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Abstract
Conservation corridors are perhaps the most visible expression of the new landscape conservation boom. Seen as the essential connecting structure across increasingly fragmented landscapes, corridors offer a structural solution to the complex problem of maintaining functional ecological connectivity. Yet the ability of corridors to connect landscapes and wildlife populations functionally remains unknown. Why then are corridors so popular in academic, practitioner, and policy circles? To explore this question I utilize two concepts—boundary objects and standardized packages—from science and technology studies to show how corridors are being constructed both as naturally occurring entities and as the best possible conservation solution, in some cases foreclosing other possibilities. The flexibility of the term (as a boundary object) combined with a standard set of tools, methods, and theories to support it, makes corridors an accessible concept across social worlds. A case study of the Tarangire Manyara Ecosystem of northern Tanzania, however, suggests that the very flexibility of corridors can backfire, once enmeshed in the local politics of wildlife conservation. When the voices of the concerned community members are heard, political and ecological challenges to corridors emerge.
Quizás los corredores de conservación son la expresión más visible del nuevo auge conservacionista del paisaje. Considerados como la estructura conectora esencial a través de paisajes cada vez más fragmentados, los corredores proveen una solución estructural al complejo problema de preservar la conectividad ecológica funcional. Con todo, todavía es desconocida la habilidad de los corredores para conectar funcionalmente los paisajes y las poblaciones de vida silvestre.? Por qué, entonces, son tan populares los corredores en los círculos académicos, de practicantes y activistas? Para explorar este interrogante, he utilizado dos conceptos—objetos delimitantes y paquetes estandarizados—tomados de estudios de ciencia y tecnología para mostrar cómo se construyen los corredores, a la vez como entidades de ocurrencia natural y como la mejor solución conservacionista posible, excluyendo en algunos casos otras posibilidades. La flexibilidad del término (como un objeto delimitante) combinada con un conjunto estándar de herramientas, métodos y teorías que lo apoyen, hacen de los corredores un concepto accesible a través de los mundos sociales. No obstante, un estudio de caso del Ecosistema Tarangire Manyara, en el norte de Tanzania, sugiere que la propia flexibilidad de los corredores puede ser contraproducente cuando se entrampa en las política locales de conservación de vida silvestre. Los retos políticos y ecológicos a los corredores ocurren tan pronto como se escuchan las voces de miembros de la comunidad preocupados.
Acknowledgments
The research on which this article is based was funded by a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant, and a National Science Foundation International Research Fellowship Postdoctoral Grant. I also received funding from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Nairobi, in 2005, as a part of their reto-o-reto project. I am grateful to ILRI for this funding, for hosting me in 2007, and for providing me a forum to share an earlier draft of this article. At ILRI, I thank in particular Robin Reid, Mohammed Said, Jeff Worden, Joe Ogutu, and David Nkediane for their insights on the research and comments on earlier drafts and Shem Kifugo for help with mapping. I would also like to thank Matthew Turner, Lisa Naughton, Alicia Davis, Tom Morrison, Amy Cooke, Laura Deluca, Audrey Kobayashi, and two anonymous reviewers for extremely helpful comments at different stages of this article's completion. I am especially grateful to the people in Monduli and Simanjiro who shared with me their knowledge, insights, concerns, and time. All the usual disclaimers apply.
Notes
1. Landscape conservation reflects concerns over the limitations of national parks and the importance of patch dynamics and landscape structure for ecological function (CitationForman and Godron 1981a, Citation1981b; CitationPickett et al. 1997).
2. In reality, corridors are difficult to implement with potentially disastrous effects (CitationChetkiewicz, St. Clair, and Boyce 2006).
3. Referred to as the “back to the barriers” movement (CitationHutton, Adams, and Murombedzi 2005).
4. With the exception of analyses of a growing expansion of protected areas (CitationNeumann 1997; CitationSchroeder 1999). Conservation biologists themselves have commented with concern on the rapid proliferation of the term and its implementation in conservation policy (CitationHobbs 1992; CitationCrooks and Sanjayan 2006b).
5. Here I draw on Latour's (1987) notion of transportability but to talk about corridors as a mutable, rather than “immutable” mobile. As Fujimura (1996, 215) argues, “the more portable a tool is, the more reliably it will be reproduced in other situations.” See also CitationCallon (1999) on translation.
6. I am referring to the enrollment of people, communities, and constituencies into a particular scientific project, plan, or idea. According to CitationLatour (1987), enrollment determines whether or not a scientific finding becomes a “fact”.
7. Since the beginning of writing this article, three books have come out dedicated to corridors and connectivity conservation (A. B. Anderson and Jenkins 2006; Crooks and Sanjayan 2006a; Hilty et al. 2006), and several articles appear monthly. See Crooks and Sanjayan (2006b) for a breakdown on published articles from 1980 to 2004.
8. This statement reflects written material (academic, policy, and project based) and discussions at meetings in Tanzania from 2002 to the present. While I was finishing the revised version of this article, a call was made to all wildlife-related researchers in Tanzania to contribute to a document to urge the Tanzanian government to officially protect wildlife corridors. This was a follow-up to conversations at the Annual Tanzanian Wildlife Research Meeting (TAWIRI, December 2007), regarding the importance of corridors (S. Lynn, personal communication, January 2008).
9. The same could not be said for the equally popular and fluid conservation approach, sustainability, the malleability of which some suggests “provides only a façade of consensus,” jeopardizing conservation goals by encompassing too broad a range of possibilities (CitationNewton and Freyfogle 2005). Others, however, argue that the very malleability of the term sustainability has been its strength “as a universal goal for conservation efforts made across sectors, countries, and environments” (CitationPadoch and Sears 2005, 39).
10. See Crooks and Sanjayan (2006b) for all of the different contexts in which corridors are discussed.
11. According to Fujimura (1996, 216), “[S]tandardization, continuity, and stability do not necessarily mean equivalence in an ontological sense. Concepts, practices, and even material entities (such as instruments and biological organisms) can be treated as the same or continuous or stable, and yet still be divergent in some fashion. Thus, sameness is something produced through experimenters' collective efforts, understandings, expectations, and agreements”.
12. There are, of course, also elements of “black boxing” involved, where a tool is no longer questioned and is in essence taken for granted, such as with geospatial tools used to demarcate boundaries and follow animals. My interest here is on the simultaneous stabilization and translation that is occurring with the use and promotion of corridors, which is more of a “gray” box, as it is malleable and unfinished.
13. This can also be said for conservation in general, particularly ecoregional and landscape conservation (CitationBrosius 2006).
14. AWF seeks donations from the general public to protect “wildlife without borders” (AWF 2006b).
15. Neither is there a commonly used Swahili word for corridor. The word ushoroba means a corridor in between houses, or inside a house. The Swahili insert for the Kakakuona wildlife magazine one month had a story on wildlife corridors using this word, ushoroba, in the title. I carried the magazine around with me for a month asking every educated Tanzanian in the study area what the word meant. Not one person knew. Most started to read the article, then after a few minutes would look up and exclaim, “Oh, corridor”.
16. This is the way in which Maasai always spoke to me about wildlife movements, “when they decide to move”.
17. With a slight play on words here, I am referring both to the growing numbers of people living in poverty in Tanzania despite the country's economic success over the past decade as well as the environmental specter of uncontrolled population growth often called on in alarmist accounts of environmental crisis in Africa.
18. This is a result of continual tinkering with park boundaries and through pressure by European conservation groups to ensure the migration was protected by the newly established park. There was also a strategic move by the British Colonial government to secure the area that is now the Maasai Mara Game Reserve in Kenya, to protect the wildebeest and zebra migrations, despite knowing very little about these migrations at that time (CitationShetler 2007). Nonetheless, today animals continue to migrate beyond the confines of the Serengeti, southbound through Loliondo and northbound through Ikoma/Tarime (I thank Fred Nelson for bringing this to my attention).
19. For more on the history of Serengeti National Park, see CitationNeumann (1997), CitationGarland (2006), and CitationShetler (2007).
20. Boma is Swahili, with bomas as the commonly used Anglicized plural. The Maasai word is engang. The English translation is village or homestead. A boma is a settlement of houses comprised of the polygamous families of men (relatives or friends) or one single (polygamous) family around a single cattle enclosure, encircled by a thorn fence.
21. When not in the field, I maintained regular contact with members of the communities discussed later by phone and e-mail. During this time I would not only receive updates of the corridor projects discussed, but would often have lengthy conversations over the changing meaning of the corridor concept itself.
22. My membership in one of the villages (including family, clan, and age-set affiliations) gained me trust throughout Kwakuchinja and also in Simanjiro. There were direct familiar relations in Simanjiro I was able to connect with, as well as long-term friendships that began prior to my official participation in the area as a researcher. During visits to Simanjiro I was often asked questions about my home village—about family and friends but also about the politics of conservation and corridors—for them to compare with their own situation.
23. The area is defined as a “heartland,” a “high-priority, large conservation landscape” by the AWF (AWF 2005, 8; cf. http://www.awf.org/heartlands/maasaisteppe) and was recently renamed to the Maasai Steppe heartland.
24. Similar shifts in other places such as toward the “Greater Yellowstone ecosystem,” reflect the global shift toward a landscape or ecoregional conservation focus.
25. High dry season concentrations inside the parks are due to the year-round water sources available there, as opposed to the drier surrounding plains.
26. These numbers come from an AWF funding document obtained in 2002. Since that time, two new villages were created within Babati district, and there are likely others not accounted for here. The area is also populated by agro-pastoral Wa-Arusha, Wa-Bugwe, and Wa-Bulu (also called Wa-Iraqw), and the pastoral Barabaig.
27. These movements were carefully planned, however, as Maasai avoid grazing in the same areas as wildebeest during the time period when wildebeest are birthing (roughly February and March). During this time a fatal disease, malignant catarrh fever, is easily transmitted to cattle from wildebeest.
28. This proposal was first put forth in an unpublished report by the FZS (see CitationBorner 1982).
29. Ngorongoro was created as a multiple land use area for conservation, pastoral development, and tourism. Although wildlife and tourism have thrived, Maasai have sunk into poverty and are deprived of the right to farm. Maasai elsewhere refer to those in Ngorongoro as poor and with no control over their lives. Their plight has been well documented (CitationArhem 1985; CitationHomewood and Rodgers 1991; CitationShivji and Kapinga 1998) but continues unabated.
30. Alicia Davis, a Ph.D. student in anthropology at Colorado University–Boulder, just completed field work on this very issue and will be writing on the impacts of the moratorium in Simanjiro and the resulting landscape changes that are occurring.
31. Access to grazing is restricted in both the Manyara Ranch and a newly created wildlife management area.
32. The TLCT recently acquired 9,000 acres of former army land in the Losimingori Mountains through a partnership with the Tanzanian Army to protect part of the corridor (AWF 2005).
33. A conservation easement is an agreement by a land owner to place legally enforceable restrictions on land use, while maintaining ownership of the land, for the purpose of long-term conservation (habitat protection). In this case, the idea was to limit farming and building in key wildlife areas and is based on The Nature Conservancy model.
34. This is paradoxical because in Simanjiro, where it is difficult to even talk about corridors, the most popular community-supported conservation intervention at the moment is a lease and easement program.
35. A new village chairman was elected and a new VEO was also appointed.
36. The VEO (Mtendaji in Swahili) is employed by the government. The VEO is in charge of keeping village finances in check and acts as a counterpart to the democratically elected village chairman.
37. This is beginning to change with corridors referred to explicitly in the new wildlife legislation (United Republic of Tanzania 1998, forthcoming).
38. Taken from a series of 70 interviews with Maasai in both study villages 2003.
39. Other methods discussed by Crooks and Sanjayan (2006a, 12) include stepping stones, migratory stopovers, and “habitat mosaics and the permeability of the intervening matrix.” This last method is particularly relevant to the case material presented in this article.
40. See Scott (1998) for a description of the creation of legible landscapes for development and management purposes in high modernist developing states, including Tanzania.