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In this chapter, Arthur Mol elaborates on informational governance in the environmental domain. He assesses the achievements of transparency to date in enhancing democratic quality and promoting environmental effectiveness. As he shows, markets and states jostle to capture transparency arrangements for their own diverse ends, which are not necessarily aligned with assumed normative linkages between transparency, democracy and participation, as well as environmental reform. The chapter argues that transparency in governance has entered a reflexive phase, one in which secondarytransparency i.e. additional layers of transparency provided by information intermediaries, is key to making primary disclosure usable. Through assessing the promise, potential and pitfalls of governance by disclosure in the sustainability realm, Mol’s provocative conclusion is that transparency has “lost its innocence” as an arbiter of democratic and environmental gains.

Popularized by scientists in the 1970s, adaptive management is an integrative, multi-disciplinary approach to managing landscapes and natural resources. Despite its broad appeal many critics complain that adaptive management rarely works in practice as prescribed in theory. This chapter traces the history and evolution of the concept and assess its implementation challenges. One reason adaptive management has not always delivered on its promise to make natural resource management more “rational” is that in the real world of policymaking scientists and natural resource managers must contend with advocates that have conflicting values and goals. Scientists and managers also operate in the context of institutions that create particular constraints and opportunities, and are generally inflexible and resistant to change. In recognition of these sociopolitical realities, the focus of much adaptive management practice and scholarship has shifted to governance, particularly collaboration with stakeholders, transformation of the institutions responsible for management, and the process of social learning.

The conclusion finds that a comparative study of transnational activism underlines the importance of justice claims to global environmental governance. It links debates on international environmental justice with literature on environmental regime effectiveness and neoliberal ecological economics. When networks generated a consensus, socialized with policymakers and invoked norms consonant with local justice, they were more likely to persuade policymakers. Absent one or more of the variables, conservation projects were implemented poorly, or simply rejected by states. Therefore, issues of fairness or justice go to the heart of effective management. They reflect the important normative questions behind biodiversity management, including what biodiversity consists of, what it is being managed for, and for whom it is being conserved.

Governance refers to how multiple institutions and organizations influence policy. Governance institutions include not only city, county, state, and national governments, but also businesses, community groups, and small non-profit organizations, as well as large national and international NGOs like The Nature Conservancy, and multilateral organizations like the United Nations. Based on multiple studies conducted over many years on systems as different as policing and forest management, Elinor Ostrom concluded that, relative to top-down government, multiple layers of governance do not produce inefficiencies but rather enable societies to more effectively address complex challenges. This is because the various organizations bring a variety of ideas to the table, which become experiments that can lead to better solutions. Community organizations conducting civic ecology practices are one of many organizations involved in such polycentric governance systems. Additionally, civic ecology practices play a role in the civic environmental movement, which as opposed to the more antagonistic environmental movement that emerged in the 1970s, focuses on collaborations among the non-profit and government sector in environmental management and policy formation.

The conclusion summarizes the argument developed in the book to synthesize an approach to conservation after the Anthropocene. It then reflects on three significant challenges that face the model developed in the book.

The introduction engages the Anthropocene, identifying the deficiencies in existing accounts before outlining the approach that is developed in the book. It sketches the theoretical framework before detailing the empirical materials through which the argument is developed.

Chapter three examines prevalent practices of biodiversity conservation as biopolitics. Focusing on the UK, it explores how biodiversity conservation seeks to secure life through identifying, counting, researching and nurturing populations of species. It presents conservation as oligoptical – framing and performing the world in the shape of partial databases and skillsets.

Chapter seven develops the concept of nonhuman charisma to explore how encounters between people and wildlife are valued in conservation. It explores the commodification of charisma in captivity and in-situ. It examines the deleterious consequences for people and wildlife of contemporary forms of neoliberal conservation focused on charismatic species.

Chapter five compares conservation as composition with rewilding, an alternative model concerned with ecological processes. Through a critical examination of the use of large herbivores on a polder landscape in the Netherlands, this chapter presents conservation as comprising wild experiments involving open-ended deliberations with multiple and discordant humans and nonhumans.

Chapter eight explores questions of space. It traces the binary understanding of conservation territories that informs Nature conservation. Focusing on urban wildlife and recent enthusiasms for ecological connectivity it examines the potential of other topologies for wildlife including network and fluid geographies that appreciate the mobilities of nonhumans themselves.

Chapter four examines a common mode of conservation biopolitics concerned with saving species from political and ecological change – or conservation as composition. It focuses on the conservation of corncrakes and crofters in the Scottish Hebrides. It traces the scientific, political and economic practices through which their fate has been secured, before identifying some of the problems with this static model.

Chapter one develops the concept of wildlife as a replacement for Nature for conservation. It does so through a discussion of the four themes of hybridity, nonhuman agency, immanence and topology. It presents wildlife as a multiple, subsuming a number of discordant ontologies. This argument is illustrated with reference to Asian elephants.

Chapter two examines how conservationists come to know wildlife. It explore field science as processes of learning to be affected in which embodied, skilled practitioners tune into the world. It examines the character and role of nonhuman charisma in shaping the conduct of conservation.

Chapter six examines the role of moving imagery in conservation. We live in an age of the screen in which media play vital roles in framing and governing human and nonhuman life. Focusing on elephants, this chapter critically examines four prevalent affective logics in the genres that characterize wildlife media.