Contribution short abstract

At Mount Nimba in Liberia, high-quality iron ore and rare biodiversity attract miners and conservationists. Market-driven projects turn land into commodities, marginalize traditional uses, and portray local practices as threats to manage. Power is exerted through access to capital and expertise.

Contribution long abstract

The northernmost reach of the Upper Guinean Forests of West Africa stretches along the Mount Nimba range, where the borders of Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, and Guinea converge. A center of rare biodiversity, the mountain also holds some of the highest-grade iron ore in the world. Minerals and endemic species have attracted the attention of multinational companies and conservation groups since the 1950s. In recent years, conservation and mining have aligned their means and ends by appropriating the surface and underground in financialization schemes that depend on the commodification of nature through ever-tightening collaborations that evoke the logic of care. Local communities participate in and are affected by this revaluation of their customary land, which reframes their rights and usage as threats. This chapter employs a political ecology framework, informed by archival and ethnographic research, to examine how particular configurations of capital, expertise, and governance have exerted power over the landscape and manufactured value by fragmenting the forest into extractable resources and substitutable biodiversity. Power in this landscape is asymmetrical, shaped by access to capital and expertise, and conveyed through technocratic discourse about what constitutes legitimate use.