GeoJournal 58: 253–263, 2002. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 253 Post-colonial nature conservation in Southern Africa: same emperors, new clothes? Jaidev Singh 1 & Henk van Houtum 2 1 Institute for Culture and Ecology, PO Box 6688, Portland, Oregon 97228-6688, USA 2 Department of Human Geography, University of Nijmegen, PO Box 9108, 6500 HK Nijmegen, The Netherlands Abstract This paper analyses and evaluates the bordering and othering impacts of environmental geopolitical discourse on land conservation in Southern Africa. Through a theoretical in-depth analysis of the use and contents of the term conserva- tion, this paper examines how conservation is determined, instrumentalized and interpreted by the state, international governmental and non-governmental institutions, and specific interest groups including neo-liberal capitalists and local communities especially in the developing world context. In particular, we discuss the impact of current transboundary park- like conservation practices in Southern Africa and how these feed into the continuous attempts to colonise Southern Africa’s nature. “Native Americans were not mistaken when they accused the Whites of having forked tongues. By separating the rela- tions of political power from the relations of scientific reasoning while continuing to shore up power with reason and reason with power, the moderns have always had two irons in the fire. They have become invincible.” (Latour, 1993, p. 38) “Since most of us live in a hierarchicalsociety, any discourse on wildlife tends to be about social relationships. Whom can we exclude from our Garden of Eden, and how can we keep ‘others’ from trespassing on valuables that help sustain our life and livelihoods, if not our identities.” Marks (1994, p. 120) “...it could be argued that binary divisions are deeply etched into social space and it is a deeper understanding of boundary erection and distancing that is required if we are to provide alternatives to exclusion and conflict” (Sibley, 2001, p. 240). Introduction This paper grows out of interest in the use of conservation as a rhetorical concept in land-use planning endeavors. By examining conservation as a land-use technique, it seeks to explore the underpinnings of this ‘tool’ and its impacts on the very nature it seeks to protect and on the people who derive and lose benefits from the conservation effort. By focusing our attention on the land management aspect of conservation, we largely restrict ourselves to the spatial- ity of conservation. In the process of examining the spatial impacts of conservation we also explore its links to the pro- duction of expert/technical knowledge and its relation to the advancement of the power and control of modern states and customary elites in the developing world. While doing so we determine that conservation has not only land manage- ment implications but also strategic territorial connotations. The territorial connotations of conservation are especially important as they relate to the expansion of control of and ac- cess to land and resources of actors engaged in conservation through geo-political ideologies, specifically neoliberalism. Building on the current debate on political ecology 1 , we begin by arguing that conservation as a state science was produced based on utilitarian principles and ideologies of nature that assisted in bringing social order out of the chaos that was perceived in Europe and European colonies at the start of the Industrial Revolution. We then explore its land use and social ordering implications along with the con- comitant imaginings of the term’s meaning and overview the evolution of conservation from fields such as forestry in order to provide a ground for challenging current conser- vation knowledge and projects, specifically transboundary conservation in southern Africa. Through a discussion of the interaction of actors – local, national and international – in the context of transboundary conservation, we then present an empirically illustrated understanding of envir- onmental geopolitics that relates to boundary making and territorialization inherent in state and interstate conservation practices (Sletto, 2002). We begin our empirical discussion by examining colonial conservation in southern Africa and exploring the makings of an expert knowledge through co- lonial imaginings of identity, landscape and wilderness. Of particular concern are the imaginings of nature and identities wrought by conservation practices and technologies from the colonial past to the post-colonial present. By focusing on the ongoing efforts in Southern Africa to create transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs) between Zimbabwe, Mozambi- que and South Africa, this paper will reveal the othering and (b)ordering processes inherent in conservation while explor-