Summary PhD English - Büscher Jan09

Despite their ambiguous historical record, conservation/development interventions the world over have remained a popular environmental governance tool. One of the latest global ‘trends’ are interventions to establish so-called ‘Transfrontier Conservation Areas’ (TFCAs): large contiguous spaces that are principally aimed at conserving biological diversity across national boundaries. In line with broader discourses around sustainable development, bioregionalism and Community-Based Natural Resource Management, a second general objective of TFCAs is to uplift livelihoods of rural people living in and around these border spaces. By creating transfrontier institutions that bind states together for these purposes a third dimension emerges: stimulating international cooperation between countries. Consequently, TFCAs are also marketed as ‘peace parks’. As such, TFCAs have significantly increased the size, scope and ambition of interventions and stimulated new institutional forms and politics around conservation and development. This study provides an in-depth understanding of the rise, consolidation and implementation of TFCAs in the region that has appeared most influential in the global conceptualization of transfrontier conservation and development: Southern Africa.