Trans-frontier conservation and the neoliberalisation of nature: the case of the Ponta do Ouro Partial Marine Reserve, Mozambique
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Date
03/07/2017Author
Symons, Kate
Metadata
Abstract
Trans-frontier conservation areas (TFCAs), large cross-border areas dedicated to biodiversity
conservation, multi-national co-operation and development are expanding in southern Africa,
fast becoming the dominant conservation solution in the region. TFCAs adopt a celebratory
discourse of ecological, community, economic and political gains, while the reality is often
far more complicated. This thesis situates the expansion of TFCAs within a critical political
ecology approach, and argues that they represent a neoliberal solution to a complex series of
development, environment and political challenges. Drawing on five and a half months of
fieldwork to Mozambique along with policy and discourse analysis it examines the first
marine reserve to be linked to a TFCA in Africa, the Ponta do Ouro Partial Marine Reserve
(PPMR) in southern Mozambique. It makes three arguments: First, it argues that
Mozambique’s embrace of TFCAs represents the neoliberalisation of conservation through
novel tourism-based products, techniques of governance, creation of subject positions based
on entrepreneurialism, and new arrangements of space. At the same time, the adoption of
TFCAs also stems from Mozambique’s post-war politics, especially the ways in which elite
state actors have sought to reconstruct and reorder the country through engagement with
donors. Second, the thesis uses a combined governmentality and assemblage framework to
explore how neoliberal conservation is made to cohere as a truth discourse, how it materially
co-produces human and non-human life in the marine reserve, and how it is fragile, partial
and contested. Third, it critiques the increasingly close relationship between the extractive
and conservation sector at a policy, state and donor level, exploring how and why marine
conservation is increasingly intertwined with Mozambique’s resources boom through its
green economy discourse. Through these three points of engagement, the thesis contributes
to debates around the intensifying relationship between extraction and conservation,
Mozambique’s post-war development, and processes of neoliberalisation of nature.