From colonial fortresses to neoliberal landscapes in Northern Tanzania: a biopolitical ecology of wildlife conservation

Abstract

Drawing on critical debates in political ecology and biopolitics, the article develops a "biopolitical ecology of conservation" to study historical shifts in how human and nonhuman lives come to be valued in an asymmetric way. Tanzania and the so-called Tarangire-Manyara Ecosystem illustrate how these biopolitical shifts became entangled with conservation interventions and broader visions of development throughout colonial and postcolonial history. Colonial efforts to balance seemingly competing domains of human and nonhuman species through spatial separation gave way to the development of the post-colonial nation through the nurturing of its wildlife population. This shift from human-nonhuman incompatibility towards human dependency on wildlife and biodiversity conservation culminated in the contemporary biopolitical ecology and geography of landscape conservation. Landscape conservation seeks to entangle human and nonhuman species. Through conservation, human populations are rearranged and fixed in time and space to allow wildlife to roam free across unbounded spaces. This conservation governmentality is tied to global environmentalist concerns and political economies of neoliberal conservation, as well as to a domestic agenda of tourism-based economic growth. It secures land tenure for some, while imposing a biopolitical sacrifice on the rural population as a whole. This forecloses alternative rural futures for a land-dependent and increasingly land-deprived population.

A landscape for everyone: integrating rights-based and landscape governance approaches

“…Landscape approaches are considered by practitioners to be needed when governance is poor; in many cases, the political aspects are an overriding concern (Langston et al, 2019). Nonetheless, landscape © Intu Boedhihartono approaches may exacerbate existing politics rather than resolve them (Clay, 2016), reinforce colonial legacies, or attempt to shift to new conservation landscape values (Bluwstein, 2018).…”

Between dependence and deprivation: The interlocking nature of land alienation in Tanzania

“…These two paradigmatic regimes of conservationist land control have produced an extensive network of protected areas (Figure ). Since the late 1990s, conservation approaches in the Global South have morphed into what big international NGOs and their donors call landscape conservation, a claim to vast territories spanning different conservation interventions and protected area categories, ecosystems and habitats, people, villages, and communities (Bluwstein, forthcoming; Clay, ). In the following, we show how large parts of Tanzania's land are to different degrees taken out of local control and production through the advancement of different conservation regimes.…”

“…There are a few cases where local residents have chosen to create a WMA to protect their land rights against actual or perceived outsiders who may want to establish themselves in these villages (Bluwstein, forthcoming). Often the ones excluded are landless migrants searching for land, farmers in need to expand their activities but lacking inputs to intensify production, or urban or rural elites looking for capital investment opportunities.…”

“…Displacement reconfigures the gendered intrahousehold dynamics in complex ways, in many instances creating new burdens for women, but to some extent also offering opportunities to renegotiate entrenched gender roles (Brockington, ). Many parks and reserves have consolidated or expanded their existing territories in the past decades, often animated by the landscape vision of conservation NGOs and their donors (Bluwstein, forthcoming). With the introduction of GPS technology in the 2000s, several national parks have resurveyed their boundaries, which led to new claims against adjacent villages (Boerstra, ; Sachedina, ).…”

Gentrifying the African Landscape: The Performance and Powers of for-Profit Conservation on Southern Kenya’s Conservancy Frontier

“…Although widely marketed as a "triple win" approach to conservation for local communities, biodiversity, and a broader transition to a green economy (U.S. Agency for International Development [USAID] 2017), the rise of similar private or nonstate conservation areas has recently been critically examined by political ecologists and human geographers (Goldman 2003;Sullivan 2003;Igoe and Croucher 2007;Benjaminsen et al 2013;Adams, Hodge, and Sandbrook 2014;Bersaglio and Cleaver 2018;Bluwstein 2018). In Kenya, much of the corresponding media and scholarly analysis has been preoccupied with alleged pastoralist "invasions" of European-managed conservancies in Laikipia County, as well as high-profile incidents such as the shooting of Kuki Gallman, a conservationist and long-standing member of Kenya's European settler community (Fox 2018).…”