Abstract
Various critiques of transboundary natural resource governance in southern Africa have questioned the efficacy and social equity dimensions of prevailing strategies for protecting transnational ecosystems, highlighting the importance of sociological research on the potentially ‘other-ing’ impacts of mainstream conservation policy discourse. We draw on research in the Chimanimani Trans-Frontier Conservation Area (TFCA) on both sides of the Zimbabwe–Mozambique border, scrutinizing simplifications inherent in terms such as “illegal foreigners” that obfuscate histories and contemporary realities of cross-border social ties. Engaging perspectives of park authorities and chiefs as well as people who have taken up artisanal mining, we explore two related themes—how ‘belonging’ is negotiated as well as how conservation agendas are instrumentalized by state and non-state actors. Bringing attention to gaps between policy discourses surrounding TFCAs and territorialized practices of exclusion, the article concludes by calling for greater attention to the mutating significance of colonially established boundaries as well as the dynamic influences of social networks in borderland spaces.
Highlights
Transboundary natural resource management (TBNRM) has for many years been a prominent theme in southern Africa, as a notion that seeks to catalyze common strategies for protecting transnational ecosystems and promoting sound development (Wolmer 2003; Hanks 2003; Buscher 2013)
In this article we explore competing claims and social relations in the Chimanimani Trans-frontier Conservation Area (TFCA) along the Zimbabwe– Mozambique border, where migration has long been a strategy in response to economic and political-induced displacements
We focus in this study on two related themes—how notions of ‘foreignness’ and ‘belonging’ are conceived and contested in mining spaces in the Chimanimani Trans-Frontier Conservation Area (TFCA) as well as how conservation agendas are instrumentalised by state and non-state actors
Summary
Transboundary natural resource management (TBNRM) has for many years been a prominent theme in southern Africa, as a notion that seeks to catalyze common strategies for protecting transnational ecosystems and promoting sound development (Wolmer 2003; Hanks 2003; Buscher 2013). The above struggles by migrant artisanal miners in the region are indicative of exclusionary practices by state actors who invoke notions of citizenship to address perceived threats to the protection of the transfrontier conservation zone Such restrictive measures have been undermining the transboundary objectives espoused by the state ostensibly aiming to both reunite communities divided by borders and allow mobile peoples to move across their traditional territories more . In Mozambique, a World Bank Project in the Chimanimani National Reserve attempted to shift communities in the buffer zone away from artisanal mining (in 2015), in keeping with one of the central goals of the TFCA, namely to promote sustainability by championing conservation agriculture as an alternative livelihood.. Contradictory to the initial notion that TFCAs could become opportunities for equitable local development, the persistence of the above tensions reflect how the real-world uses of notions of transfrontier conservation have led to forms of environmentalism that are simultaneously ineffective in ecological terms and perceived as unjust
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