Abstract
This chapter outlines a historical political ecology of conservation initiatives in the Tarangire Ecosystem (TE). First, I turn to chronological history to highlight the origins and the evolution of key stages in the making and expanding of conservation initiatives in the TE. Through attention to chronological history, I show how dominant ideas about people and nature changed over time in the study area. Second, I revisit the TE as a site of contested histories to show how two environmental history narratives compete with each other – a statist narrative which is embraced by public authorities in government and conservation bureaucracies, and a people’s history which represents lived experiences and bottom-up conservation practices of human-wildlife coexistence. I argue that by dismissing and marginalizing locally meaningful narratives, experiences and representations of the TE, a statist narrative continues animating conservation conflicts in the present. Drawing on these insights from the TE’s environmental history and historical political ecology, the chapter concludes with an outlook on how people-wildlife coexistence in the region could be fostered through convivial conservation.
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Bluwstein, J. (2022). Historical Political Ecology of the Tarangire Ecosystem: From Colonial Legacies, to Contested Histories, Towards Convivial Conservation?. In: Kiffner, C., Bond, M.L., Lee, D.E. (eds) Tarangire: Human-Wildlife Coexistence in a Fragmented Ecosystem. Ecological Studies, vol 243. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93604-4_2
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