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"Goldman, Mara"
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Beyond payments for ecosystem services: considerations of trust, livelihoods and tenure security in community-based conservation projects
In the search for successful community-based conservation models there has been a substantial focus on payment for ecosystem services. Such payments are measurable inputs that are often associated with conservation success. A closer look suggests a more complex, historically and culturally contingent picture. We argue that a focus on payment for ecosystem services as a defining factor for success in community conservation risks overlooking other, more significant processes. In particular, we argue for the importance of (1) tenure and livelihood security and (2) relations of trust, communication and respect. We draw on case studies from East Africa, but the findings are relevant for global community-based conservation endeavours.
Journal Article
Strangers in Their Own Land
Despite dramatic transformations in conservation rhetoric regarding local people, indigenous rights, and community-oriented approaches, conservation in many places in Tanzania today continues to infringe on human rights. This happens through the exclusion of local people as knowledgeable active participants in management, policy formation, and decision-making processes in land that ‘belongs’ to them and on which their livelihoods depend. In this paper, I focus on a relatively new conservation area designed on the Conservation Trust Model—Manyara Ranch in Monduli district in northern Tanzania. I present this case as a conservation opportunity lost, where local Maasai who were initially interested in utilising the area for conservation, have come to resent and disrespect the conservation status of the area, after having lost it from their ownership and control. I illustrate how the denial of Maasai memories, knowledge, and management practices in Manyara Ranch threaten the future viability of the place both for conservation and for Maasai use. The paper contributes to a growing literature as well as a set of concerns regarding the relationship between conservation and human rights.
Journal Article
Exploring multiple ontologies of drought in agro-pastoral regions of Northern Tanzania: a topological approach
There has been increased focus within the human dimensions of climate change on understanding the complex and multiple ways of 'knowing' climate. While these discussions are important in recognising different ways of knowing the climate and climate change processes already underway, we argue that this epistemological approach is limited and challenging. It begins with an assumption that there is one world (climate) out there that can just be known differently, and that knowledge can be isolated from ways of being and acting in the world. This often results in a distilling of complex knowledge practices into information for the purposes of integration. Drawing from a material-semiotic approach from Science and Technology Studies (STS), we propose a shift of focus to ontology, with an emphasis on the enactment of knowledge and reality (climate) simultaneously. We present ethnographic data from two drought events (2008/2009 and 2010/2011) among Maasai pastoralists in Northern Tanzania in East Africa to illustrate the value of such an approach, using multiple topologies (regional, network, fluid) for thinking through and following multiple enactments of drought in practice.
Journal Article
Women's stories and knowledge of wildlife and conservation practice in northern Tanzania and South India
Around the world, Indigenous peoples have stories about wildlife that reflect knowledge and feelings about animals and their relationship to humans. Different people's experiences speak to the variety of interactions people have with animals in the spaces where humans and non-human animals live and interact. These stories are often told by women, reflecting the ways in which gender mediates human–environment relations. Yet gendered differences in knowledge and experience are rarely addressed in wildlife conservation research and action. Even community-based conservation efforts often ignore or marginalize the knowledge and experiences of women. We present women's stories and experiences of wildlife from Maasai communities in Tanzania and Soliga communities in India. We show that women have the desire and knowledge to participate in conservation decision-making but are currently marginalized from community conservation practice. We argue that including women in research and action is key for successful community-based wildlife conservation.
Journal Article
Beyond ritual and economics: Maasai lion hunting and conservation politics
Populations of the African lion Panthera leo are declining dramatically, with the species’ survival in some areas closely linked to levels of tolerance by rural communities. In Tanzania and Kenya several of the remaining lion populations outside protected areas reside adjacent to rural communities, where they are hunted. As many of these communities are Maasai, research and conservation efforts have focused on understanding and curbing Maasai lion hunting practices. Much of this work has been informed by a dichotomous explanatory model of Maasai lion hunting as either a ‘cultural’ ritual or a ‘retaliatory’ behaviour against predation on livestock. We present qualitative data from interviews (n = 246) in both countries to illustrate that lion hunting by Maasai is related to overlapping motivations that are simultaneously social, emotional and political (in response to conservation initiatives). Additional case study material from Tanzania highlights how politics associated with conservation activities and age-set dynamics affect lion hunting in complex and overlapping ways. Our findings contribute an ethnographic perspective on Maasai lion hunting, people–predator relations, and how these relations are linked to conservation politics.
Journal Article
Constructing Connectivity: Conservation Corridors and Conservation Politics in East African Rangelands
Conservation corridors are perhaps the most visible expression of the new landscape conservation boom. Seen as the essential connecting structure across increasingly fragmented landscapes, corridors offer a structural solution to the complex problem of maintaining functional ecological connectivity. Yet the ability of corridors to connect landscapes and wildlife populations functionally remains unknown. Why then are corridors so popular in academic, practitioner, and policy circles? To explore this question I utilize two concepts-boundary objects and standardized packages-from science and technology studies to show how corridors are being constructed both as naturally occurring entities and as the best possible conservation solution, in some cases foreclosing other possibilities. The flexibility of the term (as a boundary object) combined with a standard set of tools, methods, and theories to support it, makes corridors an accessible concept across social worlds. A case study of the Tarangire Manyara Ecosystem of northern Tanzania, however, suggests that the very flexibility of corridors can backfire, once enmeshed in the local politics of wildlife conservation. When the voices of the concerned community members are heard, political and ecological challenges to corridors emerge.
Journal Article
Knowing Nature
Political ecology and science studies have found fertile meeting ground in environmental studies. While the two distinct areas of inquiry approach the environment from different perspectives—one focusing on the politics of resource access and the other on the construction and perception of knowledge—their work is actually more closely aligned now than ever before. Knowing Nature brings together political ecologists and science studies scholars to showcase the key points of encounter between the two fields and how this intellectual mingling creates a lively and more robust ecological framework for the study of environmental politics. The contributors all actively work at the interface between these two fields, and here they use empirical material to explore questions of theoretical and practical import for understanding the politics that surround nature-society relations, from wildlife management in the Yukon to soil fertility in Kenya. In addition, they examine how various environmental knowledge claims are generated, packaged, promoted, and accepted (or rejected) by the different actors involved in specific cases of environmental management, conservation, and development. Finally, they ask what is at stake in the struggles surrounding environmental knowledge, how such struggles shape conceptions of the environment, and whose interests are served in the process.
eBook
A personal issue: feminist standpoint theory, epistemologies of ignorance, and perceptions of HIV transmission among northern Tanzanian wildlife conservation professionals
Drawing on ten months of qualitative research from 2009/10, we present a case study of situated HIV transmission knowledge claims among wildlife conservation actors in northern Tanzania. Utilizing feminist standpoint theory and epistemologies of ignorance, this article explores why a single professional group consistently articulated divergent explanations of the causal forces shaping on-going HIV transmission dynamics. Elite respondents were more likely to consistently attribute viral transmission to individual-level behaviors, while non-elite conservation actors more often situated HIV transmission dynamics in relation to extra-personal structural forces. This case study reveals the experiential grounding of HIV-related knowledge claims; illuminates the partiality of authoritative knowledge and the intersections of practices of power, embodied understandings and socio-structural location with hierarchical matrices of status and privilege; disrupts the presumed accuracy of certain forms of knowledge by foregrounding the insights of those in positions of subordination; and exposes ineffectual HIV/AIDS interventions in northern Tanzania.
Journal Article