Land Rights, Biodiversity Conservation and Justice ─ Rethinking Parks and People

In the context of sustainable development recent land debates tend to construct two porous camps. On one side, land justice advocates dictate that people’s rights to tenure security are tantamount and even sometimes key to successful conservation practice. On the other hand, biodiversity protection and conservation advocates, supported by global environmental organizations and participating states, remain committed to conservation strategies, justified as superior to the rights of local people on behalf of a "global" mandate for biodiversity and climate change mitigation.

Struggles in the Spaces between Land Rights and Biodiversity Conservation traces the overlapping spaces between these two camps as a way to unpack what kinds of ideologies inform this tension. Through a number of case studies and shorter pieces of theoretical reflection taken from around the world, this edited volume explores the particular ideologies, narratives and practices in the spaces between land and territorial rights and biodiversity conservation that create natural resource struggles, negotiations and acceptance.

In illustrating the spaces between competing agendas of land governance and conservation, the book offers a counter- narrative that affirms that the successful and just future of biodiversity conservation is contingent upon land tenure security for local people. The original research gathered together in this volume will be of considerable interest to researchers of development studies, political ecology, land rights, and conservation.

Sharlene Mollett is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Critical Development Studies and the Department of Human Geography Department at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Thembela Kepe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, and the Centre for Critical Development Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada.