Creating ecotourism territories: Environmentalities in Tanzania’s community-based conservation

Bluwstein, Jevgeniy (2017). Creating ecotourism territories: Environmentalities in Tanzania’s community-based conservation. Geoforum, 83, pp. 101-113. Elsevier 10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.04.009

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This paper explores territorial struggles around ecotourism in community-based conservation in wildlife-rich Northern Tanzania. At the centre of analysis are two emblematic and distinctly different ecotourism business models that rely on a particular territorialization of property relations and resource control: one model is based on land sharing with local communities and villages, while the other relies on the appropriation of large parts of village land for exclusive access and control. Conceptually engaging critical geography debates on internal territorialization with a poststructuralist political ecology inspired by the framework of multiple environmentalities, the paper shows how ecotourism companies employ different techniques of government to secure business-friendly environments and territories in neoliberal conservation. Different business models underpin different processes of territorialization that in turn produce different modes of engagements and regimes of rule and authority. While the case of ecotourism through land sharing reinforces village land rights through a neoliberal environmentality, ecotourism through land appropriation illustrates how neoliberal, sovereign and truth environmentalities are put to work to facilitate the re-territorialization of property relations and resource control to undermine land rights of an entire village or an ethnic minority.

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