Biodiversity conservation is a fundamentally spatial practice. For more than a century, conservation's leading strategy has been the establishment of protected areas. Governance by the state has been central to conservation's claim to territory. In the UK, the established approach to biodiversity conservation concentrated on spatial strategies of territorialization to secure particular outcomes in relatively small pieces of land, set aside as protected areas. However, this strategy has begun to change, and conservation's expanding territorial claims have been expressed through new models of large-scale conservation. A series of projects developed by non governmental conservation organisations seek to extend conservation management over larger areas of land. In this paper we consider these developments as a form of reterritorialisation, a reframing and extension of conservation's spatial claims. We describe how conservation's ambitions have been reformed and extended and discuss evidence on the growth of large-scale biodiversity conservation projects in the UK. We then consider the implications of these changes in the light of the neoliberalization of conservation.
SUMMARYThe extent to which coffee agroforestry systems provide ecosystem services depends on local context and management practices. There is a paucity of information about how and why farmers manage their coffee farms in the way that they do and the local knowledge that underpins this. The present research documents local agro-ecological knowledge from a coffee growing region within the vicinity of the Aberdare Forest Reserve in Central Kenya. Knowledge was acquired from over 60 coffee farmers in a purposive sample, using a knowledge-based systems approach, and tested with a stratified random sample of 125 farmers using an attribute ranking survey. Farmers had varying degrees of explanatory knowledge about how trees affected provisioning and regulating ecosystem services. Trees were described as suitable or unsuitable for growing with coffee according to tree attributes such as crown density and spread, root depth and spread, growth rate and their economic benefit. Farmers were concerned that too high a level of shade and competition for water and nutrients would decrease coffee yields, but they were also interested in diversifying production from their coffee farms to include fruits, timber, firewood and other tree products as a response to fluctuating coffee prices. A range of trees were maintained in coffee plots and along their boundaries but most were at very low abundances. Promoting tree diversity rather than focussing on one or two high value exotic species represents a change of approach for extension systems, the coffee industry and farmers alike, but is important if the coffee dominated landscapes of the region are to retain their tree species richness and the resilience this confers.
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