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- Convenors:
-
Andrew Ainslie
(University of Reading)
Joana Sousa (Centre for Social Studies, Univ Coimbra)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Conceptual framings, policy debates and innovations in the financing of biodiversity conservation have all undergone decades of change. We ask why is that the voices of Africans who live adjacent to or within protected areas remain unheard and marginal to these many changes and innovations.
Long Abstract:
Conceptual framings, policy debates and innovations in the planning, financing and management of biodiversity conservation - including through the increasing deployment of advanced information technologies - have all undergone decades of significant change across and in relation to sub-Saharan Africa (Büscher and Fletcher 2020). At the global and national levels, and in INGO and private company boardrooms, the discourses, models and programs for biodiversity conservation are both increasingly sophisticated and apparently evermore socially inclusive. This panel asks why it is that the voices, viewpoints and aspirations of Africans who live adjacent to or within protected areas seem too frequently to remain unheard and marginal to these many changes and innovations. In particular, local people's independent access to conservation funds and to decision-making spaces remain controversially peripheral within protected area management. We invite contributions from across the continent that elucidate ethnographic case-studies which explore, contextualise and of course challenge this contention.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
In a protected area of Guinea-Bissau, an international conservation NGO has been mapping sacred forests, aiming to create legislation to protect them. The NGO seems to ignore the political dimensions of their mapping, as well as the religious and political dimensions of sacred forests.
Paper long abstract:
Interest in sacred forests is not new, however, following the creation of the IUCN Task Force on Cultural and Spiritual Values, sacred natural sites (SNS) have become part of this ‘globally circulating knowledge’ (Tsing, 2005) of nature conservation. Much of the available literature on SNS is produced by conservation biologists for whom wilderness and SNS go hand in hand, but their focus is on biodiversity rather than culture. In one of the seven protected areas of Guinea-Bissau, an international conservation NGO has been acting for the protection of chimpanzees for more than a decade. They have applied a model of community-based conservation, like many other NGOs in Guinea-Bissau, claiming that it is the only model capable of succeeding. Over the past five years, the NGO has gathered efforts on mapping what they call sacred forests, as part of a wider, half million euro project, aiming to “strengthen the role of the local population in safeguarding the cultural and natural assets.” Much of the data collected were concerned with the presence of charismatic species on the mapped sacred forests and in quantifying sacred forest uses (e.g., water, fruits, medicine, hunting). Very little effort was made to understand the depth of the religious/supernatural and political dimensions of sacred forests and their relationship to the concrete dimensions of people’s lives. At the same time, the sacred forest mapping has been used by some villagers to claim land from other villages, showing that the mapping process has a de facto a political use.
Paper short abstract:
A certain type of discourse frames subsistence farming as a root cause for the changing climate. The idea that subsistence farmers have damaged the planet is a racialised and class-based (a)morality that contributes to silencing the dramatic inequalities of the Anthropocene.
Paper long abstract:
In coastal Guinea-Bissau, a combination of two hegemonic discourses about nature conservation and climate change frames the farming activities of subsistence farmers as a root cause for the changing climate. This (mis)placement of blame is as much a tale grounded in unequal power relations and the cultural morality of the global north, as it is a parody of global environmental injustice. In Cantanhez National Park, livelihoods depend on forests and/or mangroves to grow upland rice and mangrove rice, respectively. The latter has been affected by strong spring tides and climate instability, which directly affects coastal peoples’ food security. Concurrently, conservation stakeholders inform farmers that climate change has resulted from shifting agriculture, a practice used locally for upland rice production. This localised and biased attribution of guilt is not only disproportionate, but it ignores the predominant effects of industrialisation, exploitation and extractivism by the global north. Such a narrative precludes farmers from struggling for global environmental justice, namely for the enforcement of effective climate mitigation measures and just compensation. It is also an overpowering extension of traditional conservation’s war on swidden farming and improperly depicts conservation stakeholders as knowledgeable about climate change mitigation. Finally, the funding allocated for both climate resilience and conservation continues to be diverted from farmers, despite the fact that they are the ones most acutely affected by both and the most knowledgeable about the local manifestations of climate change. The idea that subsistence farmers have damaged the planet is a racialised and class-based (a)morality that naturalises ongoing dispossession and contributes to silencing the dramatic inequalities of the Anthropocene.
Paper short abstract:
I discuss how wildlife conservancies in Kenya, popularly viewed as bottom-up conservation institutions, are characterized by participatory exclusions. Drawing from ethnographic research among the Maasai of southern Kenya, I reflect on the exclusion of Indigenous voices in conservation debates.
Paper long abstract:
Many African Indigenous communities are facing oppression, land alienation, and grave human injustices in the ostensible pursuit of conservation (Brockington, 2002; Fairhead, Leach, & Scoones, 2012). These patterns of oppression are not new having begun during the colonial period when swathes of Indigenous African lands were expropriated and designated state protected areas (Hughes, 2006; Mwangi, 2006). Seen as acts of colonization at the time, it was anticipated these oppressive regimes would come to an end at independence. More than half a century later, these expectations could not have been more misplaced. The entry of conservation NGOs and international investors in Africa was embraced with expectations of local development, but the conservation terrain continues to be characterized by the plight of Indigenous communities (Peluso, 1993). Indigenous African communities thus continue to operate at the periphery of debates on global conservation. In the rare event that Indigenous participation is sought, discussions about conservation have often incorporated the voices of a few figures who function as gatekeepers (Agarwal, 2001). What is deemed local or Indigenous, therefore, is often not fully encompassing. Building on my doctoral research carried out in southern Kenya, I set out to discuss how wildlife conservancies, entities deemed to foster bottom-up conservation involving Indigenous communities in biodiverse-rich areas, have been characterized by participatory exclusions both in theory and practice. I examine the different levels that these exclusions occur and reflect on possible opportunities for bolstering Indigenous participation in conservation debates to enhance local livelihoods, bio-cultural relationality, and biodiversity conservation.