Roderick P. Neumann

Primitive Ideas: Protected Area Buffer Zones and the Politics of Land in Africa

This article critically evaluates participatory, integrated conservation and development programmes in Africa, focusing on protected area buffer zones. I argue that, despite the emphasis on participation and benefit‐sharing, many of the new projects replicate more coercive forms of conservation practice and often constitute an expansion of state authority into remote rural areas. I suggest that the reasons for this state of affairs can be traced in part to the persistence in conservation interventions of Western ideas and images of the Other. These stereotypes result in misguided assumptions in conservation programmes which have important implications for the politics of land in buffer zone communities.

Ways of Seeing Africa: Colonial Recasting of African Society and Landscape in Serengeti National Park

1B ny analysis of colonialism in Africa which focuses solely on the material aspects of military subjugation, resource extraction, and so on is intellectually limited. Such a focus neglects the less visible yet fundamental and pervasive ideologies which underlie and are reflected in material processes. In Culture and imperialism, Edward Said recently wrote, ’Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations’.’ These ideological formations, which include a complex of concepts such as racial superiority and national destiny, constituted a ’European’ consciousness which shaped and was simultaneously shaped by the colonial project in Africa. As ethnographers John and Jean Comaroff cogently explain, the European colonizers imposed a new set of values, ideals and beliefs upon the conquered peoples, thereby colonizing ’their consciousness with the ... axioms and aesthetics, of an alien culture’.2 Europeans, in short, sought to impose on Africans ’a particular way of seeing and being’.s 3

Political ecology II: theorizing region

In this second of three reports exploring the incorporation of human geography theory within political ecology I focus on regions. I review how regions are theorized in human geography and conclude that political ecologists have used the concept inconsistently. I suggest that three trajectories in recent studies offer possibilities for a more rigorous theorization of regions within political ecology: (1) work employing theorizations of the social production of space and the co-constitution of nature, space, and society; (2) engagements with the political economy of natural resources literature, especially resource conflict; and (3) work linking historical materialist-oriented ‘new’ regional geography with discourse theory.

Land- use and threats to parks in the neotropics

The ecological consequences of contemporary land-use in the neotropics have important influences on national park management in the region. Historical patterns suggest that major land-use changes have occurred regularly, and that these patterns have recently intensified. Is there a relationship between specific land-uses and specific threats to protected areas? Can this relationship be detected in a population of parks? In a survey of managers of 183 national parks, 122 returned questionnaires from 19 countries in the neotropics. We found that a range of land-uses, from livestock grazing to quarrying, are occurring in and around the parks. The results of our statistical analysis indicate that many of these activities are associated with specific threats to park resources: for example, poaching for subsistence was statistically associated with each of the ten most-reported threats. We offer two suggestions for improving our understanding of environmental degradation within parks. First, that research and park management be expanded to acquire a regional focus, namely that the land-transforming activities which threaten park resources can best be understood by incorporating the regional-social and political-economic contexts in the analysis. Second, that the influences of the global economic system be increasingly considered in conceptual frameworks of conservation biology.

Churchill and Roosevelt in Africa: Performing and Writing Landscapes of Race, Empire, and Nation

During the months from October 1907 through March 1910, first Winston Churchill and then Theodore Roosevelt traveled through British East Africa on nearly identical routes. Both published a series of magazine articles and widely read books from their travels. At that time both were not only politicians but also popular authors who wrote and spoke on race, nation, and empire, and their travel accounts reflect these interests. This article analyzes the materials (visual, textual, published, and archival) produced from these travels to achieve two overarching objectives. One goal is to use these materials to understand how embodied encounters with and representations of imperial landscapes interact in mediating the performance of national and racial subjectivities. A second, more explicitly theoretical, purpose is to engage with the current “landscape debate” regarding representational and nonrepresentational approaches. Landscapes dual meaning as domain and scenery creates tension that can be productively explored through engagement with both representational and nonrepresentational approaches. I investigate how the tension between dwelling and scenery manifests in specific ways among different subjects in different contexts and reflect on what this might mean for integrating representational and nonrepresentational approaches to landscape.

Transforming the Frontier: Peace Parks and the Politics of Neoliberal Conservation in Southern Africa

Peace parks, transfrontier protected areas, and other such transboundary conservation territories have been around for decades. In recent years, however, these reterritorializing projects have become all the rage within the global conservation-industrial complex and their numbers have increased rapidly. Although proponents cautiously downplay peace parks as a panacea, any scheme that purportedly saves biodiversity, reunites fragmented ecosystems, alleviates poverty, empowers rural communities, soothes an anxious urban bourgeoisie, and heals the wounds of international conflict comes pretty darn close to one. Such win–win–win peace park discourse constitutes the “bubble of neoliberal conservation,” in author Bram Büscher’s phrase. Transforming the Frontier draws the reader into a world where conservation discourse is reified and magically transcendent of the actual material effects associated with the park project. Indeed, one of Buscher’s central revelations is how the transboundary project has been wholly formed within the logic of neoliberal capitalism, where all desires are fulfilled in representation, no matter how contradictory they might be in practice. As he makes clear, this is a familiar modern phenomenon. Capitalism’s distinctive traits have long included hucksterism, boosterism, and a tenuous relationship between representation and reality. Don Draper would feel comfortably at home in the world of neoliberal conservation.