The Gender Question in Conservation in Africa?
The history of wildlife conservation in Africa illustrates a long legacy of practice that exclude and flatten local voices, homogenizing both conservation practice and the communities it impacts. The creation of spaces for wildlife conservation, the science that goes behind conservation decision making, and the tourism that supports conservation projects, are often performed as predominately Western, white, masculinist endeavors that are intimately tied to histories of colonialism and exclusion. There has of course been movement toward new ways of conceptualizing conservation, particularly through community and rights based initiatives. And the new global biodiversity framework calls on the need to include local and indigenous communites and women and youth in any future conservation planning. How is this going to occur? The current promotion of female African rangers suggests that gender is being addressed by adding women to already existing masculine practices. In this panel we ask how the question of gender and conservation is being addressed in conservation practice and how scholars can better engage in both critique and moves towards gender transformative (not just responsive) conservation. What would this look like on the ground? And how might it challenge who gets to act as community representatives, and even what conservation looks like. These questions are global in nature, but particularly important in the African context where wildlife conservation and tourism is so closely tied to masculinist and racist conceptions of nature, knowledge, and governance. Wildlife conservation practice in particular, continues to privilege particular ways of being in and seeing the world, and thus also participates in and perpetuates specific gendered relations to wildlife and its conservation.
Contact mara.goldman@colorado.edu
