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 one side, land justice 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 participating states, remain committed to conservation strategies, justified as superior to the rights of local people on behalf of a "global" mandate for biodiversity and climate change mitigation. Struggles in the Spaces between Land Rights and Biodiversity Conservation traces the overlapping spaces between these two camps as a way to unpack what kinds of ideologies inform this tension. Through a number of case studies and shorter pieces of theoretical reflection taken from around the world, this edited volume explores the particular ideologies, narratives and practices in the spaces between land and territorial rights and biodiversity conservation that create natural resource struggles, negotiations and acceptance. In illustrating the spaces between competing agendas of land governance and conservation, the book offers a counter-narrative that affirms that 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."--Provided by publisher.

Introduction : land rights, biodiversity conservation and justice : rethinking parks and people / Sharlene Mollett and Thembela Kepe -- Meanings, alliances and the state in tensions over land rights and conservation in South Africa / Thembela Kepe -- The promise and limit of environmental justice through land restitution in protected areas in South Africa / Maano Ramutsindela and Medupi Shabangu -- Deploying difference : security threat narratives and state displacement from protected areas / Elizabeth Lunstrum and Megan Ybarra -- Green violence : market-driven conservation and the re-foreignization of space in Laikipia, Kenya / Brock Bersaglio -- Elusive space : peasants and resource politics in the Colombian Caribbean / Diana Ojeda and María Camila González -- "When land becomes gold" : changing political ecology of the commons in a rural-urban frontier / Shubhra Gururani -- Indigeneity, alternative development and conservation : political ecology of forest and land control in Chittagong Hill tracts, Bangladesh / Khairul Chowdhury -- Wapichan Wiizi : conservation politics in the Rupununi (Guyana) / Katherine MacDonald -- 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 -- The Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve : a postcolonial feminist reading of violence and Miskito territorial struggles in honduras / Sharlene Mollett