Glocalisation and Nature Conservation Strategies in 21^st‐Century Southern Africa

Abstract

This paper refers to the establishment of the Great Limpopo on the South Africa-Mozambique-Zimbabwe border and the Kgalagadi on the South Africa-Botswana border to illuminate the involvement of actors under conditions that cannot more appropriately be captured by analyses that place emphasis on particular scales. It reaffirms the view that the global-local infusion involves actors at multiple levels. To that end, the paper uses the debate about global-local connections as an interpretative framework for understanding various actors involved in the creation of transfrontier parks in southern Africa. Drawing from case study material in the Great Limpopo and KgalagadiTransfrontier Parks, the paper shows that changing conservation philosophies, the socio-political environment, economic imperatives and conditions in and around national parks combined to make the region favourable to the new nature conservation schemes.

Rivers as resources, rivers as borders: community and transboundary management of fisheries in the Upper Zambezi River floodplains

“…However, the rationale for TBRNM, like the rationale for CBNRM, is not just ecological. For example, the economic importance of wildlife‐based tourism in southern Africa provides additional incentives for TBNRM as a means of linking tourism ‘corridors’ that may run through different countries (Ramutsindela 2004).…”

“…As a result, TBNRM initiatives also reference local institutions and inhabitants in the region and contain important assumptions about them (discussed later in this article). Several examples exist in southern Africa where conservation goals and means are being defined both at the local and ecosystem scale, such as the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park and the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park (Ramutsindela 2004).…”

Mobilizing for nature in southern African community-based conservation policies, or the death of the local

“…Similarly, the land claims in South Africa have brought new modes of community involvement into conservation policies, through political movements of contestation and economic contracts for national parks (Ramutsindela 2004). Finally, social mobilization is also at work within the big transnational conservation area and the manner in which they refer not to existing territories but potential landforms (Hughes 2005).…”

The Political Economy of Africa's Natural Resources and the ‘Great Financial Crisis’

“…are increasingly becoming “underlying assets” for what has become the primary source of value of neoliberal conservation, namely idealised images within the realms of branding, public relations and marketing’ (Büscher 2010, p. 261). The idealised images of Africa's wildlife, then, remain one of the main ways in which the financial crisis can be turned into an ‘opportunity’ for further profit accumulation and the strengthening of Africa's place in global capitalist modernity (see also Ramutsindela 2004, 2007).…”