Abstract. This article looks at the International Biological Program (IBP) as the predecessor of UNESCO's well-known and highly successful Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB). It argues that international conservation efforts of the 1970s, such as the MAB, must in fact be understood as a compound of two opposing attempts to reform international conservation in the 1960s. The scientific framework of the MAB has its origins in disputes between high-level conservationists affiliated with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) about what the IBP meant for the future of conservation. Their respective visions entailed different ecological philosophies as much as diverging sets of political ideologies regarding the global implementation of conservation. Within the IBP's Conservation Section, one group propagated a universal systems approach to conservation with a centralized, technocratic management of nature and society by an elite group of independent scientific experts. Within IUCN, a second group based their notion of environmental expert roles on a more descriptive and local ecology of resource mapping as practiced by UNESCO. When the IBP came to an end in 1974, both groups' ecological philosophies played into the scientific framework underlying the MAB's World Network or Biosphere Reserves. The article argues that it is impossible to understand the course of conservation within the MAB without studying the dynamics and discourses between the two underlying expert groups and their respective visions for reforming conservation.

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Drawing on the concept of technological mediation, this article examines the spatial politics of observation technologies and associated practices that have been used to monitor the movement of migratory wildebeests in the Serengeti from the 1950s until the 2000s. It shows that key technologies, and the types of research collaborations they sustained, mediated notably different normative ideas about human–wildlife interaction and the sharing of space in and around protected areas. During the 1950s and 1960s, observations of animal migration were conducted by airplane. Direct observation was characterized by the study of movement of migratory ungulates, such as the wildebeest, and humans across space in real time. Aerial observations depended on a close cooperation between scientists and park authorities, and on the knowledge and observational skills of game wardens. The experience of the movement of animals and people in real time allowed, to some degree, for experimentation with forms of human land-use. During the 1970s, many small-scale and short-term projects shifted the research focus toward data recording by camera. Aerial photographs created supposedly complete spatial overviews of inhabitation, which supported interpretations of spatial conflicts between humans occupying the park’s surrounding areas and animal populations inside the park. From the 1980s onward, computer technology allowed for long-term calculations of past and future trends in population densities of individual species. The understanding of the wildebeest as a keystone species and the Serengeti as a baseline ecosystem turned communities of local pastoralists and agriculturalists into a future threat. As observation technologies are here to stay, it remains important to pay attention to technologies’ potential roles in creating additional distances between researchers and research subjects. Historical insights, such as the ones presented in this article, can help reflect on how various forms of remote sensing may mediate normative views on human–wildlife interactions and consequentially affect local livelihoods.

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