Abstract

Conservation Health Security: The Politics, Ecologies, and Spaces of Conservation-led Infectious Disease Containment

Concerns around zoonotic and infectious animal diseases stand at the core of health security – efforts to protect people, states, and economies from infectious disease risks and threats. While by no means new, health security, and specifically pandemic prevention, are increasingly intertwined with broader socioecological crises and the governing of human-environment relations. There is thus ample room for the conservation sector to play an important role, a task it is accepting. My talk is motivated by thinking about how evolving concerns around health security and infectious disease risk are (re-)shaping biodiversity conservation policy and practice; and how conservation space, practice, and actors are working to proactively minimise the risk, spread, and impact of infectious diseases through outbreak prevention, detection, and response. While conservation has a long history of intersecting with public health and infectious disease concerns, I illustrate how there is something different about current conservation-health intersections that point to an emergent conservation health security. I combine recent empirical research with literatures on health security, the political ecology of conservation, and political ecologies of disease to work towards conceptualising and critically examining this conservation health security and the spaces and practices through which it manifests.