Historical Political Ecology of the Tarangire-Manyara Ecosystem: from colonial legacies, to contested histories, towards convivial conservation?

This chapter (work in progress) offers a historical political ecological analysis of the Tarangire-Manyara Ecosystem (TME), a landscape conservation initiative in Tanzania. First, I turn to TME's chronological history to highlight the origins and the evolution of TME's key stages in the making and the expanding of conservation. Second, I revisit TME as a site of contested histories. Through attention to TME's chronological history, I show how a common view about conservation can be questioned - the idea that conservation is a timeless enterprise to which there is no alternative. Through attention to TME's contested histories, I show how two main historical narratives about TME compete with each other – a statist narrative which is embraced by public authorities in government and conservation bureaucracies, and a peoples' history which represents lived experiences and bottom-up conservation practices of human-wildlife coexistence. I argue that by dismissing and marginalizing locally meaningful narratives, experiences and representations of TME, a statist narrative of a contested history continues animating conservation conflicts in the present. The chapter concludes with an outlook on how conservation in TME could be practiced in a more convivial way.

Jevgeniy Bluwstein is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Geosciences, University of Fribourg (since 2018). Jevgeniy holds a PhD in political ecology/development studies, and an MSc in Environmental Sciences, both from the University Copenhagen. His research interests include the political ecology of nature conservation, tourism, and development, and the political ecology of climate change mitigation and decarbonization.

Afin d’assister à l’évènement et recevoir les informations de connexion, veuillez envoyer un email à ariane.cosiaux@unil.ch

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