Presentation short abstract

The ethnography of the game management practices in the National Park Đerdap in Eastern Serbia serves as an entry point to discuss the impact of state-organized, post-socialist public management techniques on the formation of social relationships and environments in a periphery of Eastern Europe.

Presentation long abstract

In 1974, the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia promulgated the National Park Đerdap (NP) on the southern banks of the Danube, where it forms the Iron Gorge canyons. NP Đerdap was Serbia’s first National Park and lacked institutionalized management until 1989. From 1991, a period characterized by legal insecurity during the transformation from socialism to capitalism, a resource frontier emerged in which locals poached and logged the forests and practiced charcoal burning for regional markets. The NP reacted by enforcing its management structures. Its new management plans envisioned large swaths of less protected NP territories as resources to generate funds for maintaining specially protected zones and ecological patches. The article homes in on the game management plans and specific techniques that the NP’s rangers used to create pyramidally shaped population funds of game animals to provide well-remunerated hunting tourism experiences. Especially the revenues from three trophy-bearing game animals, red deer, roe deer and wild boar, helped finance conservation measures and scientific research for strictly protected species, such as lynx. To win over the local population and curb illegal poaching, the NP simultaneously encouraged the foundation of local hunting associations. Thus, the locals could engage in cheap and legal but supervised hunting of the game animals, while also supporting the rangers’ management practices such as feeding and counting animals. The paper shadows how the game manager and his rangers, a lynx scientist, and local hunters navigated these environmental zonings and management techniques and co-shaped the ecology and politics of the NP.