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Postcolonial nature conservation in practice: the everyday challenges of on-ground urban nature conservation, Cape Town, South Africa

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Abstract

In a time of biodiversity loss, conservation management literature in Cape Town focuses on biodiversity preservation and top-down management responses. Contributing a more nuanced and politicised understanding of conservation management, this paper examines the challenges of everyday nature conservation and collaboration that occurs nearby Cape Town’s persistently racially-segregated and historically neglected townships. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with on-ground nature conservators and participant observations in collaborative conservation arrangements with local township residents. Examining the literature on Cape Town’s colonial and apartheid conservation histories, I also consider how manifest through the identified everyday challenges are persistent colonial legacies—including deeply racialised relations, exclusionary conservation practices, and a focus on biodiversity conservation to the neglect of community needs. However, on-ground relations and everyday practices also reveal significant contestations to and transformations away from colonising legacies. The analysis contributes towards a discussion of what it means to be a ‘postcolonial’ nature conservator in Cape Town.

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Notes

  1. This term is found throughout the interview transcripts and in my participant observation research notes of this study, including in a conservators’ narrative in this paper. It is also in nature conservation advocacy documents in Cape Town, see for example Pitt and Boulle’s (2010) book about urban nature conservators on the Cape Flats, in which Chapter 2 is called “Spreading the message”. The City of Cape Town’s series of Biodiversity factsheet includes “Cape Town’s Unique Biodiversity—How Can You Help” [sic] and suggests we can help by “Spread[ing] the message”. “The message of biodiversity” is also used in conservators’ narratives in Graham, 2010.

  2. For an overview of South Africans’ attitudes towards cross-racial interaction and reconciliation in the post-apartheid nation see the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation’s (IJR) report on annual national surveys between 2003 and 2013: Wale 2014. Reflecting on Reconciliation—Lessons from the past, prospects for the future. Cape Town: IJR http://reconciliationbarometer.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/IJR-SA-Reconciliation-Barometer-Report-2014.pdf

    Some implications of disturbing racial attitudes emerging from this report are examined in Davis (2014). SA Reconciliation Barometer 2014: The struggle against Apartheid amnesia. The Daily Maverick. 7 Dec.

    http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2014-12-04-sa-reconciliation-barometer-2014-the-struggle-against-apartheid-amnesia/#.VIARLFeUe0K.

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  1. Department of Geography & Planning, Sydney, Australia

    Marnie Graham

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  1. Marnie Graham
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Correspondence to Marnie Graham.

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Graham, M. Postcolonial nature conservation in practice: the everyday challenges of on-ground urban nature conservation, Cape Town, South Africa. GeoJournal 82, 43–62 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-015-9661-3

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