The Geopolitics of Protected Areas

ABSTRACT

The conservation enterprise is embedded in ideas of the environment through which it promotes a vision of the world and the relations between the non-human and human. The papers in this forum analyse conservation from various vantage points to draw the links between geopolitics and conservation. The authors use three themes to demonstrate these links. The first theme draws on the concept of environmentality to show the mobilization of ecological rationalities and power towards the creation of protected areas. The second pays attention to networks formed across the distance, and how they influence the location and governance of protected areas. The third focuses on the strategies the conservation lobby uses to align local identities with global conservation ideals and goals. Collectively, these themes highlight features of conservation geopolitics.     

The survival of apartheid's last town council in Groblersdal,South Africa

The reconfiguration of South Africa's internal territorial spaces after 1990 was a logical outcome of the need to undo the effects of decades of territorial dismemberment under apartheid. In spite of the spatial reordering of areas which were controlled and administered by town councils established during apartheid, the Town Council of Groblersdal and its area of jurisdiction have remained unchanged up to the time of writing. This article attempts to explain and analyse the survival of the town council of Groblersdal in the Northern Province. It argues that the town council used the vacuum created by the provincial boundary dispute between Mpumalanga and the Northern Province to maintain the status quo in spite of legal struggles to determine its political future.