Land Rights, Biodiversity Conservation and Justice

Rethinking Parks and People

Sharlene Mollett, Thembela Kepe, Sharlene Mollett, Thembela Kepe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138217720
• eBook ISBN: 9781315439464
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Environmental Law
• Index: Law

In the context of sustainable development, recent land debates tend to construct two porous camps. On the one side, norms of land justice and their advocates dictate that people's rights to tenure security are tantamount and even sometimes key to successful conservation practice. On the other hand, biodiversity protection and conservation advocates, supported by global environmental organizations and states, remain committed to conservation strategies, steeped in genetics and biological sciences, working on behalf of a "global" mandate for biodiversity and climate change mitigation.

Land Rights, Biodiversity Conservation and Justice seeks to illuminate struggles for land and territory in the context of biodiversity conservation. This edited volume explores the particular ideologies, narratives and practices that are mobilized when the agendas of biodiversity conservation practice meet, clash, and blend with the demands for land and access and control of resources from people living in, and in close proximity to, parks.

The book maintains that, while biodiversity conservation is an important goal in a time where climate change is a real threat to human existence, the successful and just future of biodiversity conservation is contingent upon land tenure security for local people. The original research gathered together in this volume will be of considerable interest to researchers of development studies, political ecology, land rights, and conservation.

1Introduction

Land rights, biodiversity conservation and justice—rethinking parks and people

Sharlene Mollett and Thembela Kepe

In all these matters I would suggest a little more reverence for life, a little less straitjacketing of the future, a little more allowance for the unexpected—and a little less wishful thinking.

(Hirschmann 1971, 338, authors’ emphasis)

In the context of sustainable development, recent land debates tend to construct two porous camps. On the one side, norms of land justice and their advocates dictate that people’s rights to tenure security are tantamount and even sometimes key to successful conservation practice. On the other hand, biodiversity conservation advocates, supported by global environmental organizations and states, remain committed to conservation strategies, steeped in genetics and biological sciences, working on behalf of a “global” mandate for biodiversity and climate change mitigation (Redford 2011; Sandbrook et al. 2012). While we see these positions with different priorities, they are also entangled and complex (Mollett 2016; Igoe 2011). In this book we seek to illuminate struggles for land and territory inside and in close proximity to protected areas, or “parks.” Our use of the word “parks” reflects the myriad of protected area designs promoted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the different kinds of enclosures that exist beyond protected areas, such as carbon forests, payment for ecosystem programs, etc. Building on an array of insights from scholarship in political ecology, including green grabbing and land grabbing literatures, our interest lies in the kinds of power that are mobilized when biodiversity conservation practices meet, clash, and blend with the demands for land and access to and control of resources from people living in and close to “parks.” The chapters in this edited collection maintain that, while biodiversity conservation is an important goal in a time where climate change is a real threat to human existence, we can no longer ignore the underlying power relations that displace people and that re-entrench severe social inequalities unfolding in the context, and in the name of biodiversity conservation. We write with Hirschmann’s urging in mind and with “a little more reverence for life” (Hirschmann 1971, 338).

In this volume we acknowledge the role of global capitalism in the marginalization of people affected by biodiversity enclosures. However, our goal is to make visible other kinds of power that become mechanisms of land dispossession. We are particularly interested in how difference shapes the various justifications for land governance before, during, and after conservation. In this work we understand the notion of difference in terms of spatial imaginings and signifiers with their concomitant boundaries in the making, and as positionality, in reference to how race, gender, culture, class and national hierarchical differentiation mutually inform (in)justice vis-à-vis local people’s land tenure and control (Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Sundberg 2004). Combined, these chapters are attentive to multiple logics of class, race, culture, gender, and colonialism embedded in the practices and processes of biodiversity conservation and land rights distribution and the active mobilization and resistance against them. In light of these spatial struggles, this edited volume offers an urgent reminder about who is made to sacrifice in the name of sustainable development and biodiversity conservation. We argue that the practice of biodiversity conservation facilitates how elites, states, and inadvertently transnational corporations seize control of land from many communities whose racial and cultural identities and land use practices are already subjugated in national and international development priorities. We counter by proposing that climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation strategies are doomed to fail without respect, autonomy, and enforceable legal protections for the heterogeneous communities reliant on biodiverse landscapes, without which biodiverse “hot-spots” would not exist.

Political ecology of biodiversity conservation

In this volume we employ a political ecology approach to examine the logics, impacts, and practices of conservation and environmental protection. Our collective concern is with the way biodiversity conservation, supposedly designed to improve global conditions, is too often employed as a mechanism for elite control of resources and natures (Peet et al. 2010). Our insights draw from a genealogy of biodiversity conservation that is linked to international development’s concern with biological diversity and the rise of the concept vis-à-vis the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro, and its accompanying Convention on Biological Diversity. The aim, overwhelmingly emerging from scientific and policy circles, focused on transforming peoples’ attitudes so as to halt how some humans treat nature as a treasure of conquest as opposed to a collective responsibility for care (Escobar 2008). As Escobar maintains,

under this realization, the conservation of biodiversity became a tireless task, a mission to be carried out in and on behalf of the magic, sacrosanct kingdom of wilderness.… By putting a scientific spin on the crisis, conservation biologists purported to become the authoritative spokesperson for an entire movement to save nature, having as its fundamental goal the “preservation of intact ecosystems and biotic processes.”

(Takacs 1996, 79, cited in Escobar 2008, 139)

Indeed, as Redford (2011) agrees, conservation organizations largely ignore the politics and power embedded in conservation and the places where environmental protection takes place. Such organizations are seemingly more concerned with “science driven approaches” “based on biocentric values and assumptions, privileging natural science views of both problems and solutions” (Redford 2011, 325; Chapin 2004). While there has been more attention to politics from conservation organizations more recently, conservation policy still operates as though humans are fundamentally menaces to the other kinds of nature.

While Redford and others suggest this has opened up space to think of “humans as legitimate elements in nature and explicitly part of the solutions to the conservation problems,” many of the chapters argue that only certain humans get to play a role in conservation. Said differently, even in the designs of biodiversity conservation that claim to offer a more humanized form of protection—i.e., biosphere reserves, carbon markets, payments for ecosystem services—the overwhelming fact remains that local people are meant to sacrifice land control, food security, cultural traditions, and relations to nature on behalf of a global, affluent community that continues to rely on the “merchandising of biodiversity” “green developmentalism,” and market conservation “that leaves intact the underlying framework of economics and the market that is inimical to nature in the first place” (Escobar 2008, 143; Martinez Alier 1996; McAfee 1999).

In this volume we are not concerned with finding fault with biodiversity conservationists, but rather we seek to disclose the chains of explanations for the re-entrenchment of precarious social inequalities that are reproduced by biodiversity conservation mechanisms complicit in local peoples’ dispossession, dehumanization, and ongoing subjugation by states and elites. Nor do we assert that environmental protection is homogenous and always harmful. Rather, we insist that the consequences of protected area management relates to particular historical, cultural and political contingencies (Igoe 2011; West et al. 2006). While some of us in this volume are more concerned with the disclosure of these revelations and the multiple logics of power that inform them, others work toward some kind of “solution.” We as editors, however, adhere to the postcolonial political ecological mantra that any “solution” that does not name power in its multiple, intersecting and more than economic iterations and leaves colonial processes intact engenders “a facile dishonesty by suggesting that an easy way out of our immense difficulties lies right around the corner” (Wainwright 2008, 284). We suggest that change starts with thinking differently and thus, in this vein, we rethink the relations between parks and people.

For clarity

The case studies in this volume disclose the underlying ways difference informs justice around land and land tenure (in)security in the context of sustainable development and biodiversity protection strategies in the Global South. Seemingly the successful and just future of biodiversity conservation is contingent upon land tenure security for the people living therein. In the following section we briefly explain the book’s main themes as they punctuate political ecologies of conservation: justice, history, race, and land rights.

Justice

Justice is one of the most basic values determining the direction of daily human life, particularly how human beings relate to one another (Khakhulina 2015). Many struggles dealing with the plight of the poor and the marginalized tend to focus on justice as a social value that should be central to any positive social change. However, justice as a concept is elusive, often with multiple and contradictory meanings. At the most basic level, there are three conceptions of justice, which are not mutually exclusive. These include procedural justice, which is the application of the law according to prescribed principles and due process; redistributive and social justice, which focuses on fairness in the distribution of rewards, opportunities, and burdens in life; and retributive justice, which is about what is considered appropriate sanctions and punishments for violating certain agreed rules and regulations (Jary and Jary 1995; Rawls 1999; Robertson 2004). In the context of rethinking parks and people procedural justice reflects how transparency and fairness inform the processes through which land and natural resources are allocated, and how conflicts are resolved. A colonial legacy has meant that for many marginalized people procedural justice is elusive, and favors a select few. This of course often sets the stage for other kinds of injustices.

Our understanding of redistributive or social justice is informed by John Rawls’s (1999) framework of justice as fairness, instrumental in most contemporary notions of justice. Rawls’s major contribution is the principle of difference, where he argues that inequalities are justifiable if they are arranged to benefit the most disadvantaged people in a society. As a strong believer in equity, Rawls believes that justice needs to unfold in three stages, in a particular order: to secure equal basic liberties; then to secure fair equality of opportunity; and, finally, for social and economic inequalities to be arranged to benefit the most disadvantaged people. Even though we acknowledge that Rawls’s views are not necessarily widely accepted, we wish to point out again that many tensions that exist between land rights and biodiversity conservation are fundamentally about the failure of states, past and present, to uphold the principle of fairness without discriminating based on social difference.

The ways in which contemporary states fail to remedy injustices of the past to the satisfaction of the victims of those injustices is key to land conflicts. Atuahene (2007), for example, has argued for recognition of what she calls property-induced invisibility, in thinking about land justice, emphasizing the socially embedded nature of land, and that the loss of land during colonialism had dehumanizing effect on the victims, which brought about their invisibility, or what she also calls social death. In agreement with others (e.g., Andrews 2006), Atuahene believes that any restorative processes that fails to return the victim’s dignity in turn fails to advance true justice. Restoring land as a natural resource alone, she argues, is not enough; recognizing historical roots of those injustices must remain central (Osmani 2010).

History

The overlapping struggles over place and natures have histories. The colonial and nation-building histories from which these struggles emerge continue to shape their formations however contested (Stoler 2016). A focus on history in this volume means not taking for granted “the connectivities joining colonial pasts to ‘postcolonial’ presents” (Stoler 2016, 4) but being attentive to their mechanisms. Within political ecology, scholars make clear the salience of history. For Offen, historical analysis is significant to a political ecology of conservation in how “ ‘pristine’ landscapes are, in fact, anthropomorphized landscapes that often (politically) conceal their own human history—a history of violence, disease, demographic collapse, colonialism, migration and conceptual transformation” (Offen 2004, 26). Indeed. A historicization of place discloses the way parks are significant to the “formation of a national identity for the dominant settler culture, an identity forged through a mythologized encounter with nature” (Neumann 1998, 32). History helps disclose for some what others seek to conceal, particularly when such histories are “situated” (Peluso 2012, 80). To rethink parks and people, many chapters in this volume make visible how “history making practices often disguise exploitation and oppressive associations” (Peluso 2012, 80). Similarly, the way scholars draw upon histories both contemporary and long past is to “attend to the evasive history of empire that disappears so easily into other appellations and other, more available, contemporary terms” (Stoler 2013, 23). The social landscape upon which colonial power and mechanisms materially and imaginatively influence space are arranged by the “racial ontologies they called in to being, and by the cumulative historical deficiencies certain populations are seen to embody—and the ongoing threats to the body politic associated with them” (Stoler 2013, 23). To reveal these processe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: land rights, biodiversity conservation and justice—rethinking parks and people
• PART I Justice
• PART II Militarization, violence, and exclusion
• PART III Indigenous territorial struggles
• Index