Nature Conservation, Conflicts and Local People’s Resistance Around Protected Forests in Southern Africa

Abstract

 This article focuses on the failure to fully address access and rights through co-management arrangements that takes place in forest conservation and the resultant resistance by local people. In so doing the article develops a typology of resistance as a way of contributing to the on-going debates about resistance from a Southern African perspective. Two typologies are developed based on empirical evidence gathered over many years of in-depth interviews and observation with concerned people across two sites in South Africa and Zimbabwe. What is different from most of the scholarship on resistance is locating it within property relations that were introduced at the beginning of colonialism in Southern Africa and continues unabated in post-colonial times. The circumstances surrounding access to and rights over resources are what lead local people in different places to resist and engage with the state over conservation practices, given the fact the denial of access and rights marginalises them, thereby becoming unequal members of their countries. The salient point is that resistance, as is argued in the article, results in many dimensions of repossession by those who had lost their land, forests and rights. I tease out this dimension to resistance and make the case that resistance takes different forms and does not lead to the formation of movements by the actors struggling to gain rights over and access to forest resources. Loss of rights and access results in dispossession and loss of livelihood opportunities. At the same time states need to recognize the inadequacy of giving rights or access to resources dispossessed from communities around conservation areas, but giving both rights over and access to resources that may reduce the subsequent marginalisation.