Introduction

Protected areas – state-led, community-based, or privately owned – embody future-oriented conservationist interventions into dynamic social-ecological relations. Habitually they are connected to aspirations and anxieties of future environmental states and are meant to put a hold on dynamics framed as dystopic. In many cases they also aim at the restoration of a prior vaguely defined ecological state. Despite their explicit environmental aims, they are intimately connected to the future-making agendas of socially and culturally embedded power groups acting across spatial and political scales.

This holds true particularly for the African continent. Early protected areas were gazetted to bring the wanton destruction of wildlife instigated by commercial hunters and the globalization of trade in wildlife products (ivory, rhino horn, ostrich feathers, hippo skins, etc.) witnessed in the second part of the 19th century to a halt. From the early 20th century onwards the establishment of protected areas had a twofold aim: to accomplish state control in marginal rural areas and to foster governmental income. Great economic expectations have been linked to the inauguration of protected areas in the early 20th century, in the 1950s/1960s, the 1980s/1990s, and today. The rapidly established national parks of the 1960s were meant to service independent African states as a source of stable income (via tourism) and as foundations of national pride bestowed on future-minded stewards of a global heritage. The enormous costs of major land-use change, relocation of sedentary communities within protected areas, and the effort spent on policing protected areas were all justified by the expectation that such protected landscapes were significant for the future economic welfare of colonies, independent African states and lately rural communities.

Nowadays, conservation is meant to address global problems of catastrophic biodiversity loss and devastating global climate change, to add to the national economy and to contribute to local development and poverty eradication. Such aspirations are attached to hopes for a coexistence of humans and wildlife against the apocalypse of global ecological change. Sociologist Jens Beckert calls such narratives ‘fictional expectations’ and argues that the decision-making of politicians is often anchored in such fictions. Beckert (2013: 220) defines fictionality in economic action as the ‘inhabitation in the mind of an imagined future state of the world and the beliefs in causal mechanisms leading to this future state’. He argues that ‘actors are motivated in their actions by the imagined future and organize their activities based on these mental representations’. Expanding on Beckert’s argument, we suggest that such promising political and economic fictions are strongly coupled with projections of impending collapse. In other words: whenever protected areas expanded rapidly, such expansions were reasoned to be direct answers to ecological crises. But what does such crises-reasoned future-making look like?

The idea that the imagination of the future informs present decisions is also taken up by Sheila Jasanoff who argues that contestations over possible techno-scientifically driven futures define resources, rights and obligations to manage them and privileged access to benefits accruing from such resources. In order to persuade people ‘to opt for any vision of a future world, […][it] requires a leap into a fictive, unrealized landscape of dreams rather than one of tangible reality. At the same time, those visions must have enough solidity to win people’s allegiance, to enable action, and secure buy-in’ (Jasanoff 2020: 30). Jasanoff’s key idea of ‘collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology’, as formulated in Dreamscapes of Modernity (Jasanoff and Kim (eds) 2015), bears significant potential for our analysis of Africa’s conservation landscapes. The notion of a promising future and efforts to persuade international donors as well as rural dwellers of marginal rural areas is omnipresent in the field of conservation, especially the advertisement of conservation projects, tourist destinations, and the benefits of trophy hunting for successful conservation. The promotion of a sustainable and economically beneficial vision of conservation informs current decisions of policy-makers, and the use of technological surveillance to monitor popular wildlife species evokes the belief that future conservation can be carefully designed and precisely drafted in order to achieve desired goals.

In this contribution we examine past and present conservation visions of major actors in the field: colonial administrators, state officials, conservation organizations, activists, donors, and NGO leaders. Inspired by Sheila Jasanoff’s and Jens Beckert’s ideas on the intricate relation between future-making agendas and political action, we reflect upon the history of conservation visions and their impact on conservation planning in and for rural Africa. We describe to what extent projections of doom scenarios at different times during the 20th century influenced both international conservation agendas and the implementation of conservation projects on the African continent. We also outline how the visions of ‘desirable conservation futures’ were produced and how they shaped policies and conservation projects. We conclude the text with an outlook on current trends in conservation that shape the path conservation may take in the 21st century.

A short note about the methodological approach. This article is based on many years of empirical fieldwork and archival work we have conducted in southern and eastern Africa. To extend our experience to a continental perspective, we extensively reviewed the African conservation literature and policy reports to identify overarching trends and the linkages between local and regional conservation efforts and international initiatives. The focus was primarily on understanding key trends that have shaped conservation policy and implementation both historically and recently.