Paper short abstract:

This paper shows how a conservation NGO is using their understandings of local meanings of forests and spirits to strengthen formal conservation and how their discourses and practice rely on preconceived and superficial ideas influenced by meta-narratives produced by the Global North.

Paper long abstract:

In Guinea-Bissau conservation is expanding geographically, which after the officialization of the Boé and Dulombi conservation complex in 2017, the national territory classified under formal conservation reached 26%. This paper analyses the discourses and practices of an international NGO working in this area that has aimed at developing community-based conservation in the past years. One of the projects created with local people mapped the several so-called sacred forests in the area. In the NGO's understanding, these places have an important role in conservation, and forests' survival is due to the traditional beliefs in spirits that protect them from poaching, slash-and-burn and lumbering activities. Drawing from ethnographic data, this paper shows how the conservation NGO is using the sacred forests and the spirits that inhabit these places to strengthen nature conservation at the institutional and functional levels. Conservation discourses and practices in this case are based on preconceived and superficial ideas influenced by meta-narratives produced by the Global North. For the local population these spirits (genies) are much more complex, since they are not confined to these forests, and people establish different types of relations with them, not only based in fear. In times of unprecedented awareness with the ecological crisis it is more than ever necessary to address questions such as: what is the continuity between the logics of formal conservation from the twentieth century and the present ones? Who are the international organizations speaking for? Who benefits from the knowledge that has been (co)produced in these contested places?