Browsing by Subject "Wildlife"

This dissertation research explores participatory sea turtle conservation monitoring through a comparison of two case studies, one in North Carolina (NC), USA and the other in Baja California Sur (BCS), Mexico. Participatory approaches in conservation management can supplement state capacity as well as strengthen the involvement of citizens in environmental governance and knowledge production. Despite scholarship challenging the validity of the categories of developing and developed nations, this categorical assumptions derived from this binary world divide continue to inform conservation, and theoretical vocabularies for local roles in conservation management. In developed nations, participatory conservation management is framed through the broader administrative rationalism discourse, and is identified as volunteer conservation or citizen science. In developing nations, participatory conservation management is approached through the discourse of biodiversity and the threats human society poses to it, and is identified through community-based processes of conservation stewardship. The two case studies analyzed in this dissertation serve to interrogate the ways in which these distinct discourses influence outcomes, and consider what may be obscured or overlooked due to discursive constraints.

Conducting ethnographic research in each case study site, I participated in and observed sea turtle conservation activities and conducted in-depth interviews with relevant sea turtle conservation actors as well as collected documents pertaining to the conservation programs. Sea turtle conservation monitors in NC and BCS perform functionally similar conservation tasks, and I collected data using similar techniques in order to maximize comparability. I compare the case studies, not to generalize to a population, but instead to speak to theoretical propositions and inform existing theory on participatory conservation monitoring.

Although participatory monitoring in NC and BCS does not result in a democratization of science, there are beneficial outcomes to participants in both places. NC sea turtle monitors are enabled to take ownership of sea turtle stewardship, and BCS sea turtle monitors are enabled to promote conservation and cultural change using the authority of science. These outcomes challenge assumptions about state capacity and local engagements with science in participatory conservation, and the disparate approaches to local roles in conservation in each `world.' The overall findings suggest that a multitude of factors are involved in the production of conservation program frameworks and participant outcomes, and more deeply interrogating the taken for granted assumptions behind conservation designs and implementation can offer stronger understandings of what participatory conservation management can (and cannot) achieve.

Biodiversity conservation issues are complex and contentious. In this dissertation, I focus on Indian mammal conservation science, management, as well as policy issues that shape these factors. I am particularly interested in, where and which mammals are extinction prone, and what factors promote species persistence in human-dominated landscapes. I examine patterns of extinction, range contraction and current distribution of 25 species of large mammals in India in Chapters 2 and 3. I apply occupancy models to data from a sub-continental scale expert opinion survey. I model species occurrence in relation to ecological and social covariates based on a priori hypotheses about the determinants of mammalian distribution patterns.

I find that all 25 large mammal species are extinction prone. I find time affects extinction, and conservation initiatives of the last four decades have allowed some species to re-colonize some areas. I find protected wildlife reserves are critically important for persistence of species. Many species with much of their habitat outside existing protected areas will require new protected areas to persist. I find that human population density negatively influences survival probability for species, and human cultural tolerance positively affected persistence of species. Most large-bodied animals, habitat specialists, and rare species had higher extinction probabilities. I find that in addition to protected areas, land use, and human population densities, regionally rooted cultural and religious factors have allowed some species to survive. Conservation strategies must integrate all these factors to ensure the survival of India's large mammals in the future.

Conservation efforts to protect wildlife in human-dominated landscapes, often requires relocation of people. This policy has rarely been examined in detail. In Chapter 4, I focus on a reserve in India's Western Ghats of India to assess resettlement experiences of people during and after implementation of a relocation project.

Lastly, the success or failure of conservation policies and management interventions be they for protecting wildlife or addressing needs of local communities, depends substantially on the attitudes of conservation practitioners. In Chapter 5, I examine the attitudes, perspectives and opinions of Indian conservationists towards conservation issues and policies in India.

This dissertation explores the colonization of wildlife in nineteenth and early twentieth century British India. It discusses hunting and colonial policies on wildlife to explore the political, social and cultural concerns that influenced British interactions with Indian wildlife, with their compatriots and with natives. Hunting, I argue was deeply implicated in the exercise of power in all these interactions. British policies on wildlife in the nineteenth century favored a neat categorization of wild animals as "vermin and "game." By the beginning of the twentieth century however, with decreasing numbers of carnivores and native opposition, the perceived complementarily between game preservation and vermin extermination was shattered. While the colonial administration continued both these policies, they also actively sought to formulate policies to protect all animals in areas designated as sanctuaries and national parks. Colonial hunting as it emerged from the late nineteenth century reflects the changing nature of the colonial state and a new imperial ideology of dominance. I also argue racial differences between the colonialists and colonized were articulated in the domain of hunting. While hunting represented domination of nature and natives, the "colonial hunt" also came to signify a paternal benevolent British rule. The importance given to hunting and to the notion of fair play in their hunting served to "identify" the moral and physical superiority of British rulers. The new ideology of paternalism was realized in the figure of the hunter-officer, the Sahib who in hunting dangerous carnivores was seen to act as a protector of the native. The changing nature of the colonial state and creation of racial differences also had a profound impact on colonial society which became increasingly self conscious of its own identity and image. Given the metropolitan engagement with social Darwinism and their location on the fringes of civilization as it were, colonialists became the center of metropolitan preoccupation with racial contamination. The emphasis on fair play, I argue reflects the efforts of the colonial elite to enforce a model code of conduct on its members and reassure an anxious metropole of the racial distance with the native. Policing behavior of their own, through categories like fair play was therefore essential to the agenda of creating racial differences. Due to a perceived connection between hunting, power and privilege, hunting also played an important role in social relations in colonial society. As hunting came to be regulated by laws by late nineteenth century, it often became the focal point of tensions in class and power within the colonial elite on the question of access to animals.