Presentation short abstract

Following the life of a wildlife compensation claim form in Uganda, this paper shows how bureaucracy becomes a powerful pillar of patriarchy in conservation. This research extends the existing mapping of patriarchy into material and intimate infrastructures that marginalise those with least power.

Presentation long abstract

Feminist analyses of how gendered identities are constructed through bureaucratic encounters remain comparatively rare in contemporary political ecologies of conservation. This neglect obscures the situated ways patriarchal control is produced, reproduced, and felt. By bringing feminist institutionalism into conversation with feminist political ecology, this paper centres bureaucracy as a consequential site of power. In doing so, I extend the mapping of conservation patriarchy to the material and intimate infrastructures through which these logics are made durable. To ground this framing, I examine Uganda’s newly instituted wildlife compensation scheme, which promises financial redress to individuals harmed by protected wildlife.

Drawing on ethnographic data from the periphery of Kidepo Valley National Park and in the wildlife authority headquarters in Kampala, I trace the life cycle of a wildlife compensation application. Community narratives reveal gendered pressures in the muddled process of form-filling and evidence-gathering, with women and those with limited financial or social leverage bearing the brunt of navigating administrative uncertainty. Extending ethnographic inquiry into national-level processing uncovers a bureaucracy unable to manage its own evidentiary system. This scheme grants the wildlife authority disproportionate control over what counts as compensable harm. By linking these messy, gendered encounters with the abstract economistic logics embedded in the policy’s design, I demonstrate how the “paper trail” of conservation governance becomes a subtle yet powerful pillar of patriarchy in conservation. Only by making visible and disrupting these procedural sites of power can conservation governance move toward more feminist, situated, and socially just futures.

Presentation short abstract

This paper probes pervasive masculinities present in women’s “empowerment” programs in biodiversity conservation in southern Africa. Based on field data, it aims to elevate the voices of women participants, and considers how these programs reify, rather than dismantle traditional gender norms.

Presentation long abstract

The practice of biodiversity conservation in Africa is deeply rooted in the colonial era, and its incumbent masculinities often render conservation practitioners as martial figures mastering a supposedly untamed, frontier landscape. Amidst this backdrop, several biodiversity conservation initiatives in southern Africa have seemingly countered this tendency by prioritizing hiring women (sometimes exclusively) in previously male dominated fields related to conservation management, including in all-female anti-poaching units, wildlife rangers, or safari guide teams. These initiatives are heralded as innovative win-wins in biodiversity conservation and women’s empowerment. However, the programs, while ostensibly aimed at transforming conservation, largely retain male leadership, and reenact the gendered practices commonplace in conventional masculinist conservation, especially related to militarized or securitized wildlife management approaches. Participants may be women, but they are expected to adhere to patriarchal assumptions about how to 'protect' nature, and who may be regarded conservation actors. Moreover, the discursive rationales for creating women-prioritized conservation programs rely on longstanding tropes regarding African women and men that reinscribe gender essentialisms. Despite emancipatory claims, they reproduce norms, practices, and registers of white, and often colonial, masculinities long present in the management of African landscapes and ecosystems. Using data collected from extensive field research in Botswana and Zimbabwe, including interviews and participant observation, discourse analysis, and the lens of feminist political ecology, this paper seeks to elevate the voices of women participants themselves, as well as probe the paradox of pervasive masculinity in women’s “empowerment” programs in conservation.

Presentation short abstract

This paper argues that forests shape gendered identities, yet conservation often overlooks women’s roles. In Corbett Tiger Reserve, women use forests as as socio-cultural space, but digital tools like camera traps and drones masculinize governance and reinforce patriarchal control.

Presentation long abstract

Forests are critical spaces that shape and enable gendered subjectivities in culturally and historically specific ways. However, scholarly work on forest or biodiversity conservation continues to take a very perfunctory view on gender–environment relationships. Many projects remain gender blind or view everyday practices of forest resource collection by women through a transactional or economic lens. Research has shown that forests are spaces wherein identities of women are entwined with their everyday activities in the forest. In this article, we demonstrate the gendered nature of forests of the Corbett Tiger Reserve (CTR) in India, and their different socio-cultural framings. We reveal how the forest spaces of the CTR are used by women for a wide variety of cultural and livelihood needs. We further show how biodiversity conservation practice in such forest spaces alters the activities of women in a myriad of ways. The increasing use of digital technologies in biodiversity conservation shapes how the forest space is observed and governed. We argue that the use of digital technologies for forest governance such as camera traps and drones tends to transform these forests into masculinized spaces that extend the patriarchal gaze of society to the forest. Finally, we reflect on how the use of digital technologies for biodiversity conservation is easily co-opted for purposes beyond conservation that reinforce patriarchal norms and propagate gendered structural violence.

Presentation short abstract

This paper interrogates European armed forces' and arms companies' perversion of biodiversity protection into narrative and practical tools for legitimating military-industrial relations and masculinist rationalities amid socioecological collapse.

Presentation long abstract

As Europe's largest landowners, militaries have a long history of environmental stewardship that “balances” military capability development with biodiversity protection. As part of this stewardship armed forces and arms companies argue that they are successfully integrating the national security concerns of conservation and militarisation: protecting woodlarks, orchids and damselflies while trialling hypersonic missiles and directed energy weapons.

This paper draws on in-depth analysis of European military climate governance strategies to map armed forces' and arms companies' perversion of biodiversity protection into narrative and practical tools for legitimating military-industrial relations and rationalities. I demonstrate how the normalisation of natural conservation as a commonsensical military activity relies on the careful erasure of the socioecological before-, mid- and aftermaths of military power to present sources of ecological degradation as solutions.

By legitimating European militaries and weapons manufacturers as forces for good amid socioecological collapse, the intensifying practice of khaki conservation (Woodward 2001) in Europe further empowers the particular subjects with most social, narrative and material clout within the European geographies of the global arms trade: military business masculinities steeped in a culture that privileges war, weapons, wealth and whiteness, while prizing or despising womxn for their un/desirability. I demonstrate how military ecological stewardship is rooted in and reproduces the militarised, extractive and hypermasculine both subjects and socioecological conditions constitutive of a violent, imperial global order – at the expense of people and planet. In contrast, conservation imaginaries rooted in feminist, anti-militarist and anti-imperial struggles prefigure just forms of socioecological regeneration.