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Studies of accumulation by dispossession in the Global South tend to focus on individual sectors, for example, large‐scale agriculture or nature conservation. Yet smallholder farmers and pastoralists are affected by multiple processes of land alienation. Drawing on the case of Tanzania, we illustrate the analytical purchase of a comprehensive examination of dynamics of land alienation across multiple sectors. To begin with, processes of land alienation through investments in agriculture, mining, conservation, and tourism dovetail with a growing social differentiation and class formation. These dynamics generate unequal patterns of land deprivation and accumulation that evolve in a context of continued land dependency for the vast majority of the rural population. Consequently, land alienation engenders responses by individuals and communities seeking to maintain control over their means of production. These responses include migration, land tenure formalization, and land transactions, that propagate across multiple localities and scales, interlocking with and further reinforcing the effects of land alienation. Various localized processes of primitive accumulation contribute to a scramble for land in the aggregate, providing justifications for policies that further drive land alienation.

Drawing on critical debates in political ecology and biopolitics, the article develops a "biopolitical ecology of conservation" to study historical shifts in how human and nonhuman lives come to be valued in an asymmetric way. Tanzania and the so-called Tarangire-Manyara Ecosystem illustrate how these biopolitical shifts became entangled with conservation interventions and broader visions of development throughout colonial and postcolonial history. Colonial efforts to balance seemingly competing domains of human and nonhuman species through spatial separation gave way to the development of the post-colonial nation through the nurturing of its wildlife population. This shift from human-nonhuman incompatibility towards human dependency on wildlife and biodiversity conservation culminated in the contemporary biopolitical ecology and geography of landscape conservation. Landscape conservation seeks to entangle human and nonhuman species. Through conservation, human populations are rearranged and fixed in time and space to allow wildlife to roam free across unbounded spaces. This conservation governmentality is tied to global environmentalist concerns and political economies of neoliberal conservation, as well as to a domestic agenda of tourism-based economic growth. It secures land tenure for some, while imposing a biopolitical sacrifice on the rural population as a whole. This forecloses alternative rural futures for a land-dependent and increasingly land-deprived population.

Large-scale area-based conservation measures affect millions of people globally. Understanding their social impacts is necessary to improve effectiveness and minimise negative consequences. However, quantifying the impacts of conservation measures that affect large geographic areas and diverse peoples is expensive and methodologically challenging, particularly because such evaluations should capture locally-defined conceptions of wellbeing while permitting policy-relevant comparisons. We measure the impact of Tanzania's Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs), a national community-based conservation and poverty reduction initiative. We used a novel, cost-effective impact evaluation method based on participatory wealth-ranking and Bayesian multilevel modelling. We find that from 2007-2015 the impacts of WMAs on wealth were small and variable, with no clear evidence of widespread poverty reduction. Accompanying qualitative data suggest that apparently positive effects in one WMA cannot be directly attributed to WMA activities. Our results suggest that current WMA policy needs to be revisited if it is to promote positive economic development. WMA name Region (Study Area) Year initiated Year gazetted Level of restrictions Generation of revenues

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Since the 2000s, Tanzania’s natural resource management policy has emphasised Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs), designed to promote wildlife and biodiversity conservation, poverty alleviation and rural development. We carried out a quasi-experimental impact evaluation of social impacts of WMAs, collecting data from 24 villages participating in 6 different WMAs across two geographical regions, and 18 statistically matched control villages. Across these 42 villages, we collected participatory wealth ranking data for 13,578 households. Using this as our sampling frame, we conducted questionnaire surveys with a stratified sample of 1,924 household heads and 945 household heads’ wives. All data were collected in 2014/15, with a subset of questions devoted to respondents’ recall on conditions that existed in 2007, when first WMAs became operational. Questions addressed household demographics, land and livestock assets, resource use, income-generating activities and portfolios, participation in natural resource management decision-making, benefits and costs of conservation. Datasets permit research on livelihood and wealth trajectories, and social impacts, costs and benefits of conservation interventions in the context of community-based natural resource management.