Fixing the ecosystem: Conservation, crisis and capital in Rwanda's Gishwati Forest.

Nathan Clay

doi:10.1177/2514848619826576

Abstract

Conservation-development projects are increasingly enacted across large expanses of land where human livelihoods hang in the balance. Recent initiatives–often called ‘landscape approaches’ or ‘ecosystem-based’ conservation–aim to achieve economic development and conservation goals through managing hybrid spaces. I argue that the landscape/ecosystem approach is a socioecological fix: an effort to resolve social-environmental crises through sinking capital (financial, natural, and social) into an imagined ecosystem. Rwanda’s Gishwati Forest has been the locus of diverse crises and fixes over the past 40 years, including an industrial forestry and dairy project, a refugee settlement, a privately managed chimpanzee sanctuary, a carbon sequestration platform, and, most recently, an “integrated silvo-pastoral conservation landscape.” This paper considers how these governance schemes have intersected with broader processes of agrarian change to generate crises that subsequent conservation/development projects then attempt to resolve. I demonstrate how visions for ecosystems privilege certain forms of governance around which imagined socioecological histories are mobilized to frame problems and legitimize certain solutions, technologies, and actors. The Gishwati ecosystem and its fixes are repeatedly defined through an imaginary of crisis and degradation that engenders large-scale landscape modification while foreclosing reflection about root causes of crises or how these might be addressed. Thus, even while conservation/development paradigms have shifted over the past 40 years (from separating people and nature to integrating them in conservation landscapes), this crisis-fix metabolism has consistently generated livelihood insecurity for the tens of thousands of people living in and around Gishwati. Imagining and enacting more just and inclusive social-environmental landscapes will require making space for diverse voices to define ecosystem form and function as well as addressing deeply rooted power imbalances that are at the heart of recurrent crises.

Highlights

In August 2014, the World Bank commenced its Landscape Approach to Forest Restoration and Conservation (LAFREC) project in the Gishwati region of western Rwanda
I narrate how 1980s paradigms emphasizing separate productive uses have morphed into a contemporary vision of an ‘‘integrated silvo-pastoral landscape’’ (World Bank, 2014) in which forest restoration and management activities are organized at the ecosystem level
This paper considers the claims of integrative multi-stakeholder management that supposedly set landscape approaches apart (Sayer et al, 2014) from earlier schemes of environmental governance and development that were based on more overtly binary models of society–environment interaction

Summary

Introduction

Introduction In August 2014, the World Bank commenced its Landscape Approach to Forest Restoration and Conservation (LAFREC) project in the Gishwati region of western Rwanda. I narrate how 1980s paradigms emphasizing separate productive uses (e.g. spatially segregating forestry from livestock grazing and converting forest to pasture in effort to enhance overall economic viability of the landscape) have morphed into a contemporary vision of an ‘‘integrated silvo-pastoral landscape’’ (World Bank, 2014) in which forest restoration and management activities are organized at the ecosystem level.

Results

Conclusion