Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park

The great Limpopo Transfrontier Park is an effort to establish a protected area or “peace park” across areas in South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The park aims to create contiguous protected habitat across the international boundaries of three nations and to develop greater international collaboration in the establishment and maintenance of protected areas in Southern Africa. Although the idea to build contiguous protected areas in the region has been around for quite some time, work on the Transfrontierpark has accelerated over the past 15 years. Discuss the assumptions underlying the project and some of the discourses and narratives used to rationalize, organize, and implement the park project. What sorts of benefits does the program produce and to whom do those benefits accrue? What sorts of complications might be (or have been) encountered in designing and implementing the Great Limpopo trans-boundary park?

Guidelines:
The purpose of the essay is to have you conduct research on the topic of your choice, engage with the existing literature, demonstrate an understanding of course material and the ability to apply a political ecology/critical human-environment geography perspective to a particular environmental issue. Your paper should include a thesis, reasoned and substantiated argumentation, and the use of scholarly references. You may incorporate academic articles and book chapters from the course reading list and material from more popular media sources (magazines, newspapers, web-based material), however, your research efforts need to go beyond this. You will need to find and reference several academic articles and/or book chapters to demonstrate a sufficient research effort. There is no magic number for how many academic sources you need to have. Use your sources to demonstrate engagement with the existing literature and to support and substantiate your arguments. In an essay of this length I would expect that at minimum you would need to reference five or six academic sources.

Please use APA style in text citations.

• Contain a clear and concise thesis.
• Demonstrate good research effort, and engagement with the existing literatureonthe topic.
• Contain reasoned and substantiated argumentation.
• Demonstrate an understanding of course material and the ability to apply course concepts and critical tools to a contemporary environmental issue.
• Address the chosen question and remain on topic.
• Proper in text referencing and full bibliographic details in a reference list.

Academic references:

Cronon, W. (1996). The trouble with wilderness: Or, getting back to the wrong nature. Environmental History, 1 (1), 7-28

Fairhead, J. & Leach, M. (1997). False forest history, complicit social analysis: Rethinking some West African environmental narratives. World Development, 23(6), 1023-1035.

Neumann, R. (1996). Dukes, earls and ersatz Edens: Aristocratic nature preservationists in colonial Africa. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14, 79-98

Milne, S. & Adams, B. (2012). Market Masquerades: Uncovering the politics of community-level payment for ecosystem services in Cambodia. Development & Change, 43 (1), 133-158.