Scratches on our sovereignty?

English Abstract: The article critically examines the conservation politics in a transboundary protected area (TBPA) in South Asia, the Sundarbans mangrove forests in Bangladesh and India. It explores the reasons why, despite collaborative measures by the two states, conservation has largely tended to conform to sovereignty practices, making it top-down and exclusionary. This makes the very demarcation of territory for protected areas an intensely political act with significant implications for social equity. The article examines the cultural politics of conservation since contestations to state power have often entailed the articulation of popular sovereignty in the Sundarbans. It argues that the social sustainability of conservation will critically hinge on how issues of resource access and governance are framed, negotiated, and addressed.Spanish Abstract: El artículo examina críticamente la política de conservación en el Área Protegida Transfronteriza (APT): los Sundarbans en Bangladesh e India. Explora por qué, a pesar de la colaboración bilateral, la conservación ha tendido en gran medida a ajustarse a prácticas de soberanía vertical y excluyente. La sola demarcación territorial de las APT, se convierte en un fuerte acto político con implicaciones signifi cativas en la equidad social. El artículo examina la política cultural de la conservación, ya que las protestas al poder del Estado a menudo tienen implicaciones en la articulación de la soberanía popular en los Sundarbans. Argumenta que la sostenibilidad social de la conservación dependerá fundamentalmente de cómo se enmarquen, negocien y aborden las cuestiones de acceso a los recursos y su gobernanza.French Abstract: L’article analyse de manière critique la politique de conservation dans une aire protégée transfrontalière (APT) en Asie du sud, la forêt des mangroves des Sundarbans au Bangladesh et en Inde. Il explore les raisons pour lesquelles, malgré les instruments de coopération entre les deux États, la conservation a adopté des pratiques de souveraineté étatique qui l’ont rendue erticale et exclusive. La démarcation du territoire des aires protégées est un acte profondément politique qui a des implications en matière d´égalité sociale. L’article examine la politique de conservation à travers des actes contestaires vis-à-vis du pouvoir étatique qui ont souvent favorisé une articulation de la souveraineté populaire dans les Sundarbans. Il met en évidence que la durabilité sociale de la conservation dépend de l’encadrement, de la négociation et de la promotion des thèmes d’accès aux ressources et de la gouvernance.

From paper to practice? Assembling a rights-based conservation approach

Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic study of the 2016 International Union for the Conservation of Nature World Conservation Congress (WCC), we analyze how Indigenous peoples and local community (IPLC) rights advocates have used a rights-based approach (RBA) to advance long-standing struggles to secure local communities' land and resource rights and advance governing authority in biodiversity conservation. The RBA has allowed IPLC advocates to draw legitimacy from the United Nations system—from its declarations to its special rapporteurs—and to build transnational strategic alliances in ways they could not with participatory discourses. Using it, they have brought attention to biodiversity as a basic human right and to the struggle to use, access, and own it as a human rights struggle. In this article, we show how the 2016 WCC provided a platform for building and reinforcing these alliances, advancing diverse procedural and substantive rights, redefining key principles and standards for a rights-based conservation approach, and leveraging international support for enforcement mechanisms on-the-ground. We argue that, as advocates staked out physical and discursive space at the venue, they secured the authority to shape conservation politics, shifting the terrain of struggle between strict conservationists and community activists and creating new conditions of possibility for advancing the human rights agenda in international conservation politics. Nonetheless, while RBAs have been politically successful at reconfiguring global discourse, numerous obstacles remain in translating that progress to secure human rights to resources "on the ground", and it is vital that the international conservation community finance the implementation of RBA in specific locales, demand that nation states create monitoring and grievance systems, and decolonize the ways in which they interact with IPLCs. Finally, we reflect on the value of the Collaborative Event Ethnography methodology, with its emphasis on capturing the mundane, meaningful and processual aspects of policymaking, in illuminating the on-going labor entailed in bringing together and aligning the disparate elements in dynamic assemblages.Keywords: Human rights, global conservation governance, collaborative event ethnography, Indigenous peoples

Early Twentieth-Century Ocean Science Diplomacy

This paper is a response to a 2018 call for greater understanding of how previous examples of marine science diplomacy could help shape present day efforts to draft a new law of the sea that protects marine biodiversity and conserves the marine environment. It tackles this through analysis of the various twists, turns, and challenges of early science diplomacy efforts in marine science during the early twentieth century. It looks in turn at questions of defining and agreeing on research objectives, how backchannel science diplomacy can become official government diplomacy, and finally, how careful science diplomacy brought Germany back to the international research arena so as to successfully put in place marine conservation measures during the 1920s. In doing this, it argues that the foundation of the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas in 1902 represented a revolutionary moment where supra-national scientific research, coordination, and conservation politics for the ocean first emerged; with International Council for the Exploration of the Sea becoming a key model for all subsequent marine science diplomacy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Science Diplomacy, edited by Giulia Rispoli and Simone Turchetti.

Who Cares for Africa’s Game?

This chapter examines Bernhard Grzimek’s increasing inability to broker conservation politics in Tanzania during the 1960s as the country moved toward self-reliance and the Africanization of the wildlife sector. Grzimek found it difficult to make wildlife pay for themselves due to logistical problems of West German game-cropping projects, insufficient donations for expanding and maintaining Tanganyika’s national park system, and competition with Kenya for East Africa’s share of the wildlife tourism market. Such failures shaped and were shaped by Tanzania’s shift toward socialist development and Eastern Bloc partnerships that further jeopardized a tourism industry catering to foreign desires. Friction between Western conservationists and agricultural minister Derek Bryceson over Tanzania’s conservation priorities alienated Nyerere and other African observers, who resented international conservationists meddling in “national” heritage. The Africanization of the national park leadership in the early 1970s signaled that the fate of the Serengeti’s wild animals lay in Nyerere’s hands—not Grzimek’s.

On coming into animal presence with photovoice

Methodological advancement within more-than-human geography lags behind its theorization. As an intervention into the promise of visual methods for enlivening more-than-human geographies, I describe working with a photographic practice for exploring geographies of encounter between humans, the animals they care for, and wild animals. This is presented through discussing a collaborative project employing photovoice to explore wildlife conservation politics in a landscape where both humans and animals have the capacity to kill, and be killed, by one another. Through engaging with photographs and text produced over the course of six months by six individuals living in close proximity to Bandipur National Park in Karnataka, India, I explore entangled relations between humans and animals and the production of more-than-human hierarchies. I consider the potential of a visual method for practicing more-than-human geographies as an exploration of affective encounters. This paper contributes to on-going discussions and debates on decolonizing more-than-human geographies. More specifically, I suggest photovoice as one means by which more-than-human geographies can remain critically engaged with and speak out against enactments of injustice and violent legacies of colonialism that reach across species divides.

How to Build Houses and Save the Countryside

England has a housing crisis. We need to build many more new homes to house our growing population, but house building is controversial, particularly when it involves the loss of countryside. Addressing both sides of this critical debate, this book argues that to drive house building on the scale needed, government must strike a contract with civil society: in return for public support and acceptance of the loss of some countryside, it must guarantee high-quality, affordable developments, in the right locations. Simply imposing development, as recent governments of all political persuasions have attempted, will not work. Focusing on house building and conservation politics in England, this book demonstrates why the current model doesn't work, and why there needs to be both planning reform and a more active role for the state, including local government.