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- Convenors:
-
Jose A. Cortes-Vazquez
(University of A Coruña)
Beatriz Santamarina (University of Valencia)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Main Site Tower (MST), 01/003
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
For several decades, anthropology has approached conservation policies and the designation of protected areas from a critical perspective. This panel seeks papers that look at conservation as a dynamic and variegated field, marked by transformations and in continuous dialogue with global phenomena.
Long Abstract:
For several decades, anthropology has approached conservation policies and the designation of protected areas from a critical perspective. It has paid attention, inter alia, to conflicts with local communities, from severe cases of evictions and land dispossession to subtle forms of alienation with the surrounding environment; the epistemic colonization of local worldviews with dualist ideas of nature and society and/or the cooptation of traditional environmental knowledges; the fortunes and misfortunes of land use changes and gentrification, particularly around the promotion of nature tourism; the development and overlap of variegated regimes of environmental governance; and the neoliberalisation of conservation and commoditization of protected natures. More recently, anthropology has also been sensitive to the functionalist turn in conservation, particularly re-wilding initiatives, vis-à-vis the predominantly compositionalist approach of the nature park model. As such, rather than as a static and cohesive phenomenon, anthropology looks at conservation as a dynamic and variegated field, marked by transformations and diversity and in continuous dialogue with other global phenomena. With the aim to deepen our understanding of this complex field of analysis, this panel seeks contributions from anthropologists with an interest in the drivers, means and outcomes of changes within the field of conservation, their different temporalities and spatialities, shifting grounds of power relations, and the emergence and obsolescence of conservation models, among other related topics.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
From ethnographic researches based in two Italian national parks, this paper analyzes recent shifts in conservation. It will consider original negotiations around parks and what may be put in cause by approaches, such as biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, and carbon trade.
Paper long abstract:
In the complex field of conservation politics, protected areas hold a preeminent position: their historical presence, the rethorics they promote, and their territorialization capacities contribute to their recognizability and their general legitimacy. Nevertheless, conservation institutions diversify their instruments and goals over time, and according to the contexts of their implementation. Since the last decades of the XXth century, protected areas based on sustainable development principles strengthen their authority and their appeal. Those approaches permitted significant changes in the acceptance of protected areas by local populations and political mileux, as well as concerning their potential spread on urbanized areas. They also represented one vehicle for new notions and instruments coming from global and international organisms and conventions to be introduced locally: biodiversity, ecosystem services, compensation and carbon trade principles enter the political fabric and encounter local arenas.
From ethnographic researches based in two Italian national parks (the Cinque Terre National Park and the archipelago of la Maddalena National Park) I analyze the shifts occurred recently in conservation propositions. Thanks to the attention to the historical dimension of those subjects, it would be possible to consider original negotiations around the creation of national parks and what may be put in cause by novel approaches.
This paper will investigate several social actors’ involvement and the processual structuring of specific relations to environmental issues, with regard to conservation approaches. The focus on those Italian national parks will allow a detailed account, so that nuances and variation of those wider processes will emerge.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I intend to discuss some aspects related to the processes of park making and the challenges faced by the park authorities in the management of the Tepilora, Sant'Anna and Rio Posada Regional Natural Park.
Paper long abstract:
The Tepilora, Sant'Anna and Rio Posada Regional Natural Park (RNP) was established by Regional Law in 2014, initially comprising four municipalities located in the north-eastern part of the island of Sardinia (Italy). In 2017, the park obtained the UNESCO recognition as a Man and the Biosphere Reserve (MaB), including thirteen other municipalities, with a total population of about 50,000 inhabitants. It comprises different ecological niches and economic specialisations: a coastal zone, heavily urbanised and touristic, the hydrographic basin of the Posada River and an inner mountainous zone, predominantly agro-pastoral. Since the 1960s, in line with the socio-economic changes affecting the island, this zone has been affected by processes of migration towards the coastal areas in urban expansion, with a progressive depopulation of the rural hinterland. The recognition as RNP and then as MaB is part of a discourse of revitalisation of the inner areas promoted at both the Sardinian and Italian levels and follows a complex iter of normative frictions (regional and state) concerning the creation of parks and other forms of protection. In this context, one of the challenges faced by local park authorities stems from the lack of identification of the communities with the park. In this paper – actually, some initial ethnographic notes – I intend to discuss some aspects related to the processes of park making and the challenges faced by the park authorities in the management of this protected areas in which different institutional figures and actors overlap.
Paper short abstract:
The bear programme was launched in 1996 in the Pyrenees once the population was considered extinct. Today, this programme employs a double manoeuvre around restoration and improvement that urges us to look critically at conservation as design through the moral and territorial views of the landscape
Paper long abstract:
In 1996, the bear reintroduction programme was launched in the Pyrenees. This project consisted of translocating individuals from Slovenia, but it also entailed hiring shepherds by the public administration. Twenty-five years later, the programme is assessed in terms of biological success, considering that the bear population was considered extinct whereas today amounts to seventy individuals. However, the social conflict, especially with local farmers, has persisted throughout this period. Faced with this conundrum, the bear programme employs a double discursive manoeuvre around the notions of restoration and improvement to appease these conflicts and conceal their political essence. While the renewed presence of bears and shepherds aims at retrieving parts of the past and is associated with the restoration of natural and socio-cultural heritage values, the resulting landscape is presented in terms of improvement through the moral ecology of wilderness. Considering that conservation is never about conserving but rather a set of socio-ecological transformations that shift the control over natural resources, the move from nature conservation to landscape design urges us to understand how restoration and improvement play out in wildlife programmes. In this paper, I show how designing-as-if-restoring and designing-as-if-improving are crucial in the depoliticization of conservation. In response to this mechanism and to better understand the persistence of conflicts around the bear programme, I propose to approach rewilding initiatives through the moral and territorial views of the landscape by addressing the following question: Whose views and whose rights prevail in wildlife conservation as landscape design?
Paper short abstract:
Cinque Terre, renowned as a UNESCO World Heritage thanks to their dry-stone terraced landscape on steep hills over the sea, are a major touristic site and the smallest and most populated National Park in Italy, whose policies aim to preserve a deeply anthropized, far from "natural", environment.
Paper long abstract:
The so called “Cinque Terre” are a major touristic site in Italy, renowned since the late 1990s as a UNESCO World Heritage thanks to their dry-stone terraced landscape on steep hills over the sea. This human-made landscape is the result of centuries of terraced agriculture, mainly focused on “heroic” viticulture. The arrival of mass tourism in the 1950s has opened a wide variety of new job opportunities, accelerating the already existing escape towards more desirable jobs and leading, in the following decades, to a massive abandonment of the cultivated land. Tourism might be eventually the end of that same landscape that attracted it. In the same years of the UNESCO nomination, the Cinque Terre National Park and Sea Reserve was established, the smallest and most populated national park in Italy. Its policies aim to preserve a deeply anthropized, far from "natural", environment, shaped by human activities, trying to restore the cultivation of neglected land and the traditional activities that shaped this territory into a terraced landscape, overall viticulture. A significant effort has been made on promoting a sustainable tourism interested in the local traditions and products, such as wine, olive oil, lemons and anchovies, but the goal is still far. Tourism can be both an opportunity and a threat to the Cinque Terre and different agencies struggle with each other in order to manage it, according to their diverse points of view.