Abstract
In attempts to reconcile conservation and development for poverty alleviation by establishing protected areas, economic values of nature and compensation for loss of access to resources are often prioritized over cultural and personal values. Additionally, conservation interventions in local communities are often hindered by contested visions of sustainability. We explore the utility of place meanings to unpack diverse local interests by examining an intervention that proposed to establish a fenced protected area in a community on the Wild Coast, South Africa. We describe the narratives that argue for or against the project and how they make use of the place meanings attributed to parts of the landscape, including forest, communal grazing land and plantations. We then examine the coalitions behind narratives: groups of actors who share the meanings and constructs of the problem and who employ these for a particular strategy. This allows us to map the negotiation process, and understand how community dissent influences the project. We find that a focus on economic benefits from protected areas neglects alternative meanings, e.g. cultural and spiritual value of forests as well as potential alternative pathways for development such as investing in small-scale agriculture. Our analysis reveals the tension that exists in the ‘win–win’ discourse of conservation between the rhetoric of sustainable resource use and co-management as well as a trend back towards ‘fortress conservation’. A community counter-narrative is successful in stalling the project which illustrates the importance of considering the plurality of meanings for interventions to be sustainable in the long term.
Highlights
There is a long-standing debate about how to align conservation of biodiversity with poverty alleviation and development in communities (Adams et al 2004; Wells and McShane 2004)
In the first part of the results, we summarize the different local narratives about the proposed conservation intervention and the storylines used to attribute meaning to places, with focus on how they were used to negotiate the project [for further details, see Masterson et al (2017b) which analyses the heterogeneity of place meanings and their links to landscape complexity]
We interviewed three central actors in the provincial conservation department; four non-local amaXhosa employees of the provincial Forestry Department who were stationed at or visited the reserve; three of the twelve community forestry guards employed by the project; three project staff engaged with the community primarily through an elected community committee; and six of the 21 members of the community Participatory Forestry Management Committee (PFMC)
Summary
There is a long-standing debate about how to align conservation of biodiversity with poverty alleviation and development in communities (Adams et al 2004; Wells and McShane 2004). Interventions to establish reserves or parks for biodiversity and collaborate with local communities to manage these often attempt to reconcile conservation objectives with local livelihoods and economic concerns, for example, through economic compensation for loss of access to natural resources or investments in income-generating activities associated with ecotourism (see Mangome and Fabricius 2004; Ramutsindela 2007). These community conservation interventions are often framed as ‘win–win’ opportunities with ecological and socio-economic benefits (Christensen 2004; Chaigneau and Brown 2016). Even in the literature that is quite critical about protected areas as the prevalent model for conservation interventions in southern Africa (Brockington 2002; Kepe 2008; Ntshona et al 2010), the diversity of community interests and perspectives is often mentioned, but seldom demonstrated or discussed in detail
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