Diffusing Conservation to Post-Colonial Africa

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ABSTRACT In 1961, the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) and four other U.S. Interior Department agencies began to diffuse America’s protected-area policies and practices to recently independent African states through the “African Student Program” (ASP). Employing an historical methodology with archival materials, this article argues that the ASP was a path-dependent program that promoted the application of Western management, science, and engineering to natural resource exploitation. Its utilitarian conservation was more closely associated with the Interior Department’s four other land-management agencies than with the NPS. Consequently, while the ASP was a distant variant to the widely discussed “Yellowstone model,” it was comparable to that of Africa’s former colonizers. The NPS largely organized 1961’s ASP, but summer 1965 better represents the program with its extensive planning and the inclusion of many non-NPS philosophies, sites, and personnel. The ASP’s record offers little evidence that the emerging science of ecology shaped the curriculum or that much thoughtfulness was shown about the places and cultures of its participants’ homelands. By contrast, contemporaneous but more ecologically and place-informed programs by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) stepped away from colonial practices and policies concerning African protected areas. Where the ASP was conservative in its program, the IUCN offered a newer path.