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- Convenors:
-
Léa Lacan
(University of Cologne)
Hauke-Peter Vehrs (University of Cologne)
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- Discussant:
-
Romie Nghitevelekwa
(University of Namibia)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Monday 25 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel takes as point of departure the intimate relations between people and nonhumans to discuss the histories and prospects of conservation. We propose to reflect on the role of these relations in the quest for environmental justice and the delineation of future conservation strategies.
Long Abstract:
In recent years, multispecies approaches innovatively highlighted the entanglements of human lives with nonhuman agents. At the same time protected areas continue to expand and cover more than 15% of the globe's terrestrial surface, often competing with other land uses and implicitly raising the questions of 'whose conservation' is it with just conditions 'for whom'. In this wake, the panel invites participants to dialogue about the role of nonhumans in conservation-related struggles of environmental justice.
In conservation history, approaches went from excluding people from protected areas to participatory approaches, emphasizing local populations at times as destroyers or guardians of a nature that should not be disturbed. Instead of separating humans from nonhuman environments, we propose to take their relations - often multifaceted, intimate, dynamic - as point of departure. This panel aims to discuss environmental justice linked to conservation-related topics beyond mere considerations of access or use of natural resources but taking seriously how cohabitation and interrelations between species are enabled by and shape future (convivial) conservation (Büscher and Fletcher).
Questions:
- How do nonhuman agencies shape representations and practices of conservation and environmental justice, and contribute to the making of conservation landscapes?
- How are humans "becoming with" (Haraway) nonhumans in conservation initiatives?
- How can nonhumans be included in political and ethical questions of conservation?
- How can we methodologically capture the role of nonhumans in politics and future-making?
- What can anthropology and its findings on conservation and multispecies relationships contribute to the conservation debate at large?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 25 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
I discuss matters of conservation, displacement and environmental justice and consider both the objections of displaced residents to current protection strategies and the need to include concerns of more-than-human actors in the discussion of environmental justice for 21st century conservation.
Paper long abstract:
The Zambezi Region in north-eastern Namibia is part of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA-TFCA) that attracts many tourists and hunters with its magnificent scenery and wildlife. Behind the apparent success of the conservation story - including three national parks, 15 community conservancies, several community forests, and a large forest reserve in the Zambezi Region - one finds a historic conservation trajectory extending far back into the 20th century. In the process of the ‘making of a conservation landscape’ (Bollig and Vehrs, 2021) the inhabitants along the Kwando River - which is an integral part of the conservation landscape - were displaced to the inland areas before the declaration of independence. This not only had a strong impact on their livelihoods, but in some cases also included that residents were forcefully evicted and today are still struggling to either return to their ancestral lands or seek restorative justice from the Namibian government.
In this presentation I explore issues of how a national park was planned and implemented, how local residents perceive the park’s establishment and the injustices embedded therein, how displaced people seek justice today, and to what extent environmental justice and conservation are in conflict when it comes to consider both the needs of human residents and of more-than-human species.
Paper short abstract:
In Namibia, elephants cause destruction to livelihoods in conservancies. Incomes from conservation to local communities do not offset costs of destruction. Thus, community conservation leads to better resource management, but economic impoverishment for those who live with wildlife.
Paper long abstract:
In Namibia, the communal conservancy program has been promoted by international donors, including conservantion NGOs, as an alternative land use that simultaneously ensures wildlife conservation and provides livelihoods opportunities for rural communities. More than 25 years after the start of the program, 20% of the country is covered by communal conservancies and wildlife, especially the elephant population, has increased.
In this paper, I draw from previous long term research in arid northwestern Namibia to explore the distribution of economic costs and benefits to various social groups. The data show that elephant conservation is partly responsible for a significant growth in tourism and trophy hunting industries. Nevertheless, only a small percentage of the income which is generated through both remains with local communities. At the same time, elephants increasingly cause destruction of the water infrastructure in pastoral communities. These costs are hardly compensated for by the conservancy programme or the state. If such conditions persist, the conservancy programme is likely to lead to better resource management, but skewed economic impoverishment, furtherance reproducing inequalities and putting to doubt its contribution to economic empowerment and alleviation of rural poverty. In conclusion, I propose some tentative solutions how this paradox might be overcome.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will take Haiǁom’s former being-in-relations in the Etosha National Park in Namibia as a case study to explore what could be gained by taking relational onto-epistemologies as a role model in conservation and beyond.
Paper long abstract:
The south-eastern area of today’s Etosha National Park in Namibia has been inhabited since time immemorial by Haiǁom, a group of (former) hunter-gatherers. Etosha was proclaimed as a game reserve in 1907. Haiǁom were still allowed to live in the area until they were expelled in the 1950s due to then-dominant ideas of fortress conservation and the need for labour outside the protected area. In recent years, Haiǁom have been provided with several resettlement farms by the Namibian government, which might be understood as compensation for the land dispossession they experienced due to colonial nature conservation efforts.
In this paper, I will explore the various relationships of Haiǁom in Etosha before their eviction. Haiǁom (both collectively and individually) maintained manifold relationships with the land, specific areas and places, with human and beyond-the-human beings - e.g. animals and spiritual beings - in Etosha. I will then assess the impacts of land dispossession on Haiǁom, reading it less as resource dispossession but rather as a relationship deprivation that cannot be simply be compensated with resettlement decades after relocation.
Finally, I will take Haiǁom’s being-in-relations as the point of departure to discuss what could be gained by taking indigenous onto-epistemologies seriously, promoting thereby some sort of ‘relational turn’ (in the sense of a turn to relations) in conservation and beyond.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the political force of human-forest entanglements in the Katimok forest, Baringo county, Kenya, in the contestation of a historically imposed forest reserve (dedicated to conservation and exploitation), and the negotiation of human futures.
Paper long abstract:
The Katimok forest, in the highlands of Baringo county, Kenya, overlaps with the ancestral lands of the people now living around its edges. After Katimok’s gazettement as a forest reserve under colonial rule for conservation and timber exploitation purposes, only a limited number of inhabitants were allowed to stay within the forest boundaries, until all were evicted in the late 1980s, years after independence. Yet, people in Katimok continue living and becoming with the forest. They rely on the forest for their livelihoods (for firewood, medicine, livestock grazing, etc.) and live with the trees as known and trusted companions. People relate to the forest grounds as their ancestral lands, and the forest landscape is a medium for the transmission of their histories and knowledge. Despite the historical dispossessions that forced forest dwellers to leave their lands behind and allegedly (according to local elders) weakened elders’ authority on the forest, mutual relations of care subsist that bind human local inhabitants to forest areas, trees, hills, and water streams. Not only do they continue living with the forest, people in Katimok also claim the recognition of their eviction as a historical injustice and demand compensation. In that political struggle, claimants reappropriate the forest landscape and their intimate relationship with it to negotiate new futures. This paper reflects on the political force of human-forest entanglements in the contestation of a historical forest conservation model and the negotiation of human futures and suggests taking seriously human-forest relations of care to rethink forest conservation.