1st Edition
Land Rights, Biodiversity Conservation and Justice Rethinking Parks and People
In the context of sustainable development, recent land debates tend to construct two porous camps. On the one side, norms of land justice and their advocates dictate that people’s rights to tenure security are tantamount and even sometimes key to successful conservation practice. On the other hand, biodiversity protection and conservation advocates, supported by global environmental organizations and states, remain committed to conservation strategies, steeped in genetics and biological sciences, working on behalf of a "global" mandate for biodiversity and climate change mitigation.
Land Rights, Biodiversity Conservation and Justice seeks to illuminate struggles for land and territory in the context of biodiversity conservation. This edited volume explores the particular ideologies, narratives and practices that are mobilized when the agendas of biodiversity conservation practice meet, clash, and blend with the demands for land and access and control of resources from people living in, and in close proximity to, parks.
The book maintains that, while biodiversity conservation is an important goal in a time where climate change is a real threat to human existence, the successful and just future of biodiversity conservation is contingent upon land tenure security for local people. The original research gathered together in this volume will be of considerable interest to researchers of development studies, political ecology, land rights, and conservation.
1. Introduction: Land Rights, Biodiversity Conservation and Justice: Rethinking Parks and People Sharlene Mollett and Thembela Kepe Part 1: Justice 2. Meanings, Alliances and the State in Tensions over Land Rights and Conservation in South Africa Thembela Kepe 3. The promise and limit of environmental justice through land restitution in protected areas in South Africa Maano Ramutsindela and Medupi Shabangu Part 2: Militarization, Violence and Exclusion 4. Deploying Difference: Security threat narratives and state displacement from protected areas Elizabeth Lunstrum and Megan Ybarra 5. Green Violence: Market-Driven Conservation and the Re-Foreignization of Space in Laikipia, Kenya Brock Bersaglio 6. Elusive Space: Peasants and resource politics in the Colombian Caribbean Diana Ojeda and María Camila González 7. "When Land Becomes Gold": Changing Political Ecology of the Commons in a Rural-Urban frontier Shubhra Gururani Part 3: Indigenous Territorial Struggles 8. Indigeneity, alternative development and conservation: political ecology of forest and land control in Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh Khairul Chowdhury 9. Wapichan Wiizi: Conservation Politics in the Rupununi (Guyana) Katherine MacDonald 10. Science as friend and foe: the ‘technologies of humility’ in the changing relationship to science in community forest debates in Thailand Vanessa Lamb and Robin Roth 11. The Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve: A postcolonial feminist reading of violence and Miskito territorial struggles in Honduras Sharlene Mollett
Biography
Sharlene Mollett is an assistant professor in the Centre for Critical Development Studies and the Department of Human Geography Department at the University of Toronto, Canada.
Thembela Kepe is a professor in the Department of Geography, and the Centre for Critical Development Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada.
"The subtitle of Sharlene Mollett and Thembela Kepe’s admirably, coherent and tightly argued new volume, Land Rights, Biodiversity Conservation and Justice is ‘Rethinking Parks and People’. The contributors’ multidisciplinary approach, broadly oriented within political ecology, places environmentalist justifications for forced removals and the extrajudicial killings of ‘poachers’ in stark relief."
- Scott Burnett, South African Journal of International Affairs
