Text
E-book Conservation, Markets & the Environment in Southern and Eastern Africa : Commodifying the ‘Wild’
This volume is concerned with the practices, discourses, and materialities surrounding the commodification of the ‘wild’ – a topic which has found considerable academic attention in the past decade (Smessaert et al. 2020). The ‘wild’ is commonly conceived of as a conceptual opposite to the destructive tendencies of commodification. The volume’s core concern is with the – always laborious and often tense and conflictive, but frequently also synergetic, or co-constitutive – relationships between commodification and wilderness, especially against the backdrop of novel forms of commodi-fication, such as wildlife-park tourism, or trophy hunting, or trade in herbal medicines, perfumes, and luxury exotic food items in which the ‘wild’ is tightly interwoven with human management. Currently, neoliberal approaches that aim at the commodification and marketisation of nature are dominant in addressing global environmental challenges. The hope is that by valorising nature and attaching a price label to single items or functions and establishing a market for them, biodiversity can be safeguarded and ‘wild’ landscapes can be protected from human interference (Heynen & Robbins 2005). While so-called ‘wild’ resources have long sustained livelihoods and been shaped by local management patterns in southern and eastern Africa (Sullivan & Homewood 2004), the commodification of the ‘wild’ and its integration in wider markets is deemed to have an immense future perspective and, indeed, it is thought to open up a new frontier of capitalist expansion and establish new avenues to wealth: it is apparently sustainable, non-exploitative, participatory, and in ddition to that, creates new livelihood options at different societal levels. In this projection, the commodification of the ‘wild’ will invigorate rural liveli-hoods, reduce poverty, and add important assets to otherwise vulnerable rural economies. The neoliberal logic dominant since the 1990s followed upon state-led approaches that allowed only for windows of commodification under tight control of governmental agencies, but in general distrusted markets and greatly relied on a clear-cut separation of the wild on the one hand and humans on the other, of nature and culture. It was the state’s privilege to protect wildernesses and wildlife, and protected areas were carved out of cultural landscapes in many instances. Generally, market-led approaches and the ensuing commodification of wildlife were thought to be environmen-tally destructive and easily captured by dominant groups at the cost of the wider rural population.
Tidak tersedia versi lain