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Paper short abstract

Amid an ongoing World Bank project at a post-colonial, climate-vulnerable World Heritage site in The Gambia, I employ feminist political ecology to examine how everyday life is a continual negotiation for dignified livelihoods under intersecting conservation and development pressures.

Paper long abstract

Development interventions, in legitimizing ‘technical fixes’ and community-based approaches, have often framed cultural heritage as a linchpin for sustainability due to its spatial and temporal continuity. State-led governance systems shaped by geopolitical pressures of conservation and climate adaptation agendas thus tend to privilege Eurocentric and capitalocentric visions, positioning heritage as a ‘development apparatus’ that renders local communities mere stewards of tourist-oriented sites, thereby reproducing dependency on Western aid and expertise. In doing so, they disregard practices within socio-natural networks of power, flatten the politics and labor of survival, and depoliticize lived realities.

I examine these tensions through ethnographic and participatory fieldwork in a post-colonial, climate-vulnerable World Heritage site in The Gambia, amid a World Bank project that proposes livelihood diversification and resilience for communities in place. I trace overlooked intersectional struggles and vulnerabilities, asking what lies beyond emblematic notions of gender inclusivity and capacity building, and why uneven distributions of agency and power persist despite repeated interventions. Livelihood transitions and growing dependencies on technocratic heritage-, climate-, and aid-based interventions then surface as stemming not from cultural, ecological, or individual preferences, but from shrinking livelihood options, as agrarian and local economies are eroded by global influences. Employing feminist political ecology, I foreground locally lived experiences, especially of women, navigating precarious survival amid project delays, out-migration, remittances, informal economies, and resource conflicts—framing ‘resilience’ not as a technical achievement but as a plural, political negotiation for dignified livelihoods, centering the intimate everyday and intersectional agencies within overlapping regimes of climate, conservation, and development.