Current community-based conservation (CBC) practices in East Africa have long been critiqued by activists and community members as decidedly colonial. However, while that designation has a large degree of merit, it also obscures the political and economic mechanisms by which past is turned to present in these spaces, as well as the range of participation enjoyed by local communities. Our panel traces that very genealogy, analyzing how colonial-era environmental and wildlife conservation policy has been inherited or adapted by post-colonial states, and the role of international non-governmental organizations within that adaptation. The erosion of state budgets has contributed to the privatization of conservation in both Kenya and Tanzania, yet that very privatization has reimposed the long-term state abandonment of certain spaces and communities. Furthermore, the rhetorical flourish offered by the term ‘community-based conservation,’ a conservation model that implies local ownership and direction, obscures the overlapping matrices of power that leave those same communities at the mercy of structural inequities. In exploring both the public-private partnerships that facilitate CBC programs, their historical relationship to colonial structures of power, and the experience of local communities in these areas, this panel places contemporary conservation policy in its proper genealogical context.

Dr. Raycraft’s paper provides historical genealogy of centralized conservation policies in Tanzania first implemented during the colonial period and later expanded upon by the socialist state following independence. During this era, CBC projects privatized conservation policy in the country while existing alongside a much more centralized government approach. Dr. Raycraft’s paper therefore considers whether the neoliberal era of conservation actually represents a break from centralized state power, as understood through both policy and the testimonies of pastoral communities living within CBC projects today. Similarly, Dr. Parker’s paper analyzes the historical trajectory of privatized conservation in northern Kenya through the prism of two organizations: the Nature Conservancy and the Northern Rangelands Trust. By emphasising the continuities between colonial environmental conservation policy in northern Kenya and the inheritance of those lands by private groups, the paper demonstrates how western disdain for indigenous ecologies has generated differential but overlapping policies over the past sixty years that systematically exclude communities from riverine lands.Finally, Dr. Kirigia’s paper explores the erasure of indigenous communities and ecologies in CBC projects in the Kenyan rangelands. Organizations there impede the very biodiversity conservation they claim to protect via historic and current processes of exclusion which are made logical, legitimate, and spectacular by state or private power. Through a framework of environmental justice, Kirigia elevates indigenous epistemologies to propose alternative models for convivial conservation that break from this dispossessive past. Taken together these papers reveal the historical antecedents of community-based conservation despite these initiatives’ very recent origins, and unmask the rhetorical falsehoods that imply community ownership while states and organizations in fact perpetuate long-term dispossession and ecological erasure.