From a centralized management of the West African savannahs to the creation of territories of conservation and development in a context of environmental globalization - Essay

Abstract

Whith environmental global changes awareness, territorialization processes have changed at a local scale. The construction of discourses and regulation mechanisms by epistemic communities at a global scale can lead to the creation of territories of conservation and development. These territories creation is most often imposed to local population without a particular consideration for existing territorialities and action spaces. These territories lead to change in practices and strategies of resource management, that leads to concern about their environmental and social relevance.A research framework combining French ‘tropicalist’ geography and Anglophone political ecology is proposed to analyze the consequences of the creation of territories of conservation and development, according to 4 areas: (1) their impacts on the livelihoods of local populations that rely for all or part of these territories resources; (2) the unexpected territorialities emerging from the imposition of these territories in areas already territorialized and most often in many forms; (3) the gaps between these territories and the ecological processes in one hand and the spaces of activities in the other hand; (4) the contribution of these territories to Nature commodification and cutting in pieces placed on the market.