Conservation Narratives Research Articles

Whose Threat Counts? Conservation Narratives in the Wakatobi National Park, Indonesia

The ongoing global decline of coral reefs and their associated fisheries highlights issues of governance, including contrasting interpretations of the marine environment, the drivers and agents of environmental degradation, and the appropriate actions to address these. It is therefore essential to understand the social practices of value articulation through which marine ecosystems and resources are assigned meaning and recognition. In this regard, narratives identifying 'which aspects of the environment should be made resilient', 'to what threats', and 'through which solutions' are particularly important. Such narratives may fundamentally alter marine governance by defining which knowledge counts, steering conservation activities toward certain goals, and assigning people with new identities. We explore these issues in the context of a marine national park in eastern Indonesia, where the key narratives revolve around values associated with high coral reef biodiversity. International and domestic conservation-oriented organisations promote a narrative describing the park as a success story exemplifying co-management and equality in decision-making. Furthermore, a narrative emphasising illegal fishing by outsiders creates an adversarial scenario that favours certain more powerful institutions and subsumes competing narratives emanating from disadvantaged ethnic minorities. We suggest that these narratives reflect critical issues of governance, including resource allocation, management practices, stakeholder relations, and influence conservation outcomes by favouring the protection of some species, ecosystems, and sites over others.

Conservation Narratives and Their Implications in the Coral Triangle Initiative

Conserving coral reefs, sustaining fisheries, and ensuring food security are multi-faceted challenges. Six nations in the Southeast Asia Coral Triangle have agreed to a region-wide framework to address these challenges through the Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security (CTI). Based on a review of documentation, selected discussions and ongoing work in the region, we offer an initial assessment of narratives influencing conservation practice in the CTI. Current efforts in the CTI are framed by a crisis narrative that emphasises the importance of maintaining critical ecosystems and baseline conditions. This narrative has a strong empirical basis but it can also exacerbate a dualistic view of people and nature. However, CTI documentation and programming also reflect a recognition of linked social-ecological change and the historical co-evolution of communities and coastal-marine systems. This emerging narrative places an emphasis on building resilience to change, rather than resisting change. We do not advocate here for a single narrative with which to frame policy responses in the CTI, but rather draw attention to the ways that mainstreaming of certain narratives will have material effects on initiatives and programmes promoted in this region of globally significant marine biodiversity.

Negotiating postcolonial legacies: shifting conservation narratives and residual colonial built heritage in Ireland

Where they evolve in contentious political contexts, conservation and heritage can be framed by competing priorities reflecting collective remembering, cultural politics and identities intertwined with the symbolic representation of the built environment. Drawing on postcolonial experiences in Ireland, this paper explores the shifting representations of built heritage over the post-independence era and the extent that a residual colonial legacy can perform a role in framing contemporary place-making processes. Empirically, we focus on representations emerging within contemporary ‘elite discourses’ - built heritage policy-makers, leading conservation practitioners and civil society conservation groups - to explore how they negotiate this postcolonial context. The research on which this article is based was partly funded by the Irish Research Council through the Graduate Research Education Programme.

Citizen Science and Greenspace Planning in the Rouge River Watershed

The Rouge Park is a large 46-km2 protected greenspace situated in one of Canada's largest urbanized regions, the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), an area that covers the Region of Halton, Region of Peel, Region of York, Region of Durham, and the City of Toronto. This article highlights the actions and participation of civil society groups working in the park and how they have been successful in utilizing citizen science and ecologically based arguments to legitimize their case for conservation and thus build broad public support for their goals. Using a typology of key environmental planning case studies relevant to the park, the article identifies three distinct ways civil society groups utilized scientific expertise to facilitate and enforce a conservation narrative. First they identified and utilized existing scientific reports, second they published their own reports/studies, and third they applied a hands-on approach and initiated community-based restoration and monitoring programmes. This article concludes that in community-level environmental controversies, science represents a powerful tool for civil society in the planning and land management regime in Ontario.

Social-Ecological Changes in a Quilombola Community in the Atlantic Forest of Southeastern Brazil.

Through a combined adaptive cycle and political ecology approach, this article explores how the Afro-Brazilian Quilombolas of Bombas, living inside the protected area of PETAR, respond to and shape social-ecological changes in the Atlantic Forest. Field data reveal that both environmental restrictions and social policies of state transfer payments and food packages have contributed to decreased engagement in agricultural practices, loss of traditional knowledge, and reduced agro-biodiversity. The claim to land rights based on a Quilombola identity and recent negotiations with forest authorities insinuate a shift of this trend. Contrary to dominant conservation narratives, the findings indicate that small-scale shifting cultivation practices by the Quilombolas have the potential to increase structural ecological complexity of the Atlantic Forest. The article therefore argues that legalization of settlement and subsistence activities is important not only for livelihood security and social cohesion of Bombas inhabitants, but also possibly for biodiversity conservation.

Indigenous Burning as Conservation Practice: Neotropical Savanna Recovery amid Agribusiness Deforestation in Central Brazil

International efforts to address climate change by reducing tropical deforestation increasingly rely on indigenous reserves as conservation units and indigenous peoples as strategic partners. Considered win-win situations where global conservation measures also contribute to cultural preservation, such alliances also frame indigenous peoples in diverse ecological settings with the responsibility to offset global carbon budgets through fire suppression based on the presumed positive value of non-alteration of tropical landscapes. Anthropogenic fire associated with indigenous ceremonial and collective hunting practices in the Neotropical savannas (cerrado) of Central Brazil is routinely represented in public and scientific conservation discourse as a cause of deforestation and increased CO2 emissions despite a lack of supporting evidence. We evaluate this claim for the Xavante people of Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Reserve, Brazil. Building upon 23 years of longitudinal interdisciplinary research in the area, we used multi-temporal spatial analyses to compare land cover change under indigenous and agribusiness management over the last four decades (1973–2010) and quantify the contemporary Xavante burning regime contributing to observed patterns based on a four year sample at the end of this sequence (2007–2010). The overall proportion of deforested land remained stable inside the reserve (0.6%) but increased sharply outside (1.5% to 26.0%). Vegetation recovery occurred where reserve boundary adjustments transferred lands previously deforested by agribusiness to indigenous management. Periodic traditional burning by the Xavante had a large spatial distribution but repeated burning in consecutive years was restricted. Our results suggest a need to reassess overreaching conservation narratives about the purported destructiveness of indigenous anthropogenic fire in the cerrado. The real challenge to conservation in the fire-adapted cerrado biome is the long-term sustainability of indigenous lands and other tropical conservation islands increasingly subsumed by agribusiness expansion rather than the localized subsistence practices of indigenous and other traditional peoples.

Wildlife Management in Tanzania: State Control, Rent Seeking and Community Resistance

ABSTRACTDespite a decade of rhetoric on community conservation, current trends in Tanzania reflect a disturbing process of reconsolidation of state control over wildlife resources and increased rent‐seeking behaviour, combined with dispossession of communities. Whereas the 1998 Wildlife Policy promoted community participation and local benefits, the subsequent policy of 2007 and the Wildlife Conservation Act of 2009 returned control over wildlife and over income from sport hunting and safari tourism to central government. These trends, which sometimes include the use of state violence and often take place in the name of ‘community‐based’ conservation, are not, however, occurring without resistance from communities. This article draws on in‐depth studies of wildlife management practices at three locations in northern Tanzania to illustrate these trends. The authors argue that this outcome is more than just the result of the neoliberalization of conservation. It reflects old patterns of state patrimony and rent seeking, combined with colonial narratives of conservation, all enhanced through neoliberal reforms of the past two decades. At the same time, much of the rhetoric of neoliberal reforms is being pushed back by the state in order to capture rent and interact with villagers in new and oppressive ways.

Ernest Oberholtzer and the art of boundary crossing: writing, life and the narratives of conservation and planning

Through an analysis of the various roles of narrative in the life and work of famed conservationist Ernest C. Oberholtzer (1884–1977), we explore the relations between life (as evolving autobiographical narrative), place identity, and environmental planning, and the place of literary and artistic discourses in the processes of mutual articulation one can observe there. We investigate the role of writing in his work and life, and the functions of narratives in a broader sense, and argue that Oberholtzer's remarkable identification with a self-created place narrative, and his exceptional narrative fluidity, both in autobiographical sense and in other communicative situations, made him not only an exquisite wilderness advocate but also a rich source of insights into the narrative nature of environmental planning.

Land beneficiaries as game farmers: conservation, land reform and the invention of the ‘community game farm’ in KwaZulu-Natal

Scholarship on post-apartheid land reform includes research on land claims made to formal protected areas, such as national parks and state game reserves. Little attention has however, been paid to the question of land restitution claims on private lands, on which a range of nominally ‘conservation-friendly’ land-uses (including commercial hunting) have taken place. This article traces the emergence of the ‘community game farm’ as a product of land reform processes affecting freehold land in the midlands of KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa. Two groups of land beneficiaries who were granted title to former privately owned game farms used for leisure hunting are studied in detail. The article shows that a range of state and private actors, as well as traditional authorities, have worked to ensure the continuation of the land under conservation or game farming after transfer. The central argument is that in this process, a generic narrative is imposed which works to conflate or deny the distinct historical identities of the beneficiary groups. The article raises questions about the real efficacy of land restitution in this context, as well as the appropriateness of a community-based conservation narrative when applied in the context of small farms such as those considered here.

Actors and strategies in translating global conservation narratives to Vietnam: An agency perspective

With the increasing influence of New Public Management, such narratives as payments for ecosystem services and ecological networks are gaining global popularity in natural resource management. Promoted by transnational actors, these narratives have been introduced in Vietnam and have inspired a number of projects. The ensuing politics of multi-level governance triggered conflict and cooperation in adversarial policy process and deserve greater attention from environmental policy scholars. In this paper we advance a framework to analyze such processes from an agency perspective and contend that policy actors engage in three types of strategies in their policy work: (1) scale-based strategies of seeking support across governance scales; (2) meaning-based strategies of linking narratives to other concepts and discourses; and (3) context- based strategies of engaging with the policy context at multiple sites of governance. We illustrate these strategies with examples from the Ba Be and Na Hang protected areas in Vietnam.

Narrating place, negotiating history: the politics of place in Land Between the Rivers

Conservation discourses in the last decade have witnessed a radical shift in the conceptualisation of nature. The imagery of a pristine nature has been replaced by a growing recognition of culture and place-based attachments as emerging frontiers of conservation. Yet, the complexities of place and culture call for a greater reflection on cultural approaches to natural resource management. In this paper, I argue that the cultural discourses in conservation policies are largely global in nature and conflict with a community's understanding of a local cultural tradition. The notion of the global closely relates to a global framing of an environmental problem that glosses over cultural specificities. On the other hand, local is defined here in materially specific terms that highlight the role of history in shaping environmental traditions. I examine these contradictory framings through a narrative of conservation, displacement, and cultural loss in a US rural community known as Land Between the Rivers.

Young sexual citizens: reimagining sex education as an essential form of civic engagement

Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) pose a significant threat to the health and well-being of populations worldwide, and to young people in particular. Des]pite empirical evidence that comprehensive sex education is an important tool for prevention, the legitimacy and content of sex education in schools continue to be challenged by conservative narratives within society. This paper argues that sex education should be re-imagined as a form of civic training for children and recognised as an important corollary to public health efforts aimed at reducing the rate of STIs. The author's claim builds on notions of sexual citizenship, which consider sexuality to be an essential aspect of citizenship and a form of civic engagement. Sexual citizenship can make three important contributions to the advancement of sex education. First, the model can lead to greater acceptance of the idea of sex education by challenging conservative notions about children and sexuality, which are at the root of the classic objections to sex education. Second, it can help shape the content of sex education by eliciting parallels between civic participation and sex education. Finally, by emphasising how sex education can address some of the social phenomena underlying the spread of STIs, the model can be used to facilitate the incorporation of sex education into public health agendas. Although the author uses sex education in Canada as the principal case study, the paradigm may be equally helpful in other countries.

Representations of economic crisis in contemporary Britain

The manner in which economic crises are represented plays a critical role in determining their political significance and the opportunities for reform that they create. This article analyses the representation of the contemporary crisis in the British print media. A primary crisis narrative focused upon the state's fiscal position was consolidated in the mainstream British press by the end of 2008. Debates on the reform of the financial system were relegated to a secondary position. In the right wing press the crisis effectively came to be portrayed as a product of the Labour government's profligacy, despite a lack of intellectual support for this proposition. In those media outlets more sympathetic to the Labour government the fiscal consequences of the crisis were analysed in isolation from any consideration of the causes of the crisis. The discursive context against which the 2010 general election took place ensured the election of a government with a mandate to focus on fiscal consolidation. The failure of the Labour party to advance a clear analysis of the crisis played an important role in enabling the dominance of Conservative narratives of the crisis focused upon public spending.

Speaking for the people: a conservative narrative of democracy

A Conservative accepts that democracy entails government by and (especially) for the people, but what constitutes the people is seen not in narrow but in expansive terms: the people are not confined to those who constitute a present transient majority but encompass rather past and future generations. Democracy is tempered by the need to avoid dictatorship of the masses, entrusting the task of governing to those chosen by the people and able to lead in interests of the people. Government entails a balance between accountability and autonomy, a balance delivered by the Westminster system of government, a system challenged by attempts at fundamental constitutional change.

Managing for local resilience: towards a strategic approach

The term resilience is increasingly being used to capture the challenges involved in managing in ‘hard times’. This article aims to provide one of the first empirical studies of the term’s application to local authority interventions around emergency planning and climate change: two areas in which resilience has been particularly emphasised in local policy making. Drawing upon research undertaken in the north east of England, the article considers how local managers have understood and applied the term, the extent to which it has been developed as a coherent policy agenda, and its strategic significance. In reframing the debate on resilience in terms of discourses of ‘recovery’ and ‘transformation’, the article examines how, in addition to informing policy realities on the ground, resilience is also a normative, politically laden term, within which conservative narratives of uncertainty, vulnerability and anxiety compete with a more radical focus on hope, adaptation and transformation. The study reveals concerns over the term’s longevity, tensions between the different interpretations of resilience, and the lack of a coherent strategic framework within which the different discourses on resilience could be considered and reconciled. However, the article also captures the growing importance of a resilience narrative that is seen to add value in a period of austerity, integrate key features of climate change adaptation and emergency planning, and act as a ‘strategic lynchpin’ in relation to other policy areas, such as economic resilience.

Climate Change Oppression: Media Production as the Practice of Freedom

Communities most vulnerable to climate change must educate themselves on how to adapt to the new challenges they face. The use of participatory media, especially video, can be an effective tool for doing so, allowing users to incorporate indigenous knowledge and create an alternative to the dominant, objectifying narratives of conservation and development. Following the methodology of educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, a program in community-based media, with an emphasis on social and environmental action, has the potential to empower the world’s oppressed against the challenges of the coming decades. Author’s Note Grady Walker grew up in Kathmandu, Nepal. He received his MA in Environmental Conservation Education from New York University, and has recently made films for the Red Cross in Africa. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Queensland’s Centre for Communication and Social Change.

Women’s Agency and Rituals in Mixed and Female Masonic Orders (review)

Reviewed by: Women’s Agency and Rituals in Mixed and Female Masonic Orders Amy Hale Keywords Freemasonry, co-masonry, Enlightenment, equality of the sexes, Annie Besant, Le Droit Humain Alexandra Heidle and Jan A.M. Snoek, Editors. Women’s Agency and Rituals in Mixed and Female Masonic Orders. Leiden: Brill, 2008, Pp. xvi + 436. The dominant popular (and sometimes academic) narrative of Freemasonry is that of a tightly maintained tradition, passed down from time immemorial, [End Page 227] by word of mouth, from man to man. However, the history of Freemasonry is rich and varied and the existence of women’s and mixed-gender lodges from the eighteenth century onward provides an alternative model of the ways in which Freemasonry as an institution has developed. As Jan Snoek notes in the preface, despite the conservative narratives within and surrounding Freemasonry, the traditions are actually dynamic and responsive to historical shifts, contexts, and localities. The language of “regular” and “irregular” is frequently used within Freemasonry to justify or legitimize particular branches; however, as Snoek rightly comments, in actuality there is no wrong Freemasonry, just unsuccessful Freemasonry, and throughout history there has been a lot of interesting Freemasonry that has included women. This book, edited by Alexandra Heidle and Jan Snoek demonstrates the interplay of the rise of speculative Freemasonry in the eighteenth century and the role of women in European society. We see here that, despite the attempts to limit Freemasonry to male practitioners, both women and men have resisted this exclusion with sometimes very interesting results, even if many of the experiments were relatively short-lived. This collection contains ten essays by many of the luminaries within the fast-growing field of Freemasonic studies. Most essays focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but there are some forays into the Co-Masonry of twentieth-century Europe. The introductory essay by Jan Snoek is worthy of mention in that it provides a lucid history of the inclusion of women into Freemasonry in French, wider Continental, and British traditions, providing useful terms and timelines that greatly assist the reader with the essays to follow. The first essay, “The Relationships of Androgynous Secret Orders with Freemasonry: Documents on the Ordre des Hermites de Bonne Humeur in Sacshen-Gotha (1739–1791)” by Bärbel Raschke, addresses the ways in which noblewomen in eighteenth-century Sacshen-Gotha used a paramasonic order, the Order of the Happy Hermits, to increase their level of social and political engagement while also challenging the rise of Freemasonry as an exclusively male institution. The second essay, “The Grand Lodge of Adoption” by Malcolm Davies, chronicles the short lifespan of the earliest mixed-gender Freemasonic lodge on record. It dovetails nicely with the third essay in the collection, “Maconnerie des Dames” from AndreasÖnnerfors, which provides detailed and exciting documentation regarding the proposed ritual system for a women’s order associated with the German Strict Observance. The degree to which this women’s order was actually realized is still unclear, but the organization, as evidenced by the extensive appendix, was quite well developed. [End Page 228] James Smith Allen’s, “Freemason Feminists” looks at the ways in which Co-Masonic and mixed Masonic lodges became loci for feminist activity in France, driven by the liberalism and universalism of Masonic values. Also on a feminist topic, “The ‘Women’s Question’ ” by Anton van de Sande is a study of Dutch Masonic periodicals from the second half of the nineteenth century examining views on women’s rights and their relationship to inclusion into Dutch Freemasonry. This discussion was apparently preempted by the establishment of Co-Masonry in Amsterdam in 1904. The next contribution, Henrik Bodgan’s “Women and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,” provides a short introduction to the fairly well known story of the prominent women of the Golden Dawn and the ways in which the Golden Dawn system envisioned spiritual equality of the genders. Women’s full inclusion in this initiatory order is clearly significant to the subject matter of the book, yet more direct connections with the history and ritual of Freemasonry would have been quite useful. Bernard Dat’s contribution, “Stretton’s Operative Masonry: Legacy or Forgery...

Queering Katrina: Gay Discourses of the Disaster in New Orleans

Within certain conservative narratives imposed upon the events of 2005, New Orleans has been demonized as a site promoting gay licentiousness and therefore meriting divine retribution. In queer narratives, New Orleans has been valorized as promoting that same licentiousness but lamented for having those hedonistic excesses tempered by the widespread destruction of the city. Especially in the latter scenario, there is a significant degree of nostalgia, an element that also marks other queer understandings of the city that focus not so much on the hedonism as on the day-to-day warp and woof of pre-hurricane gay communities. The main focus of this essay is on how, as gay communities have been reconfigured in the aftermath of the hurricane by temporary and permanent evacuations, job relocations, and other alterations, gay responses have continued to evince a range of emotions, including anger, bitterness, resignation, and optimism. This essay focusses on gay literary production responding directly to the hurricane to examine essays and poems published as Love, Bourbon Street: Reflections of New Orleans (2006) and Blanche Survives Katrina in FEMA Trailer Named Desire, Mark Sam Rosenthal's off-Broadway show structured around a parody of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire that, as a result of this structure, faced legal action instigated by the University of the South, owner of the intellectual rights to Williams's literary production. The collection and the play are sustained queer responses to Katrina's flooding of the city that showcase both the energizing and problematic aspects of these responses.

Some Reflections on ‘Life after Thirty’

More than thirty years have passed since the History Workshop (HW) was established in South Africa in 1977. Much has changed in these years. The 1970s was a conjuncture of struggle. In the universities a tradition of radical history had begun to take shape, and outside, workers and students movements were sweeping through the cities. Coming into being at a time of tumult, the identity of the HW became intimately connected to the battle against the apartheid regime. In the decades that followed, triennial conferences were mounted, efforts were made to understand the struggles of workers, explore popular culture and popular consciousness, and encourage local communities to write their own history. Inspired by Thompsonian social history and the pioneering efforts of the HW at Ruskin, historians set out to restore to the oppressed their agency, and give voice to those silenced by history. The consequence was a revolutionary transformation of South African historiography, a flowering of a vibrant new radical tradition, a displacement of earlier conservative and liberal narratives. By the mid-1990s the apartheid regime was gone, the social context that sustained the new history had changed, and many of the assumptions and categories that framed its projects were being debated. The HW has sought to face the challenges, broaden its projects, and re-invent itself in the new political context. This article suggests that this process of re-thinking needs to be deepened. The ideas that inform the projects of social history, local history, oral history, community history, or public history need to be subjected to critical scrutiny. A dialogic engagement with new critical traditions will be productive.

The Faint Footprint of Man: Representing Race, Place and Conservation on the Mozambique-South Africa Borderland

The integration of South Africa's existing Kruger National Park with Mozambique's newly-established Limpopo National Park signified an important milestone in the development of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. Marketed as an example of the African Renaissance-in-action, this move towards a transnational ‘mega-park’ has promised an enlightened approach to conservation and regional economic development. For Mozambique, the LNP is a highly visible post-war initiative, attracting much needed investment to a remote and under-developed part of the country. This article addresses the tensions created around people living within this new Park and considers how these tensions contribute towards shaping the LNP as a space of conservation. Specifically, it contrasts an official programme to promote ‘voluntary resettlement’ from the LNP—which represents local ‘communities’ not only as incompatible with the interests and intentions of conservation but also as fundamentally separable from it—with more historically entrenched local experiences and narratives of conservation. These narratives, drawn primarily from Mozambican migrants and refugees in South Africa, represent livelihoods and lifeworlds as intimately enmeshed in the historical development of conservation on the borderland. Relentless Mozambican intrusions into the KNP over more than a century asserted their place on this conservation landscape, albeit on terms that were profoundly alienating and marginalizing. The article argues that contested representations over belonging within this unfolding conservation regime are likely to reproduce local understandings of conservation in terms of continuities of racial politics and colonial expansion.