Biodiversity conservation in land reform : the continuities and discontinuities of colonial thought and practice : a case study of the Dwesa-Cwebe nature reserve
One of the many reasons for the dispossession of the land from black people was the colonial and apartheid regime’s commitment towards establishing nature reserves and national parks for the purposes of biodiversity conservation. The nature conservation discourse has remained strong even after the demise of these discriminatory regimes. Biodiversity conservation and the preservation of ecosystems have occupied a prominent role in the development discourse in South Africa and globally. The more recent approaches to the discourse have been on punting conservation as the basis from which all development springs. But even with this, there has been a lot of effort, wittingly or unwittingly, to craft the discourse in apolitical and ahistorical terms. There has been little effort to dissect the historical colonial thinking that still persists in the biodiversity conservation sector, and the factors that help sustain in thereof. The primary aim of this research therefore was to disentangle these ‘colonial gestures’ in biodiversity conservation and locate conservation within the framework of our colonial present .The main objective of this study is to assess and dissect the presence of the colonial motives and thinking, in the processes of policy development and programme implementation in as far as biodiversity conservation is concerned.
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