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.