
Transforming the Frontier: Peace Parks and the Politics of Neoliberal Conservation in Southern Africa
Bram Büscher
Based on extensive research in southern Africa with the Maloti-Drakensberg Transfrontier Conservation and Development Project, Büscher explains how the successful promotion of transfrontier conservation as a "win-win" solution happens not only in spite of troubling contradictions and problems, but indeed because of them. This is what he refers to as the "politics of neoliberal conservation," which receives its strength from effectively combining strategies of consensus, antipolitics, and marketing. Drawing on long-term, multilevel ethnographic research, Büscher argues that transfrontier conservation projects are not as concerned with on-the-ground development as they are purported to be. Instead, they are reframing environmental protection and sustainable development to fit an increasingly contradictory world order.
Product Details
About Bram Büscher
Reviews for Transforming the Frontier: Peace Parks and the Politics of Neoliberal Conservation in Southern Africa
Michael Schoon
Global Governance
“Transforming the Frontier is a concise book-length analysis of one particular transboundary conservation initiative. It expertly combines extensive theoretical discussion with the results of in-depth . . . field work. At the same time, it demonstrates how the MDTP is illustrative of a wider trend in contemporary conservation discourse and practice. Büscher’s efforts to link MDTP dynamics to the regional and global neoliberal political economy are convincing.”
Jörg Balsiger
Mountain Research and Development
“Transforming the Frontier is a sophisticated, theoretically heavy text, one that provokes the reader to seriously reflect on the effect of the increasingly common neoliberal governance of conservation. It is well worth the read.”
Jonathan Clapperton
Conservation Biology
"[A] masterful piece of scholarship that should find a hallowed place on our bookshelves . . ."
Larry Swatuk
Review of Policy Research
" . . . [Buscher's] approach immerses the reader in cutting edge academic thinking on conservation in the modern world . . . and gives the reader an idea of what tools are needed to conceptualise and analyse complex governmental systems in action . . . Buscher's book will surely help on the road to greater understanding."
James Middlemass
International Journal of Environmental Studies
"Transforming the Frontier offers a rich political ecology and a fascinating look not only at how the real and material are both discursive and nondiscursive categories but Büscher also clearly points to how these lines are blurring as conservation and development delve further and further into neoliberal arenas."
Alicia Davis
PoLAR