Paper short abstract:

An anthropology of conservation that seeks to understand and enact care, justice, and conviviality needs to grapple with the ways that institutions of conservation are entangled with institutions of masculinity.

Paper long abstract:

The Mozambique-South African borderlands comprise one of the most consequential and controversial conservation territories in the world. A century's worth of exogenous conservation initiatives, projects introduced during colonial, apartheid, and post-colonial periods, now comprise a network of state, private, community, and co-managed protected areas collectively referred to as the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area. Studies that have charted the "people vs. park debates" in this region have provided key insights into the colonial and racialized dimensions of conservation-related violence and inequities. Yet this work has done little to question institutions of masculinity. I draw from feminist theories environment to assess how key chapters in the one-hundred-year history of conservation in this region are entangled in institutions of masculinity: the white settlers who criminalized the hunting practices of black Africans then picked up the hunt themselves; the tens of thousands of laborers recruited directly through established protected areas to work underground in the gold mines; the retired military officers who became conservation leaders; and the hundreds of "poachers" arrested, even killed, for their involvement in illegal wildlife hunting. These are not only stories about men, they are stories about masculinity. An anthropology of conservation that seeks to understand and enact care, justice, and conviviality needs to much more intentionally grapple with the norms and practices of masculinity.

Paper short abstract:

Conservation in Tanzania's promotes co-existence between people and wildlife, while conservation dispacements of local people continue. This presentation considers this conservation contradiction in relation to community-based movements for land rights and self-determination

Paper long abstract:

Contemporary conservation in Tanzania revolves around the idea of promoting co-existence between people and wildlife, focusing especially on landscapes outside of the country's world-famous national parks. At the same time Maasai communities in Ngorongoro face renewed threats of evictions, while conservation-related displacement and dispossession continues throughout the country. This current contradiction is the latest in a series, consistently reiterated in relation to spatialized legacies of colonial conservation and related land laws.

These legacies are at the heart of contemporary land rights movements, which seek to put land and natural resources more in the hands of local people and to revitalize and refine community-based modes of environmental care. The goals of these movements reflect the recommendations of the Presidential Land Tenure Commission of 1994 and related movements for consitutional reform today

This presentation considers the challenges of these interrelated movements to conservationists and social scientists alike. It emphasizes that meaningful conservationist support for coexistence will entail a reckoning with the inherited separations and segregations of colonial conservation, as well as the political ecology of wildlife tourism. It will simultanously require reconsidering the traditional role and position of Anthropologists as privileged interpreters and anaysts.

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers what an “ethic of care” for human and non-human beings might mean for conservation practice. Insights from the critique of mainstream global conservation and institutional ethnography provide vital points of departure for building decolonizing, earth-caring institutions.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I consider what an “ethic of care” for human and non-human beings might mean for conservation practice. To do this, I draw from a robust critique of mainstream global conservation, along with emerging decolonial scholarship, to consider what matters for building earth-caring pathways and institutions. I begin by drawing from my long-term ethnographic field work, which examines the ideas and practices of big conservation organisations or BINGOs. I find that these organisations produce and enact “conservation solutions” that are technical, reductionist and economistic. Furthermore, the promise of their global policy fixes flies in the face of local contexts, which are replete with intricate socio-natures and uncertainty. By understanding what is wrong with global conservation in this way - namely its technical hubris and wilful ignorance in the face of complexity - I argue that we can identify points of departure or new values for re-building conservation practice. In other words, by recognising mainstream conservation as a form of institutional violence, we are called upon to find new practices that are liberating, non-violent and caring. The ethic of care for human and non-human kin is foundational in indigenous ontologies, and it prompts vast possibilities for ethical practice, if listening and humility in relation to our own place-of-dwelling and action is allowed. Deborah Bird Rose calls this “world-making”, a disposition in which we must ask: “Are self and others flourishing? Are the possibilities for life enhanced?” (2011:12). These questions suggest a practical ethics for earth-caring institutions.

Paper short abstract:

Conservation practitioners increasingly recognize the potential impacts and opportunities of the complex contexts in which they work. Anthropologists can support a positive process of increasing the inclusivity and conflict sensitivity of appropriate conservation projects.

Paper long abstract:

Environmental conservation work has traditionally focused on protecting specific flora, fauna, or biological landscapes while excluding sociopolitical landscapes from direct consideration. More recently, however, conservation projects and practitioners have begun to recognize the potential impacts and opportunities of the conflict and historical contexts in which they work. These impacts include the possibility of either exacerbating or contributing to the amelioration of historical inequities and exclusions as well as contemporary violent and non-violent conflicts. Anthropologists can support the development of conflict- and context-sensitivity in environmental conservation by providing frameworks with which conservation practitioners can view, explore, and respond to the histories and sociopolitical dynamics in which they work. This includes such applied practices as context analysis, stakeholder mapping, root causes analysis, and monitoring, evaluation, and learning processes that rely on common anthropological methods. Through these, anthropologists can contribute to more inclusive, appropriate, empowering, and thus effective conservation work that engages the voices of historical marginalized and disempowered groups who have not traditionally had space to engage in decisions about their natural environments.