Othering Pastoralists, State Violence, and the Remaking of Boundaries in Tanzania’s Militarised Wildlife Conservation Sector

This paper examines the ways in which Tanzanian conservation authorities utilise biodiversity “extinction narratives” in order to legitimise the use of violence in redrawing protected areas’ boundaries. Militarisation and violence in conservation have often been associated with the “war on poaching”. Drawing on the history of conservation and violence in Tanzania, and using an empirical case from Loliondo, the paper suggests that violence in conservation may be legitimised when based on extinction narratives and a claim that more exclusive spaces are urgently needed to protect biodiversity. It argues that the emerging militarisation and use of violence in Tanzania can be associated with both global biodiversity extinction and local neo‐Malthusian narratives, which recently have regained predominance. When combined with “othering” of groups of pastoralists by portraying them as foreign “invaders”, such associations legitimise extensions of state control over contested land by any means available, including violence

Making land grabbable: Stealthy dispossessions by conservation in Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania

This paper seeks to answer the question: how does land become grabbable and local people relocatable? It focuses on the historical and current conditions of land tenure that enable land grabbing. While recognising the important contributions thus far made by the critical literature on land grabbing, this paper moves forward towards understanding specific processes that befall before land is grabbed and its original users relocated. Based on an empirical analysis of policy and practices of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania, the paper proposes that land grabbing, particularly in the context of conservation in rural Africa, is not an instantaneous phenomenon and does not happen in a vacuum. It is a result of long-term structural marginalisation of rural land users that produces scarcity and the deterioration of life conditions, which make people relocatable and land grabbing justifiable. Local people either relocate themselves because they could not make a living due to systematic disinvestments on basic social services or life is made unbearable through restrictions imposed on their production practices to make “voluntary” relocation possible. The paper highlights the need to focus on the stealthy dispossessions in addition to major events of grabbing as starting points of analysis. Insight from this study can be useful in analysing other cases of land grabbing where large swathes of ostensibly empty land are made available for investment

Life in contested lands: The discourses and practices of mainstream conservation in the Greater Serengeti-Mara Ecosystem

Tanzania and Kenya are renowned for their extensive safari tourism on vast protected areas teeming with diverse wildlife. The most celebrated of such destinations is the Greater Serengeti-Mara Ecosystem (GSME), which comprises the Serengeti National Park, the Maasai Mara National Reserve and a wide range of protected areas surrounding these across Northern Tanzania and southern Kenya. The GSME is also home to traditional pastoral and agro-pastoral communities. The main protected areas were established more than six decades ago on land that was curved out of what used to be shared by wildlife and people who were forced to settle in adjacent smaller and often sub-optimal areas. Using four interrelated articles, this thesis provides nuanced critiques of the conservation policies and practices in the GSME. It argues that conservation in the region is guided by underlying narratives that emphasise the disconnections between humans and nature the origin of which can be traced to colonial history. Historically, such narratives resulted in the creation of protected areas that excluded local people. Following global calls to save dwindling wildlife numbers in recent years, governments and other conservation actors in Kenya and Tanzania have been working to include adjacent communal lands, into the more exclusive protected areas. In Kenya, the communal lands around protected areas were first privatized and then regrouped to form semi-private conservancies, causing waves of land use changes including widespread fencing in the remaining non-protected segments and dramatic shifts in livelihood pathways of the Maasai. In Tanzania, authorities use violence to expand protected spaces into what they call “buffer zone”, “corridors”, “dispersal areas”. In so doing, powerful actors cling on to global narratives about wildlife extinction and the role that population growth plays. However, despite increasing expansion conservation areas, the conditions for wildlife and people around protected areas are deteriorating. As more land gets incorporated into protected areas through different tactics, portions of land which are left for human use become overburdened and inaccessible to wildlife due to fencing and conversion of land into non-traditional use. The empirical material on which the analysis in this thesis is based comes from extended fieldworks in Kenya and Tanzania which took place between February 2017 and June 2019

Land division, conservancies, fencing and its implications in the Maasai Mara, Kenya

There is growing concern about the future of wildlife and pastoralism in the Maasai Mara as well as on the communal lands adjacent to the national reserve that serves as home to pastoral communities and wildlife dispersal areas. Of particular concern over the last years has been the increasing threat of fencing of what once was an open landscape. Although there are studies that have documented the increase of fencing and its possible effects, a thorough investigation into what provoked such a move by local communities is lacking. In this paper, we set out to investigate the causes that lead to the enclosure of what once was communal areas and the now increasing fencing of individually owned plots of land. We use empirical data from ethnographic fieldwork in villages adjacent to the Maasai Mara involving interviews, participant observation as well as analysis of documents such as conservation plans, reports, government legal acts and websites. We argue that the history of group ranches, processes of land division, the establishment of conservancies and the transformation of land into a tradable commodity can largely explain the processes of fencing taking place today. We conclude that in the long run the processes of fencing is not compatible with traditional pastoralist practices and may lead to further marginalisation of already vulnerable pastoral communities. By reducing mobility, fencing undermines pastoralism, which still is the mainstay of many households in Maasai Mara

Gentrifying the African Landscape: The Performance and Powers of for-Profit Conservation on Southern Kenya’s Conservancy Frontier

Across eastern and southern Africa, conservation landscapes increasingly extend far beyond the boundaries of government-owned protected areas. Several countries have now granted full legal recognition to various types of private or otherwise nonstate conservation arrangements, thereby often seeking to create novel opportunities for ostensibly “green” capital investments in various for-profit conservation enterprises. Following the adoption of the 2013 Wildlife Conservation and Management Act in Kenya, for instance, nonstate conservancies now encompass 6.36 million hectares—or 11 percent of the country’s land area—with at least a further 3 million hectares proposed or in the process of territorialization. Examining the consequences of this precipitous rise of conservancies in southern Kenya’s Maasai Mara region, we suggest that—in addition to significant potential for considerable profit margins to be realized by individual firms—these investments retain a number of other unique powers or capacities to transform prevailing varieties of environmental governance. In this case, these capacities manifest in two interrelated forms: first, in the dissemination of environmental crisis narratives that stigmatize pastoralist communities and thus drive down land rents or values and, second, in the recapitalization of conservation territories and the reconfiguration of prevailing land uses in ways that enable novel forms of rural gentrification via the capture of heightened or differential ground rents