This article responds to a preference for short‐term history in research on the infrastructure turn by engaging with the longue durée of East Africa’s latest infrastructure scramble. It traces the history of LAPSSET in Kenya and the Central Corridor in Tanzania, revealing the coloniality of new and improved transport infrastructure along both corridors. This exercise demonstrates how the spatial visions and territorial plans of colonial administrators get built in to new infrastructure and materialise in ways that serve the interests of global capital rather than peasant and indigenous peoples being promised more modern, prosperous futures. The article concludes by suggesting that a focus on the longue durée also reveals uneven patterns of mobility and immobility set in motion during the colonial scramble for Africa and reinforced after independence. These “colonial moorings” are significant as they shape political reactions to new mega‐infrastructure projects today and constrain the emancipatory potential of infrastructure‐led development.
We are currently witnessing a global trend of intensifying and deepening relationships between extractive companies and biodiversity conservation organisations that warrants closer scrutiny. Although existing literature has established that these two sectors often share the same space and rely on similar logics, it is increasingly common to find biodiversity conservation being carried out through partnerships between extractive and conservation actors. In this article, we explore what this cooperation achieves for both sectors. Using illustrative examples of extractive-conservation collaboration across sub-Saharan Africa, we argue that new entanglements between extractive and conservation actors are motivated by multiple purposes. First, partnering with conservation actors serves as a spatial and socio-ecological fix for extractive companies in response to multiple crises that threaten the sector's productivity. Second, new forms of collaboration between extractive and conservation actors create pathways for both sectors to produce new value from nature. For the extractive sector, creating new value from nature works as a further fix to capitalist crises whereas, for the conservation sector, producing value through nature amounts to new opportunities for capital accumulation. Importantly, working together to produce shared value from nature within and beyond extractive concessions secures both sectors' control over the means of production. Theoretically, our analysis links literature on value in capitalist nature with that on spatial and socio-ecological fixes.
This critical review aims to facilitate explicit, ongoing consideration for how post-human geographies and political ecology stand to benefit one another empirically and theoretically. In it, we argue that post-human political ecologies are well-equipped to ensure that the broader post-human turn in geographical thought engages critically with the roles that humans and non-humans play in enactments of injustice Ð both as subjects of (in)justice and as beings whose actions have justice implications for myriad forms of life. By engaging with empirics drawn from research on tiger conservation in India, we deploy myth as a conceptual tool and as an heuristic device to illustrate how post-human political ecologies might further engage with the politics and power asymmetries embedded in conservation science and practice. To conclude, this critical review summarizes the merits of bringing the Ôcutting edgeÕ of post-human geographical literature into dialogue with the traditional concerns of political ecology and recaps the potential power that myth retains as an analytic in post-human political ecologies.
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