Conservation labour and the environmental state

Abstract

This paper develops a labour theory of the environmental state through an analysis of natural resource management (NRM) work in regional New South Wales, Australia. Drawing on 20 career-history interviews with community coordinators, state extension officers, NGO staff and ecological scientists, it examines three decades of organisational churn: the rise and retreat of Landcare, the replacement of Catchment Management Authorities by Local Land Services and the growth of market-based regulation. NRM workers describe careers marked by contingency, gendered divisions of labour and continual adaptation to shifting regimes of regulation and funding. While institutions are repeatedly reconfigured, the NRM branch of biodiversity governance persists through the everyday work of professionals who carry knowledge, relationships and practices across reform cycles. Situating these trajectories within state theory, the paper argues that conservation labour is the connective tissue through which formal instability coexists with operational continuity, enabling the environmental state to manage ecological crisis, despite ongoing organisational churn.