Biopolitical Landscapes. Governing People and Spaces through Conservation in Tanzania

Bluwstein, Jevgeniy (2018). Biopolitical Landscapes. Governing People and Spaces through Conservation in Tanzania (Unpublished). (Dissertation, University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Science, Department of Food and Resource Economics)

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Conservation and rural development are at an impasse in sub-Saharan Africa. Protected areas attract global tourism and generate foreign exchange, while rural people living around parks and reserves continue to be dependent on land and land-based resources for their livelihoods. At this impasse, conservation professionals are reconfiguring conservation interventions to protect wildlife beyond the boundaries of parks and reserves to ensure its survival as a genetically diverse population. This attempt to rescale wildlife conservation from protected area management towards ecosystem management has been coined ‘landscape conservation’. In the last years, conservation through the landscape approach has gained remarkable traction in academic and policy debates, donor and NGO circles, and on-the-ground initiatives. ‘Landscape conservation’ seems to be a new depoliticizing buzzword, similar to ‘sustainable development’ and ‘good governance’. This thesis offers a critical corrective by interrogating the biopolitical ecology of landscape conservation. Drawing on the analytic of governmentality, I conceptualize landscape conservation initiatives as biopolitical projects of human population management and control to enable wildlife to roam free across unbounded spaces. I show how - underpinned by a biopolitical rationality of wildlife being under threat by human activities - rural livelihoods are problematized by state- and non-state conservation authorities as incompatible with conservation objectives, unless human behaviour and subjectivities are changed, and rural livelihoods are fixed in time and space. Ultimately, this thesis demonstrates that biopolitical landscapes advance an asymmetric valuation of human and nonhuman lives, rendering wildlife worthy of protection and care, while demanding from rural people a sacrifice of their present and future needs and aspirations. Thus, instead of working towards an overcoming of the conservation and rural development impasse, landscape conservation intensifies it.

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