In: Forum for development studies: journal of Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and Norwegian Association for Development, Band 45, Heft 2, S. 351-353
SUMMARY This Briefing looks at the existing strategies to confront poaching in Tanzania. With militarised strategies becoming dominant, the Briefing argues for diversified tactics to counter 'poaching', suggesting that bureaucrats and conservationists must put more efforts into addressing root causes of poaching through strategies that go beyond coercive measures.
This article draws insights from access, claim-making and critical environmental justice scholarships to reveal how community-based conservation (CBC) may provide strategic openings for marginalised individuals to claim recognition. Empirically, we ground it in the context of a Sustainable Charcoal Project in rural Kilosa, Tanzania. In our study villages, Ihombwe and Ulaya Mbuyuni, the project provided an opening for the marginalised to claim recognition based on contested migration-and-settlement histories. These histories produced intra-community differentiation as firstcomers (mis)used the project for political domination, cultural status and material benefits. When the project opened governance spaces, latecomers embraced CBC institutions and processes as strategic openings to contest their marginalisation and claim for recognition. We suggest that CBC may produce political benefits where (mal)recognition of rights to resource access occurs as some people hold a sense of belonging more to the land than others.
Decolonizing biodiversity conservation science and practice involves a transition towards more locally rooted, plural, socially just, and convivial forms of conservation, moving away from mainstream conservation approaches, such as protected areas, sustainable resource management plans, or market-based instruments that are strongly rooted in Eurocentric ontologies and epistemologies. In this article, we introduce and review the contributions to the special issue "Decolonizing biodiversity conservation" and we identify six principles that can be thought of as starting points in efforts to decolonize conservation: recognition, reparation, epistemic disobedience, relationality, power subversion, and limits. We explain how these principles feature in the collection's contributions and how they can contribute to decolonizing conservation science, policy, and practice. We also acknowledge that there can be differences over meaning and emphasis regarding the principles among Indigenous and local peoples, scholars, and practitioners. Yet we think that their implementation can result in subtler and less universalizing conservation approaches.