Bake Sales to Save Nature: Why Wall Street Conservation Survives

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?