In a Wounded Land Conservation, Extraction, and Human Well-Being in Coastal Tanzania

About this book

Global efforts to conserve nature and prevent biodiversity loss have intensified in response to planetary-scale challenges – nowhere more so than in coastal regions. Accordingly, international conservation organizations have increased their efforts to promote marine protected areas as one of the interventions to prevent biodiversity loss in global hotspots.

Focusing on the human element of marine conservation and the extractive industry in Tanzania, this volume illuminates what happens when impoverished people living in underdeveloped regions of Africa are suddenly subjected to state-directed conservation and natural resource extraction projects, implemented in their landscapes of subsistence. In a Wounded Land draws on ethnographically rich case studies and vignettes collected over a ten-year period in several coastal villages on Tanzania's southeastern border with Mozambique. In seven chapters, the book demonstrates how state power, processes of displacement and dispossession, forms of local resistance and acquiescence, environmental and social justice, and human well-being become interconnected.

Written in lucid, accessible language, this is the first book that reveals the social implications of the co-presence of a marine park and a gas project at a time when internationally funded conservation initiatives and extraction projects among rural African populations are engendering rapid social transformation.

Contents

Introduction: Conservation, Extraction, and Dispossession

Part One
Chapter 1. "Let's Build the Nation!": Nation Building and Social Transformation in Tanzania
Chapter 2. "The Ocean is Tired": Marine Conservation, Livelihoods and Food Security
Chapter 3. "In a Wounded Land": Natural Gas Development in Tanzania
Chapter 4. "No Peace of Mind": Dispossession and Displacement

Part Two
Chapter 5. "The Government Knows Best": Conservation, Extraction, and Environmental Justice
Chapter 6. "Now Are All Educated": Rethinking Environmental Subjectivities
Chapter 7. "What Really Matters": Conservation and Well-being

Conclusion and Epilogue: Conservation, Extraction, and Just Governance

Notes
References

Customer Reviews

Biography

Vinay R. Kamat is a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Tanzania and is the author of Silent Violence.