Protected Areas, Conservation Stakeholders and the ‘Naturalisation’ of Southern Europe

Abstract

The critical analysis of conservation conflicts in Protected Areas (PAs) raises interesting questions about the redefinition of human-environment relations in the current ecological crisis. In recent years these debates have unveiled that, in the attempt to define the ‘proper’ place of humans in nature, PAs have embodied modern dualistic worldviews, which understand nature as a realm different from society, culture and ‘civilisation’. This paper suggests that the utilisation of these worldviews should be understood as part of the conceptual apparatus that enables a transition in management roles in Protected Areas, through which new empowered groups are granted the right to control and use natural resources. By analysing the practices and discourses of conservation stakeholders at the Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park, in southern Spain, this paper shows that modern ideas of nature are essential to the collective appropriation of Cabo de Gata by new empowered groups because these ideas justify a new way of managing local resources in accordance with their own interests and desires. This has deep implications for the study of people-park conflicts and the problems associated to the promotion of more environmentally friendly ways of mastering the environment, which must be approached in the light of the power relations associated to the appropriation of territory and natural resources. The paper also concludes that, in order to understand how the nature-society dualism still dictates the way we should relate to the environment, we must trace the practices of those who bear this worldview and unveil the strategies and mechanisms that are used.

Keywords:

• protected areas
• conservation policies
• ecotourism
• nature–society
• Europe
• conservation stakeholders

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at a panel entitled ‘Mastering the environment?’ (Knut G Nustad and Signe Howell, organisers) at the 2012 biannual meeting of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Paris, France. I want to thank the organisers for their encouragement to publish this work and Alexandra Towers and Martina Prendergast for their editing.

Notes on contributor

Jose A. Cortes-Vazquez (Seville, Spain, 1982) graduated in 2011 with a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies from the Pablo Olavide University (Spain). His research interests include the ethnographies of nature conservation, sustainable development and people–park conflicts. He specialises in the European Mediterranean Area, particularly southern Spain, where he has been working since 2005. At present he is Lecturer in Geography at the School of Geography and Archaeology, National University of Ireland Galway.

Notes

¹There is an important issue here, identified by one reader of an earlier version of this paper. The word ‘naturalisation’ has other meanings, some of them much more popular, which can generate some confusion. The Oxford Dictionary defines the term naturalise, from which naturalisation derives, as (1) admitting (a foreigner) to the citizenship of a country, (2) establishing (a plant or animal) so that it lives wild in a region where it is not indigenous and (3) regarding as or causing to appear natural and explaining (a phenomenon) in a naturalistic way. Although the mainstream use of the term regards the first definition, the other two meanings are closely related to the main subject of this paper. Despite the confusion that this might generate, the reason for using the term naturalisation concerns its explanatory power. I believe the term summarises the process of material and symbolic production of a space in accordance with the particular environmental views that are inherent to Western Naturalism, which is the main phenomenon I study here. As such, I contend that the term is much more suitable than those more general ones, including re-territorialisation and heritagisation. Whether there might be connections between this phenomenon and others covered by the term Naturalisation, it is by no means my intention to explore them in this paper.

²This reflects the large extent my analysis is influenced by Foucauldian and Marxian approaches to the society–environment nexus and the production of nature (Castree, 2000; 2002) as well as by related analysis about the links between conservation policies and the distribution of privilege, fortune and misfortune (Anderson and Berglund, 2003; Brockington et al., 2008).

³The findings I am presenting here are the result of a six-year research, working with members of the Department of Social Sciences at the Pablo de Olavide University (Spain) on two applied research projects involving ethnographic fieldwork in several protected areas in Andalusia, southern Spain (project references: SEJ2004/SOCI-06161 and P06-RNM-02139). I carried out my own research at the Cabo de Gata-Nijar Natural Park alongside these two projects. Using an ethnographic approach based on semi-structured interviews and participant observation, I focused on social conflicts following the introduction of the park's management and land-use zoning plan. I opted for qualitative data since my intention was not to survey different positions towards conservation initiatives, but to obtain a ‘thick description’ – in Geertz's (1973) terms – of the senses and meanings given to the changes occurring in Cabo de Gata from the day-to-day experiences of different groups. For this paper, I am using data gathered via semi-structured interviews and participant observation with Park Managers, scientists, NGO members, ecotourism entrepreneurs and other new exurban inhabitants, as well as those obtained from an in-depth literature review and the analysis of Park's conservation plans and other secondary information sources.

⁴This dependence on wage labour is to be understood in relation to the privatisation of common lands, which mostly benefited big landowners (Góngora, 2004) and transformed the livelihoods of most small landowners and landless people, who relied on the utilisation of common lands as a source of fodder, graze and fuel. As Provansal and Molina (1991) analyse, these activities were essential economic complements because of the poor yields that were obtained from agriculture. 

⁵Between 1900 and 1970, the population level decreased by a striking 38 per cent. This trend changed from the 1980s onwards. The number of people living in Cabo de Gata has doubled since then (from 2700 to around 5700) (Source: Andalusia Statistic Institute. http://www.juntadeandalucia.es/institutodeestadisticaycartografia/; last access: July 2011).

⁶Similar population movements, which Vaschetto (2006) terms ‘utopian migrations’, have been studied in other parts of the World, for example in South America.

⁷Although some conservation initiatives in Spain date back to the early twentieth century, it has been from the 1970s onwards that the number of new PAs increased as never before. In Andalusia they were covering almost a quarter of the territory in just a few years.

⁸For more information at EU level, see Baker et al. (1994). For specific details on how this affected the framework Region of Andalusia, see Marchena (1993). Some notes about its influence in Cabo de Gata can be found in Provansal (2003).

⁹Although in this paper I focus exclusively on conservation supporters, I believe further clarifications about local population's position against the Park would be welcome. As I analyse elsewhere (Cortes-Vazquez, 2012; Cortes-Vazquez and Zedalis, 2013; Valcuende et al., 2011), it has been small landowners who have more fiercely opposed conservation measures. Reasons behind this concern the nature of irrigated agriculture in poly-tunnels, which report substantial revenues without requiring large estates. Moreover, this positioning also concern the historical relationship maintained with big landowners. These have been able to capitalise both in mass and nature tourism at the same time that benefited from the revalorisation of lands following the Park establishment. In addition, in recent years the Andalusian Government has been purchasing private lands in Cabo de Gata as a strategy to improve conservation management. Park Managers acknowledge that acquired lands mostly belong to big landowners who were able to offer larger plots at a lower price. Small landowners perceive this with distrust.

¹⁰More details about this process in Capel (1980).

¹¹The Park extension increased once again in 1994.

¹²The Park Governing Board (Junta Rectora, in Spanish) is an advisory consultant panel formed of different groups of stakeholders (scientists, NGOs, farmers, fishermen, local and regional government and tourism entrepreneurs, among others). They periodically meet to discuss issues concerning the Park management. However, despite its name, their only function is to provide advice, lacking any management capability or power to change the Park policy. These are exclusively on the hands of Park Officers and the different environmental bureaucracies of the Andalusia Regional Government.

¹³What is particularly interesting of these human-related components is that they are deemed the remaining signs of the ‘traditional’ inhabitants of Cabo de Gata, who are considered to have held a ‘wise’ know-how that permitted them to adapt to a dry environment in an efficient, environmentally friendly way. This form of regarding local inhabitants has acquired great importance in the Park policy in current years. Behind it, there is a serious attempt to integrate human presence within the conservation landscape (see similar cases in Anderson and Berglund's (2003) edited volume). Yet, as I will discuss in forthcoming sections and these authors have also stressed, the depiction of ‘traditional’ humans and their role, in a style that recalls the kind of ahistorical narratives analysed by Wolf (1982), raises further problems.

¹⁴To facilitate reading, this and the other of quotations in this paper have been translated from Spanish into English.

¹⁵The literature specialising in tourism and Protected Areas has questioned this supposedly flawless relationship and has stressed the influence exerted by tourist expectations – based on a Western rhetoric of wilderness, authenticity or primitive life (Vivanco, 2001; Wels, 2004) – on conservation management because they urge Park Managers to take actions so that these areas become attractive to potential consumers (West and Carriers, 2004). In other words, to achieve this win-win partnership between conservation and development through tourism, Parks must remain attractive and accessible for tourists, which eventually make conservation to be somehow dependant on the success of tourism initiatives.

¹⁶Some other local inhabitants (old farmers and fishermen and their descendants) have also initiated some tourism activities, although in a significantly lower proportion. This is clearly manifested in the marginal position they occupy in the main association of ecotourism entrepreneurs that exist in the Park (Natural Park Tourism Entrepreneurs Association [ASEMPARNA in Spanish initials]).

¹⁷Housing prices had plummeted due to the deep economic crisis in previous decades and the high levels of emigration that were being experienced at that time. Further particularities such as exchange rates between national currencies (Deutsche marks or British pounds being much stronger than Spanish pesetas) also explain this.

¹⁸It is interesting to note the references to a modernist, lineal sense of time in these images and narratives. For an explanation of the relationship between dualist ideas of nature–society and this sense of time, see Latour (1993).

¹⁹ Amigos del Parque Natural Cabo de Gata-Nijar (Friends of the Cabo de Gata-Nijar Natural Park): http://www.cabodegata.net/.

²⁰ASEMPARNA: http://www.cabodegata-nijar.es/.

²¹See, for example: ‘Ecologistas en Acción denuncia’ (1999) and ‘Ecologistas denuncian’ (1999).

²²Different news items that appeared in several international newspapers are evidences of this: ‘Building blight’ (2006), ‘Costas turn back tide’ (2006), «Espagne» (2009) and «Naturpark in Spanien» (2009).

²³See, for example: «Ecologistas en Acción protesta» (1999); further examples can be found in the Amigos del Parque NGO's self-edited journal El Eco del Parque: «Roturaciones ilegales en La Isleta y Los Escullos» (2004); «Roturación en San Miguel» (2006).

²⁴Further clarification is required at this point. Although for the sake of clarity and brevity I have made an effort to present the position of all these different conservation stakeholders as somehow homogeneous, the real situation is not so neat. Over the past two decades, there have been several conflicts between them, in particular as NGO members and ecotourism entrepreneurs urged Park Managers to take more severe actions to stop the installation of poly-tunnels, illegal ploughings, fish farming and the construction of new hotels. 

²⁵The original documents can be acceded at the environmental section of the Andalusian Government website: http://www.juntadeandalucia.es/medioambiente/site/portalweb/; last access: June 2011.