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Bake Sales to Save Nature: Why Wall Street Conservation Survives

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  • Jessica Dempsey

Abstract

Academics have spent decades analysing the harms and failures of market and finance‐led biodiversity policy. Yet, even though ‘selling nature to save it’ looks less like the promised green capitalism and more like a decades‐long bake sale in that its efforts are small, piecemeal and rely on copious amounts of cheap capital, the approach remains dominant. Adopting the term ‘Wall Street Conservation’, this article asks why it remains hegemonic, in spite of all the failures. Ruth Wilson Gilmore's potent approach to understanding entrenched systems like the prison–industrial complex provides a critical framework for this inquiry: if Wall Street Conservation is not solving the problem it is meant to, what kinds of problems is it solving, and for whom?

Suggested Citation

  • Jessica Dempsey, 2026. "Bake Sales to Save Nature: Why Wall Street Conservation Survives," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 57(1), pages 3-26, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:devchg:v:57:y:2026:i:1:p:3-26
    DOI: 10.1111/dech.70035
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    7. Jessica Dempsey & Daniel Chiu Suarez, 2016. "Arrested Development? The Promises and Paradoxes of “Selling Nature to Save It”," Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 106(3), pages 653-671, May.
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