at the intersection of political and civil society, through intricate technical networks that reconfigure governance arrangements beyond the state to achieve ideological objectives. The paper draws on the case of tree governance in the north of England, focusing in particular on Greater Manchester.