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The global environmental crisis has drawn increasing attention to how state power should be deployed towards achieving ecological objectives. Hence, scholars have debated the form and functions tha...

This introduction to the timely special issue of Anthropology Southern Africa examines land reform in the region, offering ethnographic perspectives on a subject often dominated by economists, lawy...

Theories of property highlight power relations and their distributional and spatial effects. The power of property is seen as necessary for the defence of nature but is also instrumental for opening nature to destructive forces, especially global capitalism. In this paper we expand the debate on property and nature conservation by showing that access to land and the arrangement of tenure regimes that govern it are crucial for the establishment of peace parks in southern Africa. To date, no peace park in the region has private land serving as its core area. We argue that the establishment of the core areas of peace parks depends on the configuration of property regimes and the power relations embedded in them. The possibility of establishing peace parks lies in the successful negotiations with property rights holders and the consequent rearrangement of land use options. These negotiations are much harder with private landowners, mainly because private property presents legal and financial challenges distinct from state and communal land regimes. In Southern Africa, private property is historically entangled with white identity and landownership. We substantiate this argument by drawing on empirical evidence from the failed attempt to create two transfrontier conservation areas across the Namibia-South Africa border, the Gariep Transfrontier Park in the late 1990s and the Lower Orange River Transfrontier Conservation Area in 2008. We ascribe this failed attempt to unsuccessful negotiations between the Peace Parks Foundation and white farmers, the inability to create a core area from scratch, and the historical tenure arrangements that evolved along the Lower Orange River over more than a century. The conceptual value of the case study is twofold. First, it contributes to understandings of conditions under which the idea of peace parks materializes or fails. Second, it underscores the agency of property regimes in nature conservation.

Concerns about poaching and trafficking have led conservationists to seek urgent responses to tackle the impact on wildlife. One possible solution is the militarisation of conservation, which holds potentially far-reaching consequences. It is important to engage critically with the militarisation of conservation, including identifying and reflecting on the problems it produces for wildlife, for people living with wildlife and for those tasked with implementing militarised strategies. This Perspectives piece is a first step towards synthesising the main themes in emerging critiques of militarised conservation. We identify five major themes: first, the importance of understanding how poaching is defined; second, understanding the ways that local communities experience militarised conservation; third, the experiences of rangers; fourth, how the militarisation of conservation can contribute to violence where conservation operates in the context of armed conflict; and finally how it fits in with and reflects wider political economic dynamics. Ultimately, we suggest that failure to engage more critically with militarisation risks making things worse for the people involved and lead to poor conservation outcomes in the long run.

Social science research on nature conservation ascribes enclosures and the consequent evictions and dispossession of local people to unequal power relations. It reveals that the monopoly of power b...

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), occupying a centre stage in the post-2015 development paradigms, raise important questions about how African development priorities and needs are situated within broader global agendas, and the impacts these agendas have on the well-being of people living on the continent. The aim of this chapter is to contribute to discussions and debates on the intersection between the SDGs and African development in the twenty-first century. African development has been a subject of scholarly debates and policy interventions by state and non-state actors for many years. Our intention in this chapter is to discuss African development in the context of the SDGs and through five themes relevant to this volume. The first theme tackles the question whether the SDGs compete with or compliment other development agendas on the continent. The second theme places the SDGs within the political economy of Africa’s natural resources to argue that Africa’s resources remain crucial for the global capitalist economy, and that this limits the promise of transforming the continent through the SDGs. The third theme draws the links between higher education institutions, networks, and African development, and also teases out the identity and developmental roles of African universities. While SDGs offer many opportunities for African development they also come with their own constraints. We explore these opportunities and constraints in theme four. The last theme, on climate–human–ecosystem interactions, draws attention to changing human–environment relations and their implications for global environmental solutions.

The concerns of environmental scientists, environmental non-governmental organisations, government agencies and international bodies with biodiversity are aptly captured with observations in the United Nations Secretary-General’s Report on Progress towards Sustainable Development Goals released on 11 May 2017. The Report notes the increase in biodiversity loss, declining land productivity and the increase in the poaching of wildlife, among other challenges. While these problems are real, there is a need to comprehend how their solutions intersect with other national policies or development agendas in Africa. Literature shows that trading off Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or the failure to draw synergy among them undermines their universal aim of ending poverty, protecting the planet and ensuring prosperity for all. This chapter adds to this literature by showing that some of the efforts toward curbing biodiversity loss ironically create conditions that work against the protection of biodiversity while also deepening existing socio-economic problems. The chapter demonstrates this irony by referring to SDG 15 and its relations to inequitable land distribution in African contexts. It argues that efforts to reduce biodiversity loss by expanding protected areas and by excising land in the battle to curb rampant poaching compound the very challenges as they lead to a situation, where land alienation and poaching are entangled in a vicious and unabating cycle.

The conservation enterprise is embedded in ideas of the environ-ment through which it promotes a vision of the world and therelations between the non-human and human. The papers in thisforum analyse conservation from various vantage points to drawthe links between geopolitics and conservation. The authors usethree themes to demonstrate these links. The first theme draws onthe concept of environmentality to show the mobilization of eco-logical rationalities and power towards the creation of protectedareas. The second pays attention to networks formed across thedistance, and how they influence the location and governance ofprotected areas. The third focuses on the strategies the conserva-tion lobby uses to align local identities with global conservationideals and goals. Collectively, these themes highlight features ofconservation geopolitics.