How does neoliberalism shape the ideas, functions and layouts of ‘Leisure Landscapes’ in a market-driven society?

Interview with Bram Büscher about Leisure Landscapes

Interviewers: Zwaan Hoeksma (Z.H.) and Theresa Konova (T.K.)

Interviewee: Prof. dr. Bram Büscher (B.B.)

In this interview, we have invited prof. dr. Bram Büscher, a political scientist, to explore and discuss the spatial dimensions of neoliberalism, focusing on how market-driven ideologies shape contemporary leisure landscapes. Through a critical lens, we examine the commodification of green spaces, the exploitation of land under the guise of economic growth, and the political narratives that sustain these processes. We delve into public perceptions of neo-liberal landscapes, questioning whose voices are heard in the decision-making process and who bears the consequences of a consumption-driven approach to landscape development. Our conversation highlights the tensions between biodiversity conservation and commercial interest, and considers how stakeholder engagement can evolve within a de-growth framework. Ultimately, we envision more equitable and ecologically grounded alternatives to the current trajectory of landscape planning.

About prof. dr. Bram Büscher:

Bram Büscher is Professor and Chair of the Sociology of Development and Change at Wageningen University, and Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg. A leading scholar in political ecology, his work focuses on the political economy of environment and development, particularly in relation to conservation, biodiversity, and capitalism. He has held prestigious fellowships in South Africa and received multiple international research grants. Bram is the author of several influential books, including The Conservation Revolution and The Truth About Nature, and serves as a senior editor of the open-access journal Conservation & Society.

T.K.: Hallo, Bram, we are very glad to be able to dive into the theme of neo-liberal landscapes and explore whose voices are heard when designing the so-called ‘leisure landscapes’ in contemporary society. Thank you that you agreed and are able to discuss with us the theme and how it is reflected in the landscape planning, stemming from (and supporting) a full political picture.

Z.H.: I saw your lecture on new liberal conservation and conservation is not really our field of study, but we do spatial design, so we were wondering how, according to you, neoliberalism is expressed in spatial context, especially in leisure landscapes?

B.B.: Well, Zwaan, you were in the class where I gave some definitions of neoliberalism, that is of course important to begin with. Neoliberalism is basically a political project or political philosophy that tries to increase market dynamics, capital market dynamics, in different spheres of life.Let us (very broadly) leave it at that for now, for the purpose of this interview. 

In terms of its spatial features, when you talk specifically about landscapes, there's actually been a lot of research on that: there has been a lot of literature on the relation between capitalism and geography, and one of the central thinkers in that has been David Harvey. He has done incredible work in trying to understand the spatial features of neoliberal capitalism. In this sort for instance, I think you can't really disentangle these two very well. And one of the things he shows is an incredible unevenness in terms of how different landscapes get transformed and for what purposes. So if you need a growing economy, you need all kinds of infrastructure to enable this kind of economic development and interaction: that is from a broader capitalist point of view. We see vital infrastructures like airports, roads, harbors, like the thing in Egypt, where the boat got stuck once and all our goods from China could not come to Europe and to the Rotterdam harbor. Those are key features for the global economy. But of course, building airports, roads, harbors and all those kinds of things have huge implications for landscapes: you see the development of cities around that as well, and the intensification of spatial features. In the 19th and early 20th century that saw huge growth, both the growth of cities, as well as industrial pollution. But at the same time, you saw the opposite happening: focus on leisure landscapes. So leisure landscapes and conservation cannot be completely taken apart, I think.

From the 19th century, because of the intensification of life, economic processes, people's ideas of time changed dramatically. People could travel faster by train, get products from all over the world, all kinds of things changed very rapidly in that time. In a way people also sought to find ways to offset that, to balance things out a little bit, thus they started creating active leisure landscapes. So both conservation landscapes away from modernization to keep certain ecosystems and natural landscapes intact, but also leisure landscapes, landscapes that allow people to find or offset certain types of activities in their daily life by relaxing or doing things of leisure. Those things need to be connected, so leisure landscapes and the idea of leisure landscapes historically can only come up if you are aware of the required need for them. In that way, they are strongly connected.

Skipping maybe 100 years, coming into the neoliberal era, in the 1970s and 1980s we see  further economic growth and globalization in terms of the economy. We have also seen leisure landscapes themselves becoming globalized. For me (I am a little bit older than you guys), the idea of traveling around the world and outside of Europe was super exciting. The notion of particular forms of leisure landscapes around the world has changed a lot and they have become much more accessible to a certain class of people that can afford it now.But under neoliberalism, leisure landscapes are often not necessarily government owned or community owned, but very often increasingly privately owned, so they very much focus on the market niche for people.I mean, here in the Netherlands, you see it through these estates called ‘vakantieparken’ (vacation parks), where you can rent a house with your family: where people come and they find a specific niche in their life under the term of leisure. Of course, that term is very broad and all kinds of landscapes start to be transformed in relation to that. Some more focused on sports, some more focused on nature, some more focused on maybe specific types of hobbies that people have, and I think this is how you can see how neoliberalism is increasingly reflected in leisure landscapes. So the commodification of specific landscapes for all kinds of diverse leisure purposes related to specific niches that people like in terms of their leisure, such as swimming or other sports, or just relaxing, those kinds of activities. Does this answer your question? (laughs)

T.K.: Yes, it is quite a broad question indeed, but I think this explanation brings it to a summary that is generally applicable. Types of leisure of course also differ for each part of the world, people’s mentality and stereotypical ways of recreation, but also on the type of nature. So it is connected to these things, but in general there are a few categories of pleasures that areliked on a global level, so I think you summarized that in a logical way.

B.B: Exactly, and that diversity is really important.  An example, a colleague of mine works in Jamaica where a lot of beaches are privatized and then turned into resorts, resulting in local communities not being able to access the beach anymore for fishing or other purposes, or just in daily life. Another example in the US, is that many leisure landscapes are made for hunting, we do not see that here a lot. I mean, our King likes to hunt: he has a couple of estates, of course, leisure landscapes for himself, but in the US, that is a huge public thing. The whole states, like South Dakota, contain so many landscapes that are specifically focused on hunting as a form of leisure.

T.K.: Yes, so deeply driven by culture.

B.B.: Yes, and neoliberalism allows that diversity to be exploited and commodified in all kinds of ways: there are all kinds of market niches.

Z.H.: Because in your work you also explore the relationship between land exploitation and market driven economic growth: can you dive deeper into this connection, between politicized landscapes?

B.B.: What I always try to do, especially with big questions like this, is to be very precise about the terms: leisure is an important term for you, but also landscape, land exploitation, etc. There is so much literature on this historically and currently, because now you are not just talking about leisure necessarily, but land exploitation more generally. I think the most impactful type of land exploitation, globally and historically, is related to agriculture. What is often called the great sort of transformation, the great ‘land rush’, where globally again in the 18th, but especially the 19th and early 20th century, huge slots of land were turned from natural conditions, focused on prairies or forests or here in the Netherlands, swamps, into agricultural lands and often not very diverse agricultural lands. So for a particular type of market-driven economic growth focused on agriculture, you see a ginormous sort of transition of land and different types of environments into forms of land exploitation for the market. One absolutely beautiful, but also a bit disturbing book, is this book, called ‘Nature's metropolis’: Chicago in the Great West by William Cronin. Now, William Cronin is one of the most important environmental historians, and he shows in this pretty big book how the development of Chicago, which is a fairly new city, in 1840, which is unthinkable in the Netherlands because most of the big cities were already there, but in 1840s, there was nothing: Chicago did not exist, only after that, all of a sudden, it exploded in 50 years. Why? Because it could only become a major city by changing the entire surrounding area, like a third of the entire United States, into farmland. And then all of the farm produce, timber, meat, grains, all of that, were transported to Chicago: that became a hub for further transportation of agricultural goods globally, particularly to the East of the US, to New York and to Boston and then further also to Europe and other places and. Of course this has been taken over to some degree by other places like Brazil, which have changed massive parts of the Amazon, again changing the landscape, by focusing on cattle rearing and soy growth, but also in Ukraine, which is one of the biggest producers of grain in the world: massive amounts of land that are just mono culture, just one crop, instead of a diversity of environmental features that historically has been the case. So I think you can explore this relationship historically: what has happened? How have landscapes and land changed historically and this is still going on. Over the last years, there has been a big discussion (you can look at the Journal of Peasant Studies for example) on the new ‘land rush’ and ‘land grabs’ for new agro fuels, as we need to get away from fossil fuels, you can do it through agro fuels. And that has been happening in Africa in the in Asia and other parts of the world as economic growth and economic growth strategies.

So yeah, there is much more to be said, but I do not think I should go into much more detail, but this relationship historically and currently is still incredibly strong. I think one important additional remark on this is that, we have come to a point where huge areas of the world cannot really be opened up anymore for new land conversions, so there is increasing pressure on the land globally, through human habitation, human use, industrial and agricultural production, but also because, people need leisure and we need to conserve important ecosystems, so these tendencies increasingly tend conflict with each other. So the last big Conservational Global Agreement called for a 30 by 30 strategy, which means that 30% of the entire planet needs to be protected under formal protected areas by 2030. So in five years from now: we are now at 17%, so it is still a huge area that needs to be formally conserved: it is not going to happen, especially not with Trump and all that kind of craziness, but that is the goal. But if that must happen at the same time as further economic growth based on agriculture, agro fuels, etc., these things are increasingly clashing in places, and you see that all over the world: huge land conflicts.

Z.H.: Okay and how do you think a de-growth economy can fit into finding compromises in those land conflicts?

B.B: De-growth is a strategy for global change in the face of all the big problems that we're currently having as a global society, like the biodiversity crisis, climate, social inequality, etc. It tries to go to the core of the problem that many policymakers do not like to speak about, namely that the economic system is putting more and more pressure on the people and the planet and that pressure comes from economic growth. So the growth that we have experienced of the last 200 years is never going to be sustainable. I think most people know this, especially young people now also see this and they are standing up against this, but at the same time, you see opposite forces, like with Trump and Musk. These are clashing now, especially over the limits to growth, and this is not a new thing, de-growth is only the latest manifestation: in the 1970s, people already talked about limits to growth (the famous report), but the key thing for me, in terms of what de-growth does, is it tries to get away from this idea that we can have everything at the same time. We can have more conservation, and more agriculture, and more industry, and more cities that grow bigger and bigger and bigger: and that is currently what is clashing. De-growth says no, we should actually not have this growth strategy. Maybe some things can grow: that is fine, especially in the global South, I think it is important formaybe certain medicine markets to grow, so that people have access to important medicine and those kind of essentials. You can think a lot of different elements that could benefit from growth, but other things we have too much of or are no longer socially useful. I mean, if we continue to burn all the oil that is still available, we are screwed: it is not very scientific, but it is just a basic fact and all scientists, also at Wageningen, accept that basic fact. The same is also with a lot of other things in our society that I find completely useless: like all the commercials around us the whole time, we supposedly live in a free market, but all the time we get bombarded by commercials saying you need this and you need that. So that you consume, consume, consume, consume more. So we can drastically de-grow those kind of things: commercials, McDonald's, pesticides, things that are not good for people that are proven to be not good for people and the planet, they need to de-grow, and if you do that, you actually open up space for other things: this is unthinkable in a capitalist economy, in a neoliberal economy, because growth is holy and the basis of the whole system, but all of a sudden, if you do not have the pressure as you had before, news new things open up. De-growth tries to do that consciously and deliberately. The COVID crisis, for example, was an accident and a disaster and nobody was prepared for it. But if you prepare for it and say: okay, so we cannot continue with the same type of agriculture, we need different agriculture, but how are we going to help the farmers to switch to a different form of agriculture, unless it is an agriculture not so focused on growth, but on good food, not so much on export, but more on community agriculture so that the farmer has a good life, but also the people that depend on that food have a good life. And that is, I think, what de-growth ultimately tries to do looking at different sectors.How can we get a balance rather than a one sided growth of everything?

Z.H.: How would you suggest that leisure landscapes fit better within the de-growth concept?

B.B: I think leisure landscapes should become less of an offsetting tool. Nowadays many people work so hard and they are under so much pressure all the time through their work that they need to get out.There is a very famous article on tourism that is titled ‘Getting away from it all’. You will just want to get away, right, I have worked so hard, I deserved this. So you fly to Spain, go to a leisure Landscape, chill for two weeks, and then you get back into the rat race, ‘de molen mollen’, as we would say in the Netherlands. So both leisure becomes intense next to work: your work becomes really intense and you need intense leisure to offset the intense work. What I would like to see is how can you find ways to have leisure much more integrated into daily life.If we do not have to work as intensively as now to produce all kinds of goods and services that nobody needs, that does not make us happier, why ca we not we use that time to actively work together in our local communities to create different kind of landscapes that provide both leisure and work, maybe to some degree at the same time, that are not spectacular, but much more community-based and focused on daily life, rather than something exceptional that you do in your holidays. And that for me makes a crucial difference.It also means that these leisure landscapes are not privatized as market niches, but are community-based as things around us that we do and take care of together, not just for ourselves as human beings, but also for non- human beings. Nowadays it is also hard to live with certain animals because we do not have time for dealing with the wolf here. We would much rather fly to South Africa all the way, which is a huge CO2 footprint to look at lions there, but people in South Africa would rather get rid of the lions there and say well, why don’t you just take them to the Netherlands and then we can fly to the Netherlands and visit them there, then we do not have the problems of living with lions in landscapes, because it is quite dangerous.But they are willing to do it if they get a decent way to do so, which currently is not the case. It is like running away from your problems instead of solving them. And I want leisure landscapes to become part of the solution rather than right now, often part of the problem.

T.K.: In the Netherlands, I feel like it is quite versatile and there are a lot of people that are very open and have the possibility and the support to create community-based alternatives for leisure and define leisure in a way that it does not work against other characters in the landscape, but on the opposite, it supports biodiversity or it supports more shared spaces, etc. But there are also like, of course, a majority of people that are still translating leisure only in a way of exploitation of the landscape, with a very capitalistic mindset. So how can such perspective be encouraged and in a way change or influence the mindset to show that there are different ways to address leisure and not necessarily cut a lot of trees, dig the soil and change nature, so you make a golf field or create artificial mounts for mountain bike. So how can you show people that leisure could be also more simplified and not mostly through ways of exploitation only.

B.B: There are a lot of people thinking about these things and trying to do things differently: there is no magic bullet. Things do not change immediately because what we are basically talking about here is structural change, not behavioral change, a behavioral change focuses on that people buy something different in the supermarket, so instead of normal peanut butter, they buy biological peanut butter. I do it too, but it does not create structural change. What you need for a structural change, is a vision of change that combines short-term practical actions, experimenting with different leisure landscapes, with different forms of work in the here and now, with a longer term, bigger vision that changes the broader system altogether, so that more and more people start to think like that. And the last thing is often something that many people often do not talk about or many people do not connect it to: if you only have long term ideals, but you do not have short term practice, you will never get there, if you only have short term practice, then it can go all kinds of ways and still stay within the current system. So for me key in answering your question is to do both: to develop a vision for based on what is happening now and what would it more ideally look like for you in the future?And then you have a bit of an horizon start working this out. Talk to people about that, because that will change people's minds in a bigger way and then on the short term, see where some of these elements are being practiced and try to connect those. For me, this is exactly what we are doing now with the conservation work that we are doing and was presented in the lecture you, Zwaan, attended as well. The convivial conservation stuff that we are doing is exactly based on this kind of principle: to push ofr a structural alternative and to have a long term plan for that. If you are talking about neoliberalism and capitalism, you are talking about hundreds of years that have brought us to this point: there is no easy way out of that. But many people are already working on it, and if you have a bigger plan with a short term and a long term vision and you connect those, then sometimes what happens is that when all of a sudden the circumstances change, these things become more appealing. So with COVID, all of a sudden, things that seemed impossible became possible, because of circumstances. I think this is how we need to think about leisure landscapes as well, you know, look at the look at the experiments that people are already doing, study them, talk about them.For example, a friend of mine, Frank Gorter, he and his family owned an estate on the Veluwe, called Welna and he is trying to change it from a private gain from the estate on timber and logging to a ‘living landscape’, focused on combining leisure, food and conservation. This is a long term process. I think those are the kind of things that we need to learn from in practice to push and to connect to a broader vision.

Z.H.: That is what I actually really liked about your lecture that it ended up with personal things you can do, like if you want to visit the place, maybe stay for a few months and do a project there instead of just going to South Africa to see the Big 5 and also enjoying the nature around you. For me that sounds very nice, because a lot of time academics is about the very big picture, but just being able to incorporate that in your personal life, that really spoke to me and others. B.B.:  I am also struggling with that, but constantly trying out different things and learning from others how to do exactly that. We need each other to keep, some motivation and to not become too depressed with everything that is going on. We need to actively fight for a different world, and there are so many things you can do, but it must be on a bit of a bigger scale. I think that is with bigger ideas behind it and I think that is what has been lacking a little bit over the last the last years. And I can see that now coming back also with you guys and with other students talking about these themes.

T.K.: Well, thank you so much. We feel like we covered all the main aspects of the theme without being too strict with the questioning and we are happy because it was more of a natural discussion that flew from one idea to the other while still keeping the main ideas intact. We are very grateful for having you here with us and for your time and consideration!