No space for participation: Pastoralist narratives and the etiology of park-herder conflict in southeastern Niger

Abstract

State‐sponsored programs for protecting natural areas in Africa have increasingly adopted ‘participatory’ approaches. While a welcome change from the more coercive approaches of the past, a major impediment to the effectiveness of such programs is how conservationists conceptualize the logics, constraints, and spatial scales associated with the production practices of rural inhabitants that may cross protected perimeters. This paper examines the growing conflict between Fulße herders and managers of National Park ‘W’ in southeastern Niger. Rationales for conservationist reactions to herder incursions in the coercive past and ‘participatory’ present are supported by ‘development narratives’ t..