Presentation short abstract

This paper analyses the emergence of enterprise culture and extractive, informal labour regimes under the conservation strategy of ecotourism. Through ethnographic research in Panna Tiger Reserve, India, it reveals how the ecotourism labour force is disciplined into maintaining their own precarity.

Presentation long abstract

International conservation lobbies, state actors and NGOs promote market based conservation strategies like ecotourism as forms of “selling nature to save it” and green developmentalism (McAfee, 1999). These strategies increasingly rely on informal labour regimes, often comprising displaced indigenous and forest dwelling populations (Igoe, 2017). Through an ethnographic study of ecotourism in Panna Tiger Reserve in central India, this paper illuminates how market based conservation fosters a culture of enterprise amongst two groups of actors- safari guides and homestay owners, the latter offering low-cost accommodations marketed as “authentic” rural experiences.

Ecotourism consolidates an aspirational “win-win” promise (Grandia, 2007; Igoe & Brockington, 2007) where individuals can liberate themselves from structural inequality through entrepreneurship. However, the nature of entrepreneurship (Anjaria & Anjaria, 2013; Gooptu, 2013a), intertwined with the histories of conservation induced dispossession, reveals a different reality. Running enterprises like homestays require large financial risks (Bröckling, 2015) and rely on the reproductive labour of women for housework (Vogel, 1983). Similarly, safari guides navigate contradictory regimes of discipline obeying the restrictions of Protected Areas and the competitiveness of the market that necessitates transgressing these restrictions. This paper also examines how late capitalism extracts labour in more than professional forms including embodied and emotional labour (Gooptu, 2013b; Hochschild, 1983) from both groups of actors. Individual competition, along with caste and gender hierarchies weakens possibilities of collective struggles and workers express their agency in covert, surreptitious ways. Conservation strategies then discipline these groups into furthering the agenda of conservation by maintaining their own precarity.