scholarly journals From colonial fortresses to neoliberal landscapes in Northern Tanzania: a biopolitical ecology of wildlife conservation

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jevgeniy Bluwstein
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
Wildlife Conservation ◽  
Spatial Separation ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Landscape Conservation ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Northern Tanzania ◽  
Political Economies ◽  
Nonhuman Species

Drawing on critical debates in political ecology and biopolitics, the article develops a "biopolitical ecology of conservation" to study historical shifts in how human and nonhuman lives come to be valued in an asymmetric way. Tanzania and the so-called Tarangire-Manyara Ecosystem illustrate how these biopolitical shifts became entangled with conservation interventions and broader visions of development throughout colonial and post-colonial history. Colonial efforts to balance seemingly competing domains of human and nonhuman species through spatial separation gave way to the development of the post-colonial nation through the nurturing of its wildlife population. This shift from human-nonhuman incompatibility towards human dependency on wildlife and biodiversity conservation culminated in the contemporary biopolitical ecology and geography of landscape conservation. Landscape conservation seeks to entangle human and nonhuman species. Through conservation, human populations are rearranged and fixed in time and space to allow wildlife to roam free across unbounded spaces. This conservation governmentality is tied to global environmentalist concerns and political economies of neoliberal conservation, as well as to a domestic agenda of tourism-based economic growth. It secures land tenure for some, while imposing a biopolitical sacrifice on the rural population as a whole. This forecloses alternative rural futures for a land-dependent and increasingly land-deprived population.

scholarly journals The political ecology of wildlife conservation and trophy hunting in human-dominated landscapes of southern Africa: a review

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Never Muboko
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Continuous Monitoring ◽  
Wildlife Conservation ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Conservation Policies ◽  
Trophy Hunting ◽  
Source Materials

Drawing from a historical conservation perspective and political ecology, this review mediates the growing debate on wildlife conservation and hunting, especially inhuman-dominated landscapes of Africa. The focus is to 1) trace how socio-political changes during and after colonization transformed the hunting and wildlife conservation discourse in southern Africa, and 2) to address how previous conservation injustices were addressed through benefit-based approaches like CAMPFIRE, adopted in Zimbabwe after colonization. Some 144 published journal articles, books and other source materials were consulted. The review indicates that political changes in southern Africa profoundly transformed the conservation and trophy hunting narrative. This narrative had varied impacts and outcomes for different groups of people. Although a number of benefit-based approaches, like CAMPFIRE reflected a complete departure from past conservation policies, they continue to attract praise and criticisms since opinions differ among stakeholders, especially over extractive activities like trophy hunting and its associated benefits. I conclude that political developments impacted on conservation and trophy hunting in a profound way and that although post-colonial, pro-community conservation programs have inherent weaknesses, to a greater extent they addressed past conservation-based injustices. Continuous monitoring and area-specific adaptive management of wildlife and its sustainable management is recommended for long-term conservation benefits and community livelihoods.

THE POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF ‘INCURSIONS’: LIVESTOCK, PROTECTED AREAS AND SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL DYNAMICS IN THE MARA REGION OF KENYA

Africa ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 84 (4) ◽  
pp. 614-637 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bilal Butt
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Protected Areas ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
Domestic Animals ◽  
Supporting Evidence ◽  
Management Policies ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
Mara Region

ABSTRACTAcross the world, the presence of domestic animals in protected areas (PAs) is considered an ‘incursion’ that threatens the economic and ecological viability of these areas. Dominant narratives about incursions inaccurately describe the relationships between people and PAs because they lack adequate contextualization. In this paper, I rely on a political-ecological framework to argue for an alternative narrative. Through a case study from a PA in southern Kenya, I demonstrate how incursions are instead modern co-productions that arise from the intersections between changing political geographies of resource control and variable animal geographies of resource utilization – thus clarifying a long-standing debate about the presence of domestic animals in PAs. I rely on direct empirical and supporting evidence from place-based studies to illustrate the spatial and temporal differences in resource access strategies of wildlife and livestock within and outside the PA. I contrast these against changing land tenure and resource management policies to highlight how livestock movements into PAs are patterned in ways that reflect the changing nature of PA management, the material conditions of the landscape, and the agency of animals. Through these investigations, this paper provides a more accurate and nuanced explanation for livestock movements into PAs.

scholarly journals An ecology of difference: fence-line contrast photographs as scientific models in ecology

2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eirin Hongslo
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Scientific Models ◽  
Private Land ◽  
Textual Theory ◽  
African Context ◽  
Land Use Policies ◽  
Fence Line

Political ecologists have long acknowledged the links between knowledge and power. Recently there has also been a growing interest in detailed studies about knowledge production within critical political ecology. This article is a study of the use of photographs in scientific articles on dryland ecology, and investigates the functions of photographs. Contrary to the straightforward manner in which they are presented, photographs are not value-free documentary proofs of 'how things are.' Rather, photographs constitute arguments in their own right. Using photographic and textual theory, this study analyzes two articles that include photographs of fence-line contrasts between two different management regimes. Contrasting areas divided by a fence-line is a methodology that demonstrates how management differences lead to differences in vegetation. In a Southern African context, however, differences across a fence tend to encompass deep racial and economic divides, and the fence-line photos risk encompassing these differences. This article argues that the fence-line contrast photographs in this study function as models that order the causal links between vegetation dynamics, land tenure and land management. These models correspond closely to equilibrium models in range ecology, and the fence-line photographs thus contribute to a degradation narrative that has been influential for land reform policies in Southern Africa, and that feeds into land use policies that favor private land ownership in communal areas.Keywords: Critical political ecology, fence-line photography, scientific models, rangeland ecology, Southern Africa

The limits of power: the political ecology of the Spanish Empire in the Greater Southwest

Antiquity ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 66 (250) ◽  
pp. 153-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas E. Sheridan
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
New World ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
The Political ◽  
Epidemic Disease ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
History Of

The Spanish conquest of the Americas was one of the most dramatic cultural and biological transformations in the history of the world. Small groups of conquistadores toppled enormous empires. Millions of Native Americans died from epidemic disease. Old World animals and plants revolutionized Native American societies, while New World crops fundamentally altered the diet and land-tenure of peasants across Europe. In the words of historian Alfred Crosby (1972: 3),The two worlds, which God had cast asunder, were reunited, and the two worlds, which were so very different, began on that day [I1 October 14921 to become alike.

Resistance to Colonial Conservation and Resource Management

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Beinart ◽  
Lotte Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Natural Resources ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Popular Resistance ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Agrarian Systems

In the remaining chapters we will focus increasingly on the response by colonized people to competition for, and commodification of, conquered environments. Political conflict over natural resources had deep historical roots in the Empire, and these issues were not resolved by dominion status for the British settler states nor decolonization after the Second World War. They fed into the politics of decolonization and into environmental debates within and beyond the post-colonial Commonwealth. Subsequent chapters traverse the moment of decolonization and explore elements of late twentieth-century political ecology. In South Asia and Africa state attempts to control and regulate natural resources changed power relations in the countryside and triggered popular resistance. Through conquest or annexation, some colonial and protectorate governments not only alienated large swathes of territory, but also assumed responsibility for and asserted rights over the natural environment. The governments of settler states moved to protect environments from careless settlers who ransacked it for wildlife or timber, and from indigenous peoples whose land-management systems were regarded as destructive. In some cases conservators recognized that European settlers wreaked more havoc than indigenes; Sim said of the Cape forests that the ‘Hottentot and Bushman inhabitants … were not intentionally destructive … But the advent of European civilization boded greater ill to the forests, and rapidly enough that ill has been accomplished.’ And some, such as Howard, saw value in local agrarian systems. But although regulation could affect all colonial subjects, it tended to bear most heavily on indigenous people. Colonial governments introduced policies of excluding humans from protected areas, as well as a wide range of other measures aimed at curbing customary user rights and maximizing state revenue. Stiff penalties were introduced to punish those who broke the new regulations, and thus the rise of bureaucratic conservationism often led to the criminalization of local resource extractors. In settler colonies the privatization of land transformed socio-environmental relationships, barring local communities from accessing resources they had long regarded as communally held and managed. In some early colonial settlements, this process echoed the enclosures of common land in eighteenth-century England. At a fundamental level it changed the value people placed upon land, setting in train a process towards individualized tenure, commercialization, and subdivision of territory.

scholarly journals Providing more protected space for tigers Panthera tigris: a landscape conservation approach in the Western Ghats, southern India

Oryx ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 336-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanjay Gubbi ◽  
Kaushik Mukherjee ◽  
M.H. Swaminath ◽  
H.C. Poornesha
Keyword(s):  
Protected Areas ◽  
Conservation Planning ◽  
Protected Area ◽  
Wildlife Conservation ◽  
Area Network ◽  
Panthera Tigris ◽  
Landscape Conservation ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Protected Area Network ◽  
Indian State

AbstractConservation of large carnivores is challenging as they face various threats, including habitat loss and fragmentation. One of the current challenges to tiger Panthera tigris conservation in India is the conversion of habitat to uses that are incompatible with conservation of the species. Bringing more tiger habitat within a protected area system and in the process creating a network of connected protected areas will deliver dual benefits of wildlife conservation and protection of watersheds. Focusing on the southern Indian state of Karnataka, which holds one of the largest contiguous tiger populations, we attempted to address this challenge using a conservation planning technique that considers ecological, social and political factors. This approach yielded several conservation successes, including an expansion of the protected area network by 2,385 km2, connection of 23 protected areas, and the creation of three complexes of protected areas, increasing the protected area network in Karnataka from 3.8 to 5.2% of the state's land area. This represents the largest expansion of protected areas in India since the 1970s. Such productive partnerships between government officials and conservationists highlight the importance of complementary roles in conservation planning and implementation.

The Elephant in the Room: Confronting the Colonial Character of Wildlife Conservation in Africa

2008 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 51-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Garland
Keyword(s):  
Wildlife Conservation ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Wild Animals ◽  
Capitalist Production ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Political Economies ◽  
Structural Inequalities

Abstract:This article draws attention to the structural inequalities that characterize the position of Africans within the global symbolic and political economies of African wildlife conservation, and theorizes these inequalities in ways that move beyond the critique of conservation as simply a colonial or neocolonial imposition. Conceptualizing wildlife conservation in Africa as a mode of global capitalist production, the article argues both for broadening the analytic lens through which the effects of conservation on Africa are assessed, and for redressing the global power dynamics that currently surround the protection of African wild animals.

Perceived Threats and Governing Capacity

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 147-166
Author(s):  
Bill Chou
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
City Government ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Public Inputs ◽  
Foreign Policies ◽  
Political Economies ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
High Degree

Abstract Many of the past literature on small states focus on the foreign policies and political economies of liberal democracies. This paper examines the non-liberal democracies of Singapore and Macao in their construction of national identities. Non-liberal democracies are different from their democratic counterparts in their reactions to perceived threats. Instead of forming a corporatist system to make important decisions by consensus, both Singapore and Macao leadership exclude the participation of civil society in defining their national identities. Faced with high perceived threats and armed with strong governing capacity, Singapore succeeds in building a national identity overarching the cultural identities of major ethnic groups. In view of electoral setbacks, Singapore leaders have to include more public inputs into its policy making process, including the definition of national identity. On the contrary, the perceived threats of Macao are not pressing. The cultural and political affinity enables the post-colonial Macao to integrate smoothly with China’s national identities defined by the Communist leadership. The relative weak capacity of the city government makes the building of national identities gradual. Its high degree of ethnic homogeneity has contributed to a process of nation building relatively free of disputes.

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