Connor Joseph Cavanagh

Guerrilla agriculture? A biopolitical guide to illicit cultivation within an IUCN Category II protected area

Protected areas now encompass nearly 13 percent of Earths terrestrial surface. Crucially, such protection often denotes exclusion – of farmers, of pastoralists and of forest-dwelling people. Engaging with the biopolitical implications of these displacements, this paper explores the emergence of an increasingly widespread type of resistance to conservation in the developing world: guerrilla agriculture, or the illicit cultivation of food within spaces zoned exclusively for the preservation of nonhuman life. In doing so, it undertakes a comparative analysis of three groups of farmers at Mount Elgon, Uganda, which support an overarching strategy of illegal cultivation with a variety of nonviolent, militant, discursive and formal-legal tactics. Far from passive victims of global economic and environmental change, we demonstrate how the struggles of farmers at Mount Elgon are frequently effective at carving out spaces of relative autonomy from both conservationists and the Ugandan state apparatus.

Biopolitics, Environmental Change, and Development Studies

This article proposes a Foucaultian, yet more-than-human, conceptual framework for scholars of both international development and biopolitics in our current historical–geographical conjuncture: the ostensibly nascent Anthropocene. Under these conditions, it is argued that biopower operates across three primary axes: first, between differently ‘racialized’ populations of humans; second, between asymmetrically valued populations of humans and nonhumans; and, third, between humans, our vital support systems, and various types of emergent biosecurity threats. Indeed, one can observe biopower at work in governmental programmes to encourage specific forms of environmental citizenship, or, alternatively, to ensure the conservation of certain ‘charismatic megafauna’ at the expense of marginal human communities. In addition, emerging campaigns to identify and contain both harmful pathogens and their vector species constitute a third axis of human–nonhuman–nonhuman biopolitics, wherein the international community increasingly seeks to eliminate or contain life-forms that threaten both human communities and the ecological systems from which we derive our prosperity. In short, each of these sets of interventions proposes a governmental vision for the forms of life that states and development institutions can and should support, while implicitly approving that others may be ‘let die’. Suggesting that these are the parameters of the empirical problematic with which a properly (bio)political approach to development studies must engage, the article concludes with a further elucidation of these arguments in relation to four ‘sectoral impacts’ of environmental change that the World Bank has recently identified: (i) agriculture, (ii) water resources, (iii) ecosystem services, and (iv) emerging infectious diseases.

The Political Economy of Conservation at Mount Elgon, Uganda: Between Local Deprivation, Regional Sustainability, and Global Public Goods

This paper presents a case study from Mount Elgon National Park, Uganda, examining and deepening an understanding of direct incomes and costs of conservation for local people close to protected areas. In the early 1990s, collaborative arrangements were introduced to Mount Elgon National Park to improve people-park relations and enhance rural livelihoods after a period of violent evictions and severe resource access restrictions. In areas with such arrangements – including resource access agreements, Taungya farming, and beekeeping schemes – we observe a marginal increase in annual incomes for involved households. Other incomes accrue from tourism revenue sharing schemes, a community revolving fund, and payments for carbon sequestration. However, these incomes are economically marginal (1.2% of household income), unevenly distributed and instrumentally used to reward compliance with park regulations. They do not necessarily accrue to those incurring costs due to eviction and exclusion, crop raiding, resource access restrictions and conflicts. By contrast, costs constitute at least 20.5 % of total household incomes, making it difficult to see how conservation, poverty alleviation and development can be locally reconciled if local populations continue to bear the economic brunt of conservation. We recommend a shift in policy towards donor and state responsibility for compensating costs on a relevant scale. Such a shift would be an important step towards a more substantive rights-based model of conservation, and would enhance the legitimacy of protected area management in the context of both extreme poverty and natural resource dependence.

Resilience, class, and the antifragility of capital

Abstract Critical scholarship on the concept of resilience has so far eluded synthesis with that on the concept of antifragility, or the ways in which diverse entities, organisms and complex systems may benefit from disorder. Yet this distinction is crucial for understanding both the overarching political and ecological stakes of our contemporary historical-geographical moment: the ostensibly nascent Anthropocene. Indeed, whilst ecologists may be perfectly correct to empirically describe ecosystems as exhibiting resilience, attempts to extend this signifier to intertwined ecological and political-economic phenomena elide a politics of both articulation and frequent contradiction between resilient ecologies and antifragile patterns of capital accumulation. Examining the latter, in particular, I reflect on the politics of class in what we might call moments of capital’s ‘opening’, which complement well-known moments of the ‘stretching’ and ‘deepening’ of marketisation and commodification. In short, such moments speak directly to the ways in which new opportunities for compounding growth are synthetically emergent precisely from the social and ecological crises of capitalism themselves. This is not to say, of course, that antifragility equates with omnipotence; only that the seeds of capital’s destruction must be consciously planted, cultivated and harvested with extreme prejudice. If our pursuit of resilience is to be just as well as sustainable, in other words, it must be revolutionary rather than merely transformative.

Anthropos into humanitas: Civilizing violence, scientific forestry, and the ‘Dorobo question’ in eastern Africa:

Early interactions between state administrators and forest-dwelling communities in eastern Africa yield significant insight into colonial attempts to grapple with difference across hierarchically conceptualized ‘races’, classes, tribes, and radically alternative livelihoods. In particular, uncertainties related to the governance of forest-dwellers resulted in a problematic known as the ‘Dorobo question’ in Kenya Colony, the former word being a corruption of the Maasai term for the poor, the sinful – and hence – the cattle-less. Drawing upon archival research in Kenya and the United Kingdom, I argue that halting attempts to govern such communities illuminate an historically and geographically specific dimension of late imperial Britain’s apparently ‘liberal’ biopolitics, which entailed not the ‘abandonment’ of populations, per se, but rather the elimination and subsequent transformation of livelihoods, ontologies, and sustainablities perceived as fiscally barren or otherwise of little use to the colonial state. Far from being resolved, however, the afterlives of these logics of elimination highlight the stakes of contemporary struggles over eastern African forests, and particularly so in the context of an emergent transition to ostensibly ‘green’ forms of capitalism in the region.

Land, Natural Resources and the State in Kenya’s Second Republic

Across the African continent, various rural populations are currently embroiled in a wide range of struggles that foreground rights of access, control, and ownership of land and natural resources. Investigating such struggles in the Kenyan context, this chapter examines the provisions of the 2010 constitution that formally seek to elevate collective forms of land and resource tenure to a status legally equivalent to that enjoyed by their public and private counterparts. In doing so, the substance of these provisions is juxtaposed with ongoing challenges to their implementation. Resultant implications of these challenges are examined for the devolution process, the fate of a new tenure category of ‘community land’, and related institutional reforms for access to and ownership of other natural resources.

Enclosure, dispossession, and the green economy: new contours of internal displacement in Liberia and Sierra Leone?

Abstract Through a review of recent writings in political ecology and agrarian studies, this paper appraises the potential for emerging forms of ‘green economy’ initiatives to catalyze new forms of internal displacement in West Africa, with specific emphasis on the postwar contexts of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Following the International Committee of the Red Cross’ Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, the primary drivers of forced migration are conventionally thought to include some combination of civil war, ostensibly ‘ethnic’ strife or cleansing, development-induced migration, or allegedly ‘natural’ disasters. However, land acquisitions for both conservation and commercial agriculture seem poised to constitute an important additional driver of internal displacement, threatening to map onto the unresolved legacies of these previous instances of forced migration in both Liberia and Sierra Leone. Drawing lessons from the role of agrarian grievances in each country’s history of civil conflict, in particular, I explore the ways in which such forms of displacement may pose clear and present dangers to the very peacebuilding efforts that proponents of a green economy transition in the Mano River region claim to support.