From 8 October to 26 November, we're hosting a series of talks on nature and society to celebrate 25 years of NCF. On Friday, 19 November, Nitin Rai will talk about community-based conservation approaches and the impact they have on forest dwellers.
Over the past decade, community-based conservation has increasingly replaced fortress conservation approaches due to global donor and political pressure to democratize conservation. Yet these decentralized approaches have not made any real difference to the acute dispossession faced by forest dwellers. This talk explores how community-based conservation creates forest-dwellers as willing conservation actors and thrusts upon them typical roles that have been drafted for them. Such an acquiesced conservation approach changes customary relationships to landscape and ensures capital accumulation by a conservation consortium. Paying attention to the detailed working of such conservation apparatus can help reorient the relationship of people and nature.
We would love for you to join us!