Contested territory : authority, access, and transboundary conservation in the Greater Virunga landscape

Hanley, Matt and Cleaver, Frances and Lacy, Mark (2025) Contested territory : authority, access, and transboundary conservation in the Greater Virunga landscape. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Since 1991, Western conservation NGOs have been working with state governments of Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo to protect the critically endangered mountain gorilla and their transboundary tropical rainforest habitat in the Greater Virunga Landscape (GVL). While ecologically successful, research of the impacts of global conservation discourses on local and indigenous communities in the region remain under-developed. Similarly, challenges to the authority of governing arrangements in the three contiguous gorilla-dwelling national parks, generated by global environmental governance narratives, remain unexplored. Processes of territorialisation have challenged formations of property and land, the legitimacy of authority in the GVL, and access to forest resources, causing authority in conservation interventions to be contested by multiple social actors with differing and frequently competing agendas. This thesis reveals the complex dynamics of multi-spatial authority and resource access, both in environmental governance and on local impacts of biodiversity conservation in the GVL, in an arena of political and violent interstate and civil conflict. Tensions persist around the fortress conservation model adopted by Western conservation NGOs in East Africa. The deployment of Western conservation science and capitalist economic policies in Virunga ecotourism has resulted in the commodification and exploitation of nature, evictions, and the continuing marginalisation of indigenous and local groups in the name of revenue-raising, and political conflict over border areas. The thesis reveals that conservation authority is not singular but plural, contested, fragmented and continually negotiated amidst layers of postcolonial regimes of contested legitimacy. Grounded in political ecology, the thesis conducts a critical interrogation of this contestation of authority. In doing so, epistemic authority is identified as a form of dominant power that operates through knowledge production rather than resource control or property rights. The research reveals the economic, social, and political realities of transboundary conservation landscapes in post-conflict dynamics. It demonstrates how the impact of complex (neo)colonial legacies is producing potentially fatal ruptures in the conservation episteme, where discursive practices of the epistemic conservation community no longer fit the reality of gorilla conservation in the GVL.