Conservation and neocolonialism

Conservation and Neocolonialism refers to the conservation movement as taken up today by international organizations such as the World Wide Fund for Nature, which has inadvertently set up a neocolonialist relationship with underdeveloped nations in a manner consistent with Immanuel Wallerstein’s World Systems Theory (Wallerstein, 1974) and Andre Gunder Frank’s
Dependency Theory (Frank, 1975).
Neocolonialism, with its attempts to create dependency through indirect control, demonstrates Andre Gunder Frank’s theory in a modern situation. In terms of conservation, foreign powers in the form of international conservation organizations exert pressure on underdeveloped nations to create protected areas. The national governments of these underdeveloped nations agree to do this because of the economic incentives they are given by the World Bank and donor nations. In Madagascar, for example, the World Bank actively participates in creating national parks by relieving national debt in exchange for establishing wilderness areas (Harper, 2002:97). The World Bank created, and continues to fund, the National Association for the Management of Protected Areas, which the Malagasy government runs, to manage national parks in Madagascar.
Within the underdeveloped nations, the conservation movement has become a form of internal colonialism. By agreeing to create wilderness areas that exclude people, the national governments force the local, often already marginalized, people off their territory. This creates a state of dependence on the state by the local people for their socioeconomic well-being. In the late 1980s, the conservation movement attempted to alleviate this dependency situation by developing community-based conservation (c.f. Drijver, 1992; Brockington, 2001). This utopian vision has not been quite as successful as planned, however. As Anthropologist Carol A. Drijver notes, “the local rural population may be used as informants and sometimes consulted for their opinions. However, this does not necessarily give them any real control or participation in the direction of the project” (Drijver, 1992:133). While international conservation organizations promise social and economic improvement to local communities as a direct result of the creation of national parks and protected areas, the outcome is seldom successful. Jobs created by the parks are more often given to people from outside the area with more education or connections than the local people often have.

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