Suchergebnisse

Since 2018, Swiss courts have become regular sites of criminal trials against climate activists who engage in various forms of non-violent protest to obtain effective climate action from their government and raise public awareness. Since the autumn of 2018, we have recorded approximately 30 non-violent forms of climate protest and civil disobedience across Switzerland, leading to at least 200 trials in Swiss criminal courts. In this contribution, we highlight three themes that have emerged in the trials of climate activists: First, the Federal Supreme Court has closed the door to the use of the necessity defense to justify civil disobedience in the name of the climate emergency. Second, at least some Swiss judges and courts are open to considering and applying the case law of the ECtHR. Third, the idea of civil disobedience remains deeply contested in the courts, as it is considered by the authorities to be antithetical to the Swiss model of democracy.

I suggest that to decolonize conservation we must also decolonize our way of seeing land and nature-society relations inscribed in it as landscapes. I proceed in three parts. First, drawing on insights from post- and decolonial studies, critical geography, environmental history and political ecology, I highlight three problems that underpin a landscape way of seeing nature-society relations: depoliticization, simplification/decomplexification, and representation. Second,to illustrate the colonial legacy of the contemporary landscape approach to nature conservation, I revisit the global history of landscapism – the double movement of colonizing landscapes/landscapingcolonies. This double movement began with the internal colonization of European landscapes (autonomous political communities), and continued through the landscaping of (settler-)colonies by Europeans outside of their homelands. Third, through the contemporary case of a landscape conservation initiative in Tanzania (the so-called "Tarangire-Manyara Ecosystem"), I illustrate the implications of the double movement in the colonial present of African conservation. I conclude with a few remarks on what decolonization of conservation would have to entail in scientific research and practice.

This article illustrates how the introduction of modern geospatial surveying technology in Tanzania has failed to resolve a boundary conflict between the state and nature conservation authorities on one side and a rural community of pastoralists on the other. Far from fixing a contested geography by resurveying its boundaries and facilitating stakeholder participation for conflict resolution, digital cartography has made visible and reanimated the buried history of mismatched and conflicting logics between state-led territorial administration and conservation, and pastoral land use practices. The article shows how state and conservation officials have relied on the insights from fact-finding exercises to dismiss rural land use practices that are not represented in official maps. Pastoralists resist these state- and conservation-centred cartographic practices of fixed boundaries to maintain a historical, vital geography of seasonal access to pastures and water. By way of conclusion, this article highlights the pitfalls of geospatial land surveys and fact-finding exercises that unearth and lay bare a boundary conflict previously hidden from the state's view. Through enhanced legibility, rural communities may become visible to the state, risking dispossession and evictions.

Drawing on critical debates in political ecology and biopolitics, the article develops a "biopolitical ecology of conservation" to study historical shifts in how human and nonhuman lives come to be valued in an asymmetric way. Tanzania and the so-called Tarangire-Manyara Ecosystem illustrate how these biopolitical shifts became entangled with conservation interventions and broader visions of development throughout colonial and post-colonial history. Colonial efforts to balance seemingly competing domains of human and nonhuman species through spatial separation gave way to the development of the post-colonial nation through the nurturing of its wildlife population. This shift from human-nonhuman incompatibility towards human dependency on wildlife and biodiversity conservation culminated in the contemporary biopolitical ecology and geography of landscape conservation. Landscape conservation seeks to entangle human and nonhuman species. Through conservation, human populations are rearranged and fixed in time and space to allow wildlife to roam free across unbounded spaces. This conservation governmentality is tied to global environmentalist concerns and political economies of neoliberal conservation, as well as to a domestic agenda of tourism-based economic growth. It secures land tenure for some, while imposing a biopolitical sacrifice on the rural population as a whole. This forecloses alternative rural futures for a land-dependent and increasingly land-deprived population.

Drawing on critical debates in political ecology and biopolitics, the article develops a "biopolitical ecology of conservation" to study historical shifts in how human and nonhuman lives come to be valued in an asymmetric way. Tanzania and the so-called Tarangire-Manyara Ecosystem illustrate how these biopolitical shifts became entangled with conservation interventions and broader visions of development throughout colonial and post-colonial history. Colonial efforts to balance seemingly competing domains of human and nonhuman species through spatial separation gave way to the development of the post-colonial nation through the nurturing of its wildlife population. This shift from human-nonhuman incompatibility towards human dependency on wildlife and biodiversity conservation culminated in the contemporary biopolitical ecology and geography of landscape conservation. Landscape conservation seeks to entangle human and nonhuman species. Through conservation, human populations are rearranged and fixed in time and space to allow wildlife to roam free across unbounded spaces. This conservation governmentality is tied to global environmentalist concerns and political economies of neoliberal conservation, as well as to a domestic agenda of tourism-based economic growth. It secures land tenure for some, while imposing a biopolitical sacrifice on the rural population as a whole. This forecloses alternative rural futures for a land-dependent and increasingly land-deprived population.

Drawing on critical debates in political ecology and biopolitics, the article develops a "biopolitical ecology of conservation" to study historical shifts in how human and nonhuman lives come to be valued in an asymmetric way. Tanzania and the so-called Tarangire-Manyara Ecosystem illustrate how these biopolitical shifts became entangled with conservation interventions and broader visions of development throughout colonial and post-colonial history. Colonial efforts to balance seemingly competing domains of human and nonhuman species through spatial separation gave way to the development of the post-colonial nation through the nurturing of its wildlife population. This shift from human-nonhuman incompatibility towards human dependency on wildlife and biodiversity conservation culminated in the contemporary biopolitical ecology and geography of landscape conservation. Landscape conservation seeks to entangle human and nonhuman species. Through conservation, human populations are rearranged and fixed in time and space to allow wildlife to roam free across unbounded spaces. This conservation governmentality is tied to global environmentalist concerns and political economies of neoliberal conservation, as well as to a domestic agenda of tourism-based economic growth. It secures land tenure for some, while imposing a biopolitical sacrifice on the rural population as a whole. This forecloses alternative rural futures for a land-dependent and increasingly land-deprived population. ; Drawing on critical debates in political ecology and biopolitics, the article develops a "biopolitical ecology of conservation" to study historical shifts in how human and nonhuman lives come to be valued in an asymmetric way. Tanzania and the so-called Tarangire-Manyara Ecosystem illustrate how these biopolitical shifts became entangled with conservation interventions and broader visions of development throughout colonial and post-colonial history. Colonial efforts to balance seemingly competing domains of human and nonhuman species through spatial separation gave way to the development of the post-colonial nation through the nurturing of its wildlife population. This shift from human-nonhuman incompatibility towards human dependency on wildlife and biodiversity conservation culminated in the contemporary biopolitical ecology and geography of landscape conservation. Landscape conservation seeks to entangle human and nonhuman species. Through conservation, human populations are rearranged and fixed in time and space to allow wildlife to roam free across unbounded spaces. This conservation governmentality is tied to global environmentalist concerns and political economies of neoliberal conservation, as well as to a domestic agenda of tourism-based economic growth. It secures land tenure for some, while imposing a biopolitical sacrifice on the rural population as a whole. This forecloses alternative rural futures for a land-dependent and increasingly land-deprived population.