About

James Igoe is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, where he also serves as the Director of Graduate Studies and Director of Graduate Admissions. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from Boston University, obtained in 2000. His research focuses on globalization, biodiversity conservation, development, nature, value(s), spectacle, and social movements, with particular attention to East Africa and North America. Igoe has conducted field research on biodiversity conservation, community-based development, and grassroots social movements in Tanzania, Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and New Orleans, Louisiana. His earlier work concentrated on conflicts between nature conservation and indigenous and local communities across diverse contexts. More recently, his work explores how spectacles of nature connect and disconnect people's experiences of their place in the world across various interconnected scales and locales. He is also involved in experimental collaborations aimed at integrating theory, applied practice, and public scholarship.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Geography
• Environmental science
• Environmental planning
• Environmental resource management
• Law
• Ecology
• Political economy
• Biology
• Environmental protection

Selected publications

• Saving the Planet with Class: Professional-Managerial Virtue and the Emergence of Neoliberal Conservation

  Progress in Environmental Geography · 2026-05-20

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Conservation's moral significance for capitalist reproduction has been vividly evident through its neoliberal formations, in which conservationists exalt the virtues of “natural capital” for “saving the planet.” Political ecologists and human geographers have critically engaged conservation's neoliberalization but not explained how and why conservation emerged as a prominent and durable realm of capitalist virtue-making. To address these questions, we focus on the relationship between neoliberal conservation's emergence, capitalist class formations, and their moral ideologies, particularly the convergent ascendance of conservation and the professional-managerial class (PMC) following WWII. We trace how modern conservation became a key domain of PMC virtue-making during this period and continued as such through the shift from state-centric managerialism to market-centric technocracy that began in the 1970s. During the late twentieth-century neoliberal policy turn, PMC actors refashioned their virtue-making around market logic, enabling mainstream conservation to endure and expand as a prime source of capitalist moral authority. Its prospects appear less certain amid rising authoritarianism.

  PublisherDOI

• National Parks and Human Ecosystems:

  Berghahn Books · 2025-04-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 5 National Parks and Human Ecosystems: The Challenge to Community Conservation. A Case Study from Simanjiro, Tanzania

  Berghahn Books · 2025-06-06 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• NGOs and Civil Society at the End of a World

  Development and Change · 2024 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 5 National Parks and Human Ecosystems THE CHALLENGE TO COMMUNITY CONSERVATION. A CASE STUDY FROM SIMANJIRO, TANZANIA

  Berghahn Books · 2022 · 22 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Geography
  • Environmental resource management
  • Environmental planning
  PublisherDOI

• Conservación Neoliberal. Una breve introducción

  Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The growing body of work on the ‘neoliberalisation of nature’ does not as yet pay adequate attention to conservation policy and its impacts. Similarly, studies of conservation have much to learn by placing conservation policies in the context of broader social and economic changes that define neoliberalism. In this introduction, we outline and analyse the ways in which viewing conservation through a neoliberal lens adds value (if you will excuse the metaphor) to the collection of critiques we offer, placing quite different geographical areas and case studies in a comparative context. We argue that neoliberalisation involves the reregulation of nature through forms of commodification. This, in turn, entails new types of territorialisation: the partitioning of resources and landscapes in ways that control, and often exclude, local people. Territorialisation is a starkly visible form of reregulation, which frequently creates new types of values and makes those values available to national and transnational elites. Finally, neoliberalisation has also coincided with the emergence of new networks that cut across traditional divides of state, non-governmental organisation (NGO), and for-profit enterprise. These networks are rhetorically united by neoliberal ideologies and are combining in ways that profoundly alter the lives of rural people in areas targeted for biodiversity conservation. The studies this collection brings together, which are all rooted in place-based detailed research, are united by their experience of these processes. We argue that the disparate collection of critiques on the neoliberalisation of nature needs more grounded studies like these. We conclude this introduction with some tentative recommendations for future research and policy on neoliberal conservation.

  PublisherOA PDF

• A Conservationist Political Ecology in and for the Tarangire Ecosystem

  Ecological studies · 2022-01-01 · 4 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 30. Neoliberal Conservation

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020 · 12 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Geography
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• The Nature of Spectacle

  University of Arizona Press eBooks · 2017-09-12 · 53 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Today crisis appears to be the normal order of things. We seem to be turning in widening gyres of economic failure, species extinction, resource scarcity, war, and climate change. These crises are interconnected ecologically, economically, and politically. Just as importantly, they are connected—and disconnected—in our imaginations. Public imaginations are possibly the most important stage on which crises are played out, for these views determine how the problems are perceived and what solutions are offered. In The Nature of Spectacle, Jim Igoe embarks on multifaceted explorations of how we imagine nature and how nature shapes our imaginations. The book traces spectacular productions of imagined nature across time and space—from African nature tourism to transnational policy events to green consumer appeals in which the push of a virtual button appears to initiate a chain of events resulting in the protection of polar bears in the Arctic or jaguars in the Amazon rainforest. These explorations illuminate the often surprising intersections of consumerism, entertainment, and environmental policy. They show how these intersections figure in a strengthening and problematic policy consensus in which economic growth and ecosystem health are cast as mutually necessitating conditions. They also take seriously the potential of these intersections and how they may facilitate other alignments and imaginings that may become the basis of alternatives to our current socioecological predicaments.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Nature of Spectacle: On Images, Money, and Conserving Capitalism

  2017-09-12 · 31 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Today crisis appears to be the normal order of things. We seem to be turning in widening gyres of economic failure, species extinction, resource scarcity, war, and climate change. These crises are interconnected ecologically, economically, and politically. Just as importantly, they are connected—and disconnected—in our imaginations. Public imaginations are possibly the most important stage on which crises are played out, for these views determine how the problems are perceived and what solutions are offered.\nIn The Nature of Spectacle, Jim Igoe embarks on multifaceted explorations of how we imagine nature and how nature shapes our imaginations. The book traces spectacular productions of imagined nature across time and space—from African nature tourism to transnational policy events to green consumer appeals in which the push of a virtual button appears to initiate a chain of events resulting in the protection of polar bears in the Arctic or jaguars in the Amazon rainforest. These explorations illuminate the often surprising intersections of consumerism, entertainment, and environmental policy. They show how these intersections figure in a strengthening and problematic policy consensus in which economic growth and ecosystem health are cast as mutually necessitating conditions. They also take seriously the potential of these intersections and how they may facilitate other alignments and imaginings that may become the basis of alternatives to our current socioecological predicaments.

Frequent coauthors

• Dan Brockington

  Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

  19 shared

• Rosaleen Duffy

  University of Sheffield

  10 shared

• Katja Neves

  Concordia University

  8 shared

• Bram Büscher

  University of Johannesburg

  8 shared

• Sian Sullivan

  Bath Spa University

  7 shared

• Peter R. Wilshusen

  4 shared

• Alonso Cover

  American University

  4 shared

• Ken Macdonald

  University for Peace

  4 shared