Golden Wildebeest Days: Fragmentation and Value in South Africa's Wildlife Economy After Apartheid

There are renewed global efforts to make wildlife conservation the foundation for broad-based economic development. This article looks at these tendencies in the 'Kruger to Canyons' (K2C) biosphere region in South Africa, encompassing the Kruger National Park and adjacent settlement areas...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of southern African studies 2022-11, Vol.48 (6), p.1013-1035
Main Authors: Bunn, David, Büscher, Bram, McHale, Melissa R., Cadenasso, Mary L., Childers, Daniel L., Pickett, Steward T.A., Rivers, Louie, Swemmer, Louise
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
agrarian restructuring
Apartheid
Biopolitics
Biosphere
buffer zones
Canyons
Economic development
Economics
fragmentation
Kruger National Park
Land reform
National parks
Poaching
protected areas
Regions
Risk perception
Rural communities
Rural poverty
Segmentation
Spacing
Value
Wildlife
Wildlife conservation
wildlife economy
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Summary:There are renewed global efforts to make wildlife conservation the foundation for broad-based economic development. This article looks at these tendencies in the 'Kruger to Canyons' (K2C) biosphere region in South Africa, encompassing the Kruger National Park and adjacent settlement areas and reserves. Various forms of the wildlife economy have a long history in this region. However, it is increasingly posited as a preternatural means for creating jobs. We chronicle the growth of the wildlife economy from its apartheid heyday to the present, showing its fundamental dependence on the ecological and political fragmentation of space. More generally, these biopolitical divisions are part of a broad contestation of wildlife value, organised around changing regimes of protected area enclosure and the spacing of human and non-human life. Despite recent claims by the South African conservation industry that it is demolishing fences and increasing habitat connectivity, political territorialisation and ecological fragmentation continue to be important means of securing profit and reducing perceived risk. While the contradictions of this dynamic have now become acute through the emergence of the rhino-poaching crisis, the growth of that violent industry, we conclude, should not be seen as the negative inversion of a legal wildlife economy. Instead, both the legal and the illegal wildlife economies are manifestations of the same underlying problems: ill-conceived attempts at agrarian reform; the persistent influence of an older veterinary wildlife assemblage; the continued role of the rural poor as an enabling but unacknowledged buffer between development and wildlife.
ISSN:0305-7070
1465-3893
DOI:10.1080/03057070.2022.2145776