Presentation short abstract

How can the labour that pastoralists perform to enhance the ecological health and resilience of rangeland ecosystems be better accounted for? How does framing coexistence as a material practice and a form of labour change how we think of conservation justice?

Presentation long abstract

This talk aims to reflect on how the labour that pastoralists perform to enhance the ecological health and resilience of rangeland ecosystems can be better accounted for in conservation research and policy. It seeks to push beyond studies that have focused on attitudes and subjectivities in relation to rewilding processes, to propose an understanding of coexistence as a material practice—mediated by wider political economies of rural livelihoods and implicated in issues of conservation labour justice. The framing of this work rests on literature that theorises different facets of conservation labour carried out by rural communities: from notions of ‘alienated labour’ (Cepeck, 2011) performed by communities enrolled in conservation science projects, and more recent discussions of the ‘eco-precariat’ (Neimark, 2023) employed in generating conservation commodities under the guise of local participation, through to notions of affective labour (Singh, 2013), consisting of everyday acts of care that communities extend to the natural environment they depend on and from which they derive a sense of belonging. Specifically, the talk will interrogate: Who is doing the labour of coexistence, and what axes of social differentiation are involved (age, migration history, gender, multispecies collaborations)? How is this labour mobilized or hidden by different state/ conservation/ local actors? How is it transformed under neoliberal conservation regimes, structural agrarian change and processes of technological intensification? The aim is to reflect on the conditions under which rural communities can lead processes of knowledge and practice creation, and the changes necessary for pastoral knowledge to gain greater legitimacy.