Mainstream environmental literature has often presented the initiation of transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs) in southern Africa as progress, obscuring the influences of geopolitics and capitalist power relationships that shape TFCA initiatives. Recognising the need to explore trajectories that threaten the very core of what TFCA approaches, in theory, stand for, we undertook an ethnographic study in the Chimanimani TFCA along the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border to examine outcomes of uneven funding commitments associated with geopolitics and neoliberal conservation initiatives. We discuss how on the Mozambique side, access to donor funding linked to neoliberal programming has been associated with unfulfilled promises of 'conservation-based enterprises' and the grabbing of livelihood resources, while constricted access to conservation funding has been instrumentalised as a rationale for coercive 'fortress conservation' approaches in Zimbabwe, shaping tensions between park authorities and buffer communities. Communities on both sides of the TFCA experience unintended socio-ecological trajectories associated with economic inequalities and systems of exploitation, in turn leading to fraught conservation in the TFCA. Considering how these inequalities in TFCA management have also been worsened by shocks, including extreme climatic events and the COVID-19 pandemic, we conclude that more attention is warranted to the impact of uneven donor engagement driven by neoliberal principles and geopolitics on conservation.