FACTORING CULTURE AND DISCOURSE INTO AN APPRAISAL OF THE NEOLIBERAL SYNTHESIS OF WILDLIFE CONSERVATION AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

Abstract

This thesis is a holistic appraisal of community-based wildlife management (CWM) in sub-Saharan Africa. CWM, which aims to integrate large-landscape conservation and rural development, is a programme full of neoliberal aspirations, particularly in its call to decentralize decision-making and encourage African communities to engage in a market for wildlife. Its general failure to live up to these aspirations, however, is due to the wide scale retention of owner and user rights over wildlife at state level and the dominance of the private sector. Beyond these policy issues, it is stipulated that there lies at the very core of CWM a more profound stumbling block: the conflict between indigenous African beliefs and rituals towards wildlife and the cold market rationality of CWM in its current form. As well as exploring these cultural dimensions, CWM is also analyzed as a discourse in which new representations of the savannah lands and its peoples legitimize intervention by an international environmental elite.