Selling Success: Constructing Value in Conservation and Development

“Selling success” is crucial in conservation and development. Solutions, ideas, projects, and people must actively be constructed as valuable to get donors and policy-makers to buy (into) them. Exactly how success “travels” and becomes capital, however, is not often explicated. Using a southern African conservation and development intervention, the paper compares “positive translation” along the project’s accountability chain with the broader circulation of positive references to the project’s payments for ecosystem services initiative. While both illuminate the construction of value in conservation and development, the paper concludes that a neoliberal context increasingly emphasizes the latter tactic of “epistemic circulation”.