Annette Green on Overcoming Difficulties in Conservation-Farmer Collaboration: The Role of Open-mind
“There’s a moral and intellectual imperative there to include farmers in a meaningful way.”
Annette Green started her conservation journey as a languages graduate working for a tour operator in Tanzania. Since this time, she has completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge researching social aspects of conservation in Tanzania, and is now conducting post-doctoral research with Cumbrian farmers at the University of Edinburgh. This experience makes her the perfect candidate for this blog as she has both academic and personal experiences of the social impacts of conservation on farmers.
*All text in this interview is paraphrased and adapted from a conversation with Dr Green.
Tell me about what motivated you to work within the intersection between conservation and agriculture. Why do you think it’s important?
The thing that originally piqued my interests in conservation, was when I was working for a tour operator in Tanzania selling safari holidays to American and European tourists. Whilst doing this job, I became aware that I was selling a very specific narrative about what Tanzania was like and have since come to realise this is tied up with problematic ideas about pristine wilderness and an absence of people, which is a very common idea about conservation in Africa. This can be seen when you go through Tanzania, with huge national parks and flagship areas (such as the Serengeti) which can have strict segregation between conservation land and agricultural settlements. This segregation has historically affected incomes in the country and the ear marking of land for distinct purposes is embedded it the countries history as a colony. Further to this, I was selling a narrative to myself too, that bringing tourists into this country was beneficial from a development perspective, which is a very mainstream conceptualisation of development and tourism, especially countries in the Global South where tourism is promoted as if it benefits everyone. In Tanzania, the income from tourism influences how conservation is done and I was always very aware that I did not understand how money from tourism was helping ordinary Tanzanian people (such as subsistence farmers). I found these social aspects of conservation fascinating and I just wanted to understand more about it.
I think the intersection between conservation agriculture is unavoidably political and I just really wanted to understand that politics and to learn more about it first-hand. There’s a few different elements driving this interest; the intellectual interest of it, and then also this kind of emotional connection that I had to Tanzania of having worked there. It was almost like moral obligation to understand whether what I'm doing [bringing tourists into the country] actually beneficial to Tanzanian people? Is bringing tourists in really helping development? Does it really support people to lead their lives? Does it really help conservation? My research in this area helped me learn that tourism does not always lead to development, and conservation can have negative impacts on people’s lives (including farmers). These impacts are particularly stark in Tanzania where many people have a very direct relationship with the land and are dependent on agriculture.
Throughout your career, you have worked alongside farmers in your research. Could you give an example of a time that working alongside stakeholders has taught you something new or changed the way that you’ve approached a research problem?
For my PhD, I was interviewing farmers in Tanzania about corridors for conservation, the idea that you need to create links between existing protected areas or areas of conservation importance. The idea is that such corridors facilitate the movement of wildlife which allows them to maintain healthy genetics and so prevents localised extinction and maintains certain ecological processes. The farmers I worked with in my research were sandwiched between a national park in the North Valley and a game reserve in the South Valley. Conservations said that there needed to be connections between these two protected areas and the farmers might have been getting in the way of achieving this.
Through conversation with the farmers, it was clear that they didn’t see ecological connection in quite so simple and binary terms, for example if animals want to move across the two parks they will do it anyway regardless of whether they are farming there or not (such as an elephant or a buffalo). As the animals are already moving freely, the farmers didn’t see the logic in changing their farming systems and where they farmed. For conservation organisations to achieve their goals, there needs to be a understanding that the people that you're working with view the landscape in a way that might be fundamentally different to the way you view it. You need to you need to know that because you might find that the project is a bit of a non-starter because well the people that your supposed to be working with are never going to agree to it. However, this is where power balance issues and politics between big organisations and country politicians, and the local stakeholders.
Overall, there can be a real disconnect between how a farmer sees something and how a conservation organisation sees something, so you have to take that into account in conservation strategy. Anything I’ve learned from farmers has started with open mindedness. These principles have been the same when working with Cumbrian farmers and organisations. They will just see a landscape in a different way and have different priorities.
In your opinion, what are the key difficulties for collaboration between conservationists and farmers? How do you think that this could be overcome?
I think the key difficulty is not having enough open mindedness and issues of participation in general. I mean, the fact that participation is even offered to farmers is viewed with its own kind of connotations by farmers that it is something that that is something that should be given to them, like it a gift, rather than it being a true collaboration and true empowerment for the people who live on the land, know the land, and have real and valuable knowledge to offer. That's probably a systemic problem is often to do with how conservation is done in general, some organisations take participation, empowerment and collaboration more seriously than others. They will come with the money that they have got and they will want to make certain things happen and achieve certain deliverables which they need to achieve for the funding. This aspect of it may make the project follow a certain trajectory before farmers and land managers have been involved.
An example of where participation in conservation has had negative connotations has been seen in the area of Cumbria in which I am currently doing my work. In this area, there has been some talk of rewilding. This can be a very contentious word for some people and it has often been portrayed that farmers have a very visible negative reaction to the word. However from having worked with farmers in this part of the country, I would argue that this is a mischaracterisation and in fact farmers, like anyone else, have varied opinions on rewilding for a variety of reasons. A subset of farmers don’t mind the ideas, whereas others may not like it for legitimate reasons, and all opinions in between!
As discussed, sometimes what is dressed up as participation and very inclusive conservation work on paper is perceived as farmers as tolerating them in the landscape and not including them in the outset. Furthermore, the politics of which farmers to include in conservation decision making can be a minefield in its own right. Having a proper social scientist consultants involved in conservation work could help overcome these issues with participation. This is getting better with the social science, and politics of collaboration is being taken more seriously by conservations than it was in the past.
What can ecologists do to increase farmer participation in ecology and decision making?
Take the politics of it seriously and do all of that ground work as thoroughly as you can. It is systemic as well, so it is difficult to make those kind of fundamental changes if you are just one organisation because you do have to get your funding from somewhere, you do have to answer to someone whether that's like one major funder that’s given you set deliverables or set things to be achieved. The organisation could also be answerable to the general public who have their own perceptions on what conservation should be like in both this country and the other side of the world which could make participation harder to implement. It won’t be easy to change things, but through taking the social and cultural aspects of farming into account from the offset of conservation work we can make a start. There’s a moral and intellectual imperative there to include farmers in a meaningful way.
Is there anything else I’ve not asked you about which you think is relevant or interesting?
These things are becoming more important over time with the increasing numbers of threats we have to both conservation, climate and farming. So it can only be a good thing to reflect deeply on these kind of questions and I think we should be encouraging conservationists and farmers alike to reflect on their values and why they think particular things. This might make people more amenable to listening to other people’s point of view if they did that.
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