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- Convenors:
-
Knut G Nustad
(University of Oslo)
Marianne Elisabeth Lien (University of Oslo)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Monday 25 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel explores how state bodies (including large NGOs) and people affected by conservation are constituted relationally through nature practices. We especially welcome papers that mobilise ethnographies for the purposes of comparison along a North-South dimension.
Long Abstract:
Conflicts over conservation have often been explored with an emphasis on how nature is cast as external to local people, thereby justifying processes of dispossession. While building on such scholarship, this panel shifts the focus to how state bodies (including large NGOs) and people affected by conservation are constituted relationally through nature practices.
The politics of conservation are not only shaped by pre-existing notions of relational identities as regards natural resources (indigenous, colonial, peasant, squatter, citizen, etc.). Conservation also shapes identity formation, deepening some distinctions while glossing over others. In much of Southern Africa, for example, state conservation authorities cast people infringing on protected areas as poachers, foreign immigrants or squatters. In the Nordic Arctic, conservation efforts are justified through notions of commons, casting all citizens as equally benefitting in a way that disregards differences of senses of ownership and local ecological knowledge.
Different histories of state formation in relation to land ownership and use enable as well as preclude sets of identities. These identities thus emerge at the intersection of processes of conservation, identity and state formation. We invite papers that explore the relational and mutually constituting processes of people and state actors (including NGOs) in politics of conservation. We specifically welcome papers that mobilise ethnographies for the purposes of comparison along a North-South dimension, by paying specific attention to how relations between state formation, identities, conservation and nature practices have been constituted historically and continue to have effects today.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 25 October, 2021, -Anna Kamanzi (University of California, Irvine)
Paper short abstract:
This paper traces shifting conceptions from the making of Africa’s first national park and its Indigenous inhabitants as conservation objects to “non-ethnic” conservation subjects in the post-genocide reimagining of the nation.
Paper long abstract:
Mountain gorilla conservation and post-genocide state formation have intimately shaped conceptions and identities of the indigenous Batwa community in Rwanda. Shifting representations of the Batwa as part of “nature” during the colonial period, as poachers under Dian Fossey’s tenure, and now as “historically marginalized” in the post- genocide period have dispossessed the Batwa of their identity and denied their representational sovereignty. At the same time, imaginaries of what is now Volcanoes National Park as an “international laboratory” (De Bont 2015), a militarized border region, and now a gorilla sanctuary have facilitated post-genocide nation-building ambitions to transform Rwanda into a “clean-green-safe” eco-tourist destination. Meanwhile, transitional justice efforts have eliminated ethnic designations and refused the recognition of indigenous identity, thereby preventing claims to rights and resources by the Batwa. Representational rhetorics (West 2016) of “nature,” nation-building, and Indigenous peoples have both obscured and justified dispossession while remaking Batwa identity in relation to state (re)formation and conservation. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Rwanda, this paper traces the shifting conceptual identities of Batwa from conservation objects to conservation subjects in the making of a “new” Rwanda.
Ferran Pons-Raga (Spanish National Research Council (IPNA-CSIC))
Paper short abstract:
The reintroduction of bears in the Pyrenees has entailed the arrival of shepherds to tend the flocks. This historical figure stands today between the local farmers and State bodies, making us reflect on the identity formation behind this rewilding project through the lenses of the rural-urban divide
Paper long abstract:
After the bear reintroduction program was launched in 1996 in the Pyrenees, the Catalan government decided to implement a regrouping policy in 2010 to reduce the bear attacks on the sheep flocks that were grazing loose over the high mountain pastures. This policy consisted of gathering several small flocks belonging to different local farmers from adjacent villages with the support of a set of three protection measures: shepherds, livestock guardian dogs, and electrified enclosures for the night camps. Through the resulting regrouped flocks, the previous hierarchical dual relationship between farmers and shepherds gave way to a more complex triangle of stakeholders in which the bear program’s decision-makers, including politicians, experts, and environmental NGOs, have taken a crucial role. Considering the bear program as a State-driven territorialisation process over the local farming practices, I propose to draw attention to the shepherds’ current ambiguous position to better understand the persistence of the conflicts among the primary sector around this rewilding project. Taking care of local farmers’ sheep but being hired by the public administration through the bear program’s funds, mountain shepherds lay in-between two opposing poles. In this new triangle, they stand in an ambiguous vertex, on the edge of the rural insiders and urban outsiders, respectively personalized by the local farmers and the State bodies and animalized by the sheep and bears. As such, they press us to reflect on the identity formation behind a State-driven rewilding project through the lenses of the rural/urban divide.
Tanya Richardson (Wilfrid Laurier University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes the tense, interdependent relationship between Vylkovchany fishers and Danube Biosphere Reserve administrators, and the mutual learning that occurred as they negotiated access to fisheries amidst changing property relations and contradictory regulation after socialism’s end.
Paper long abstract:
Between 2014 and 2016 Ukraine’s Danube Biosphere Reserve (DBR) administrators devoted extensive time to two lawsuits in which they defended the legality of commercial fisheries in reserve territory. Since the late 1990s, DBR administrators have managed fisheries as a kind of limited-access common pool resource that gives priority to fishers from the Danube Delta town of Vylkove and nearby villages. In both lawsuits parties claimed that the conduct of fisheries in the DBR violated Ukraine’s 1992 protected areas law. Although DBR administrators lost their cases and had to rezone the Reserve in order to allow local fishers to continue fishing legally, litigation helped defend local fishing commons against further enclosure by environmentalists, state officials and outside business people, and to limit officials’ predatory behavior.
This paper draws on interviews, participant observation, and documents pertaining to these events in order to analyze the evolution of a tense, interdependent relationship between Vylkovchany fishers and DBR administrators and mutual learning that occurred as they negotiated access to Danube fisheries amidst changing property relations and the proliferation of contradictory environmental regulation. For example, administrators and hydrobiologists recognize fishers’ claims that their stewardship helped give the Danube Delta its current form and species-diverse ecologies and testified that fishing is an ‘environment-forming factor’ in court. This account thus illuminates an idiosyncratic yet positive case of administrators’ use of domestic law and global conservation norms to balance nature conservation and residents’ fishing livelihoods in a chronically under-funded post-Soviet state-run biosphere reserve during a politically volatile period.
Claudine Pied (University of Wisconsin Platteville)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the effects of a conservation regime premised on property negotiations between state, conservation NGOs, and for-profit timberland owners. This system is changing a culture of open access to forestland while simultaneously contributing to distrust of these institutions.
Paper long abstract:
In the last few decades, forestland conservation in northern New England has been dominated by a market-based approach, including industry-regulated forest management and the negotiation of land ownership and easement purchases among environmental NGOs, state agencies, and for-profit timberland owners. Land governance entities sell conservation easements and carbon credits for additional income and to finance land purchases. In addition, forestland is predominantly privately owned and rural economies increasingly depend on access to this private land for recreation-based tourism. Indigenous leaders maintain power by playing peripheral roles in conservation and land access negotiations. This paper asks how this system of institutional leaders negotiating conservation and access is affecting the relationships between the state, conservation NGOs, indigenous peoples, and others using the land for logging, hunting, hiking, camping and other forms of recreation. Based on ethnographic research with land users and agency representatives, I document a class-inflected shift in how people interact with the environment. To promote conservation and keep landowners happy, state agencies and NGOs encourage trail access, overnight lodges, and formalized permission from landowners. Understanding conservation negotiations to be articulations of power and authority, I argue that this system of negotiating conservation is slowly changing a culture of open access to private land while simultaneously contributing to distrust of government, industry, and NGOs.