Project A04, Future Conservation

How and to what degree do households incur costs and benefits from conservation? How are such costs/benefits distributed within households and across communities?

In what way do incomes from conservation spur rural inequality? To what extent are they an option for rural poor to diversify their livelihoods and gain more security?

How are projects of conservation co-produced between local power brokers, national elites, governmental officers, and international actors?

How is conservation linked to other processes, such as economic intensification, infrastructure development, rewilding, ecological invasions, or defaunation?

What role do specific multispecies assemblages play in the planning and implementation of conservation projects and what insights can we, as anthropologists, gain by using the multispecies approach in the conservation context?

Qualitative ethnographic methods; structured and semi-structured interviews; household surveys; cognitive methods; cultural mapping; participatory observation; essay writing.

(1) The conservation landscape and its environmental infrastructure in north-eastern Namibia has been shaped by the impact of administrative measures and the gradual decoupling of humans and wildlife in a vast wetland. The path towards today’s conservation landscape was marked and marred by the enforced reordering of human-environment relations. In Kenya, colonial and postcolonial governmental projects of conservation and development transformed forest landscapes, and still continue shaping their ecologies, the lives of their inhabitants and forest-people relations.

(2) Beyond conservation, cattle husbandry in the Zambezi Region is a project of the local population, being an expression of wealth and as a means of saving. At the same time, cattle can be used in farming activities, produce milk and meat for consumption and sale, and fulfil important social functions (i.e. bridewealth payments or cattle loans). However, the needs and practices of expanding cattle husbandry often conflict with the demands and challenges of conservation and conservation-related tourism.

(3) The travelling idea of conservation (and CBNRM in particular) is often detached from the lives of conservancy members who are confronted with the repercussions of conservation, such as human wildlife conflicts or past displacements. For most conservancy members conservation is by far not as relevant as other livelihood strategies, which raises the question to what extent community-based conservation, as practiced today, is a viable future option for many smallholders in the conservancies.

(4) In Baringo, despite rights that allow residents to use public forests in certain ways, they often feel cut off from the benefits of forest exploitation. In turn, some subsistence practices in the forest conflict with governmental conservation goals, in a highly politicized context.

(5) Communities that were displaced in the designation and making of a conservation landscape in the Zambezi Region complain about, protest against and legally contest their estrangement from their former homes that now have become protected areas. They are often relegated to supply cheap manual labour or engage in ‘cultural’ events to well-paying tourists who visit their former ancestral land, a region that is now inhabited by large herds of wildlife and where little or nothing reminds visitors of earlier inhabitants. In Baringo, former forest dwellers are claiming justice for historical evictions from forest areas by colonial and post-independence governments for conservation and exploitation purposes. We argue that conservation of biodiversity can only be successful if issues of past and present environmental injustices are addressed comprehensively.

(6) In Baringo, despite formal dispossessions of forest areas, local populations continue living with the forests. Extensive ecological knowledge and practices of care bind residents to the forest and structure the local economic and social life.

(7) Intimate relations between people and natural environments are determining in the negotiation of future conservation and livelihoods. In Baringo, Kenya, forest histories are reappropriated in political claims. In these struggles, the role of traditional authorities regains significance and cultural identities are being reframed.

A04’s activities in phase II start off from the assumption that the combination of a comparative approach, a strongly interdisciplinary agenda and an in-depth ethnographic focus dealing with multispecies assemblages (WP 6-8) will contribute to a fuller understanding of future-making via conservation in the 21st century. We seek to examine how human livelihoods, social institutions, imaginaries, and attitudes change under new socio-ecological conditions of conservation Humans are excluded from conservation areas, or land use is reduced to provide space for refaunation. Migration corridors for large ungulates are kept free of human habitation and occasionally wildlife is introduced into some areas that often have been bare of wildlife for decades. At the same time, these emergent conservation landscapes are vulnerable: global climate change endangers species compositions and enforces extinction, and important diseases and invader species threaten the “authenticity” (however such authenticity is defined) of ecosystems. We further intend to focus more on multi-species assemblages – as it is such assemblages that conservation strategies directly address. Each assemblage is comprised of a loose multi-scalar network consisting of different species populations, environmental infrastructures and technologies, human actors, and organizations.