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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, -Jose A. Cortes-Vazquez (University of A Coruña)
Paper long abstract:
Conservation policies in natural protected areas suffered a major blow after the imposition of neoliberal austerity in Spain following the 2008 financial crisis. Beginning in 2011, severe cut-backs in conservation budgets and personnel left many parks underfunded and understaffed. Many services, hitherto carried out by public agents, were externalized and sub-contracted to private agents with the idea of reducing public expense and to encourage private involvement in conservation. Despite the neoliberal attack on conservation policies as a burden to economic growth and job creation, parks were not delisted and conservation policies were not revoked; but certain de-regulations were successful in loosening the requirements for many new private activities, both green and un-green. However, there has been little interest from the private sector on making conservation their business. In this paper, I conceptualize these changes as nature up-for-grabbing: a contradictory process that follows the more general push of neoliberal conservation, but also fails in making protected nature a new commodity. The focus will be on the strategies followed by public agents, park managers and bureaucrats to create the conditions for such ambivalent results.
Key words:
Neoliberal conservation, parks, Spain
Saskia Brill (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich)
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to analyze the dynamic, long-lasting, and still ongoing negotiations around the protection of the Great Bear Rainforest between First Nations, industry, environmental groups, and the state.
Paper long abstract:
Conservation has been the one dominating political theme on Canada's Pacific central and north coast for decades. What began with protests from Indigenous groups against the industrial use of natural resources from their traditional territories in the 1970s, culminated in the "War in the Woods" in the 1990s between the forestry industry, environmental organizations, First Nations, and a settler-colonial government.
From these confrontations evolved a unique path towards a new land-use regime that aims for healthy ecosystems just as much as for sustainable socio-economic betterment for the indigenous communities living in them. After more than 20 years of heated debates in hundreds of meetings, international media campaigns, dozens of pieces of legislation, and a lot of listening and learning from Indigenous knowledge keepers, the Great Bear Rainforest Agreement was signed in 2016. The Act puts large parts of forest under protection and asks for Ecosystem-based Management in the remaining areas. But conflicts are not over since. Depleting fish stocks, oil and gas infrastructures, as well as climate change, keep the current arrangement under pressure.
This paper aims to analyze the dynamic, long-lasting, and still ongoing negotiations around the contested landscape, now called the Great Bear Rainforest. By looking at its drivers, means and outcomes, I want to highlight especially the shifted relations of power between the state, the holders of Title and Rights as well as the stakeholders of the land and how this affects reconciliation negotiations today.
Arno Pascht (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
Paper short abstract:
The paper relates different conceptualisations of conservation in Vanuatu to each other. It suggests the interpretation of a community-managed marine conservation area as the attempt of local actors to transform and preserve an assemblage of fish and humans.
Paper long abstract:
The paper deals with dynamics of local conceptualisations of ‘conservation’ in the village of Siviri in Vanuatu where villagers have established and maintain a small community-managed marine conservation area on their own initiative. When inhabitants of Siviri encountered the concept of conservation during workshops and awareness events, they adopted the term and created a new practice designed to meet their own needs. This paper carves out local conceptualisations and practices of ‘conservation’, and relates them to conceptualisations of conservation in the context of other approaches which may involve a dichotomy between the environment and humans. It suggests that conservation in Siviri can be interpreted as creative engagement of the villagers with their environment(s) in order to transform and preserve the specific world-making assemblage including humans and fish for future generations. Using theoretical concepts of ‚assemblages‘ and ‚world making‘, the paper will show that there are ontological differences regarding conservation in Siviri and the concept of conservation used in Vanuatu’s national policy. It is argued that using these theoretical concepts may enable anthropology to carve out temporalities and spatialities of conservation.
Dayabati Roy (University of Helsinki)
Paper short abstract:
Upon drawing the ethnographic fieldwork conducted during 2018-21, this paper examines through analysing the drivers, means and outcomes of changes within the field of conservation how the policies of forest conservation have been changing and thereby engendering conflicts at the margin of Indian Sundarbans.
Paper long abstract:
The forest conservation policies have a long trajectory in India. Ever since the colonial period, the government has been scripting policies to govern the activities within/regarding the forests. The question is why the conservation policies would fail to conserve the forests and why the marginal people would bear the brunt of the strict interpretation of the conservation policies. Upon drawing the ethnographic materials collected in the period of 2018-21 from the Indian Sundarbans, this paper argues that forest conservation policies could hardly succeed in achieving their avowed conservation goals because it would prioritize the development agenda at the expense of conservation and privilege the interests of the propertied sections at the expense of marginal people. While the economically marginal people who have always been trying to maintain their subsistence through sustainably harnessing the resources of the two adjacent ecotones get uprooted as consequences of pro-development and pro-propertied sections’ agenda, the propertied class people have prospered through exploiting the ecotones ruthlessly towards accumulation. These class and accumulation processes have made the Sundarbans forests vulnerable to climate change and environmental degradation. The question is how we could resolve the conservation crisis. What kinds of radical changes are needed to pursue sustainable forests in Sundarbans? This research suggests that what we require to strive for resolving this conservation crisis is nothing but a change in policies that would effectively replace growth-induced development with sustainable one.
Fleur Nash (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents ideas on how researchers can work with practitioners in conservation by engaging with the messy reality on the ground. Working with practitioners can lead to ideas for how power relations can be shifted that are grounded in reality not ideology.
Paper long abstract:
A large amount of social research has focused on marginalised voices in conservation with the aim of bringing those voices to the decision making table. This has resulted in critical research on conservation organisations around how they design, implement and evaluate conservation practices. Critique is a valuable tool to enable people and organisations to question themselves and their practices. Yet critique from the outside, which is the form the majority of social research has taken in conservation, can fall on stubbornly closed ears. Conservation practitioners have pushed back against academic research, arguing that it is based in too much ideology and too little realism, resulting in a lack of understanding of the messy complex realities in which conservation organisations work. For critical social research to impact change on the ground, there is a need for researchers and practitioners to work together, not in silo. This presentation will share a story of a collaboration between a PhD researcher and practitioners in a conservation INGO and local organisation in Kenya. The story aims to highlight three main points. Firstly, switching the lends to ‘study up’ those stereotypically seen as having more ‘power’ can offer insights into how rights based conservation approaches can be achieved in reality. Secondly, working together with practitioners through participatory action research can result in implementable change on the ground. Thirdly, understanding one’s own and each other’s positionality, and, open and transparent communication are crucial to form a partnership that meets both partner’s needs.