Katharina Lenner and Sylvie Janssens, ““Conserve Not Protect”?: Competing Environmental Imaginaries in Jordan’s Conservation Thinking and Practice”, Arab Studies Journal, Vol. XXXII, No. 1 (Spring 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article?
Katharina Lenner and Sylvie Janssens (KL & SJ): We both spent a good part of our PhD research—which in both cases focused on other issues pertaining to rural Jordan—witnessing negotiations around conservation and exploring some of the contentious dynamics between local populations and the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN), the non-governmental organization charged with managing protected areas in Jordan. The depth of the antagonisms we encountered in different places, as well as the obviously significant role of RSCN as a governing agency in rural Jordan, made us dig deeper into the history of conservation in the country in an effort to understand where dominant ideas around protected areas came from, how they connected with imaginaries of conservation circulating across the globe, how they interacted with other dynamics in the country, and how they were (re-)negotiated by different actors over time.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the article address?
KL & SJ: The article engages with competing environmental imaginaries over the course of Jordan’s history, particularly around protected area management. We offer a new interpretation of how intersecting global and local actors and strategies have shaped contemporary struggles around protected areas over time. We particularly highlight two issues. The first one is that while conservation is deeply shaped by colonial imaginaries, what environmental colonialism actually means is multiple and specific. Looking at the circulation of ideas in the transition from British to American hegemony in Jordan is particularly insightful in this regard.
Secondly, we show how past environmental imaginaries remain deeply ingrained in contemporary efforts to make conservation more participatory. This both relates to the socio-spatial setup and institutional practices of protected areas, and the ways in which communities living around them relate to them. We show how an exclusive notion of protected areas as pristine spaces established in the 1970s has lingered on into the 1990s and after, when conservation was supposed to become more people-centered. By bringing together institutional perspectives with those of communities in and around different protected areas we show how this legacy has complicated a genuine transition in this direction.
Directional sign for Dana reserve (mahmiyat Dana) riddled with bullet holes, near Faynan, Wadi 'Araba. Photo by Katharina Lenner, 2010.
J: How does this article connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
KL: The article connects with my current book project, which focuses on the politics of poverty alleviation in Jordan. It explores the many ways in which rural Transjordanian populations in particular have been socio-economically marginalized over the course of Hashemite rule and traces how, since the gradual reorganization of governance since the late 1990s and 2000s, they have been addressed as (potential) small entrepreneurs expected to wean themselves off dependency of the state, and to what end. The paradigm of integrated conservation and development, which became hegemonic in the mid-1990s—a focus of the article—is part and parcel of this change of governing strategies, and as such it is also discussed in the book, with an empirical focus on Dana reserve and the people living around it. At the same time, this paradigm has its own history in conservationist thinking and practice, which the article explores in much more depth.
SJ: My PhD dissertation traces the heterogenous socio-material elements through which private property in Azraq has been, and continues to be, performed. It analyzes the role that world-making projects, such as conservation, play in putting together, consolidating, and destabilizing the (private) property arrangement. Through processes such as the enclosure of land for nature’s protection and the imposition of what constitutes a “proper” relation to land (for example, herding versus agriculture), conservation discourses and practices continuously reorder some of property’s constitutive elements (for example, land’s value and the ways in which property becomes intelligible and legible). As such, my research demonstrates how conservation can help effect a world conducive to a particular—in this case private—property arrangement.
J: Who do you hope will read this article, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
KL & SJ: We hope the article will be interesting for a broad range or readers interested in conservation, rural politics, and land issues in Jordan, as well as in other countries in the region and more globally. We would love for it to contribute to discussions of the multiple forms and legacies of environmental colonialism, and on what alternative forms of conservation are imaginable given the lasting legacies of excluding local residents from conservation management. We believe it will only be possible for conservation to be truly owned by populations living in and around protected areas when these legacies are openly acknowledged and addressed by conservation agencies.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
KL: My recent work has focused on the politics and policies around the labor market participation of marginalized populations, including refugees, migrant workers, and women in the region. At the moment, I am working on a project on garment sector workers, which compares working conditions and prospects for social protection in a largely formalized setting dominated by a South Asian work force—Jordan—with that an almost entirely informally regulated one—Turkey, where Syrian refugees constitute most of the workers.
SJ: I have left academia and now work for a Belgian independent federal institution promoting and guaranteeing gender equality.
Excerpt from the article (from the Introduction, footnotes removed)
Conservation and tourism are among the main ways through which international organizations, NGOs and states have produced and reproduced nature in the Middle East. Over the past decades, these intertwined projects of improvement have substantially contributed to inserting rural areas in the region into transnational circuits of expertise and capital formation. They have also fundamentally redefined the relationship between “nature” and “humans,” including people living in and around designated protected areas, and those passing through them as visitors.
In Jordan, much like elsewhere, a significant change in institutionalized conservation efforts occurred in the 1990s. The global proliferation of sustainable development initiatives, which advocated fusing development and conservation, coincided with a period in which the country increasingly reoriented itself toward global markets. The country’s protected areas became central to these transformations. The result was new discourses and practices of conservation that gave particular attention to the livelihoods of communities in and around protected areas.
These transformations did not, however, come out of the blue. They tied into previously established forms of thinking about conservation and their spatial manifestations. Researchers have traced these transnational legacies and their colonial underpinnings in other cases in the region. They have particularly highlighted how colonial conservation initiatives decisively shaped dynamics of exclusion and dispossession of local communities, particularly pastoral nomads, on the pretext that they supposedly degraded nature. For Jordan, however, the history of institutionalized conservation efforts and their impact on contemporary forms of conservation remains largely unexplored. Scholars have partially reconstructed the history and institutional dynamics of the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN), the nongovernmental organization charged with managing Jordan’s protected areas. They have also analyzed the transnational economies and networks of expertise involved in the design and the daily life of a number of RSCN’s current protected areas and their surroundings. By and large, however, they have focused on the post-1990s period, exploring how the RSCN’s Integrated Conservation and Development (ICD) approach has played out in often conflictual interaction with residents in and around protected areas.
In this article, we build and expand on this literature by combining discussion of Jordan’s earlier conservation history with in-depth analysis of contemporary environmental imaginaries among conservationists as well as residents of the south of Jordan. We offer a new interpretation of how intersecting global and local actors and strategies have shaped contemporary struggles around protected areas over time. Exploring different international visions for conservation in Jordan, and how they have aligned or contrasted with those of local elites and organizations, highlights the significance of competing global imaginaries of conservation and their effects. It helps explain how a relatively exclusive legacy of protected areas as pristine spaces could take hold at the expense of an initial, more inclusive conceptualization of conservation in the form of multipurpose national parks. We argue that the success of the more exclusive model, and the way the RSCN engrained it in their organizational dynamics and the spatial setup of the country’s protected areas, has hindered contemporary efforts to transition to more genuinely community-led forms of conservation.
By drawing out alternative environmental imaginaries, the article sheds light on a forgotten dimension of conservation in Jordan, which it places in the context of different actors’ geostrategic and economic considerations over decades. Moreover, our analysis offers a rare insight into a context in which notably different (post)colonial environmental imaginaries intersected. When scholars and practitioners discuss the trajectory of international conservation, they often present it as a clear sequence of colonially established reserves, which transformed into national parks in the postcolonial period, but largely maintained their restrictive land-use policies and exclusion of local communities. The case of Jordan complicates such an account, highlighting that the coloniality of conservation does not necessarily or primarily emanate from the (former) colonial power. Analyzing competing global imaginaries in the same context helps to nuance accounts of their persistent effects in the region. It strengthens calls that we should understand environmental colonialism as both specific and multiple. It also points to alternative trajectories, which could have turned institutionalized conservation in Jordan and elsewhere into a less exclusive undertaking.
Finally, the longue durée perspective we offer contributes to scholarship on factors that shape the (limited) transformation of conservation governance. We highlight how past environmental imaginaries remain ingrained in contemporary efforts to make conservation more participatory, both in the socio-spatial setup and institutional practices of protected areas, and in the ways communities living around them relate to them. By bringing together institutional and community perspectives over time, and by highlighting how communities transmit their perspectives between different locations, we enable a more comprehensive understanding of dynamics that have complicated attempts to transform conservation governance.
The first two sections trace the evolution of knowledge production about conservation in Jordan and its materialization in the 1960s to 1980s. We show how the interaction among international conservation agencies’ agendas and priorities of international funding bodies and national agencies shaped this process in the context of a gradual transition from British to US hegemony in Jordan. While British proposals for a multipurpose national park in Azraq (section 1) might have led to a relatively inclusive form of conservation, they did not materialize. Instead, during the subsequent phase of US hegemony in Jordan, combined with the Hashemite state’s tightening of territorial control, a fortress conservation model became dominant. This model excluded local communities from using and managing the resources of protected areas (section 2). Section 3 rethinks the degree of continuity and change that came in the 1990s, with the turn toward ICD, focusing on Dana Biosphere Reserve as a laboratory for this new approach. It traces how the intellectual and spatial legacies developed over preceding decades combined with new circuits of capital, knowledge, and people to establish the “Dana model” as a success story. It shows how, despite integrating a socioeconomic perspective into conservation efforts, the model placed limited value on the environmental expertise of local communities, particularly pastoralists. Finally, section 4 explores these communities’ engagement with expert discourses relating to protected areas and conservation. It argues that the Dana model not only has shaped conservation thinking and practices across the country until today, but also has constituted the main target of residents’ critique, appropriation, and mobilization. There has been a partial turn toward more participatory forms of conservation that allow for multiple uses of land, reminiscent of the British approach of the 1960s. The Dana model’s legacy, however, has often prevented a cooperative relationship between local communities and the conservation agency.
We use the terms “participatory” and “people-centered” institutionalized conservation to denote a new standard of governance that has become increasingly hegemonic in international conservation institutions since the late 1980s. In conjunction with sustainable development discourse, under this standard conservation is supposed to develop a “human face.” The implication is that conservation agencies acknowledge indigenous communities’ rights to the land and include them in conservation management, for example through community-based natural resource management schemes. They also commit to shift from enclosing land for preservation purposes alone toward permitting multiple kinds of use of conservation land, including agriculture. Yet our article confirms the finding in much of the critical literature that many such attempts are tokenistic exercises that do not follow a social justice agenda, and that residents meet them with skepticism because their ingrained experiences of exclusion and dispossession make it hard to imagine a different mode of institutionalized conservation.
The article is based on archival research in London and Amman, as well as interviews and participant observation among conservation experts and local communities that we individually conducted between 2007 and 2015 in, around, or about different protected areas in the country, especially Azraq, Dana, and Wadi Rum. Fieldwork took place over five stays in Jordan of two to three months for each author. Katharina Lenner’s research stays were recurring short-term visits to different areas around Dana reserve for up to a week at a time, usually based in a community-run hotel or in self-organized accommodations. Sylvie Janssens stayed in Azraq for several weeks at a time with a local family and made several briefer visits to Wadi Rum. Research participants in and around the protected areas consisted of staff working for the RSCN as site managers, community liaison officers, eco-guides, rangers, or handymen, as well as heads and members of local cooperatives engaged in tourism-related activities, and local government representatives. Interviews and conversations were conducted in English and Arabic.