Resistance to Colonial Conservation and Resource Management

In the remaining chapters we will focus increasingly on the response by colonized people to competition for, and commodification of, conquered environments. Political conflict over natural resources had deep historical roots in the Empire, and these issues were not resolved by dominion status for the British settler states nor decolonization after the Second World War. They fed into the politics of decolonization and into environmental debates within and beyond the post-colonial Commonwealth. Subsequent chapters traverse the moment of decolonization and explore elements of late twentieth-century political ecology. In South Asia and Africa state attempts to control and regulate natural resources changed power relations in the countryside and triggered popular resistance. Through conquest or annexation, some colonial and protectorate governments not only alienated large swathes of territory, but also assumed responsibility for and asserted rights over the natural environment. The governments of settler states moved to protect environments from careless settlers who ransacked it for wildlife or timber, and from indigenous peoples whose land-management systems were regarded as destructive. In some cases conservators recognized that European settlers wreaked more havoc than indigenes; Sim said of the Cape forests that the ‘Hottentot and Bushman inhabitants ... were not intentionally destructive ... But the advent of European civilization boded greater ill to the forests, and rapidly enough that ill has been accomplished.’ And some, such as Howard, saw value in local agrarian systems. But although regulation could affect all colonial subjects, it tended to bear most heavily on indigenous people. Colonial governments introduced policies of excluding humans from protected areas, as well as a wide range of other measures aimed at curbing customary user rights and maximizing state revenue. Stiff penalties were introduced to punish those who broke the new regulations, and thus the rise of bureaucratic conservationism often led to the criminalization of local resource extractors. In settler colonies the privatization of land transformed socio-environmental relationships, barring local communities from accessing resources they had long regarded as communally held and managed. In some early colonial settlements, this process echoed the enclosures of common land in eighteenth-century England. At a fundamental level it changed the value people placed upon land, setting in train a process towards individualized tenure, commercialization, and subdivision of territory.

Colonialism · Commodification · Decolonization · Dominion · Economy · Ethnology · Geography · Indigenous · Natural resource · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Protectorate · Sociology · Australian History and Society · Ecology · History · Law

• Examining the EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) action plan in Ghana through a governmentality lens

  Open Access•Christian Pilegaard Hansen•Journal of Political Ecology•2022

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