Geographies of conservation III: Nature’s spaces

Abstract

There is a rich literature by geographers on the spatial imagination and ambition of conservation, and particularly the long-established strategy of creating protected areas such as national parks. This report highlights five ways in which the spatial ambitions, imaginations and practices of conservation are changing. First, appetite for the expansion of protected areas continues to grow, with proposals for marine reserves and up to half of the earth under protection. Second, substantial intensification of agriculture is proposed to free up land for such expansion, a policy of land sparing. Third, areas being protected are increasingly privately owned, and conservation is serving as a powerful form of legitimization of large-scale private landholding. Fourth, in many countries conservation management is being extended beyond formal protected areas in mosaics of public, private and community land. Fifth, the political and material technologies used to secure conservation territories, like the extension of these territories themselves, raise urgent political ecological questions. Conservation governance physically marks spaces for nature, but also constructs and polices ideas about both nature and society in profound ways, which often go unremarked by conservationists themselves.

Reading the Entanglements of Nature-culture Conservation and Development in Contemporary India

“…Thus, we offer our analyses not only to contribute to a more balanced theorization and critical scholarship but also as a matter of practical-political urgency-typically what resident communities want and what they represent for conservation, is most often always assumed, and never examined or inquired into. This is especially a concern in developing countries like India, where, to recall Adams (2020) and Sandbrook (2017), conservation has a predilection for coercive methods in the exercise of biopower.…”

“…The attention to conservation practice in the context of development is also of immediate practical-political importance. Adams’ (2020) observation (building on Sandbrook, 2017), that conservation’s ability to assert bio-power is stronger in the developing world than in more industrialized societies, is borne out by the scale and diversity of conservation projects across India, put in place by a growing number of laws and global conventions. There are about 3,600 cultural sites (immovable cultural property) protected at the national level by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) under the Ancient Monuments and Scheduled Remains (AMASR) Act 1958/2010.…”

Restoration-as-development? Contesting Aspirational Politics Regarding the Restoration of Wildlife Corridors in the Kilombero Valley, Tanzania

“…Only recently, in line with a more comprehensive shift in conservation science away from the protection of single species and a focus on fenced-off areas towards landscapeecological concepts, a new emphasis is being placed on corridors and their decisive role as connecting structures for the migration of species over distances in order to satisfy their vital needs (Flitner 2005;Newmark 2008;Goldman 2009;Howell et al 2012). Recent research, as well as different practical interventions in the corridors of the Kilombero Valley, also testifies to this new interest in corridors as target areas for 'conservation-as-development' (Adams 2020).…”

“…By drawing on empirical work on the corridor connecting the Selous Game Reserve with the Transfrontier Conservation Area (TFCA) between Tanzania and Mozambique, she illustrates how integrating community, reserved and private categories of land into the corridor project contrasts with the earlier containment policies of national states and parks. In the end, the conservation of corridors formally becomes effective in mosaic landscapes of private, state and public land (Adams 2020), in which land use is supposed to go hand in hand with its protection (Ramutsindela and Noe 2012). To reach this goal, and in contrast to simply fencing them off, forests are re-created, trees are planted, and corridors are actively restored with the participation of local residents.…”

Territories of state-led aquaculture risk management: Thailand’s Plang Yai program

“…Territorialization is commonly understood as a top-down state-led process, creating territories through the delineation of boundaries within which claims of authority and control are enacted (Vandergeest and Peluso, 1995). Territorialization has been used to examine the consequences of spatial forms of conservation, like national parks, on people and ecosystems (Adams, 2020; Bluwstein and Lund, 2018; Raycraft, 2019). Attention has only recently been given to the territorialities of more diffuse environmental phenomenon such as aquaculture production risks across more ‘fluid’ (i.e.…”