There are primarily two conservation approaches that have been in use since the beginning of the 20th century. The one conservation approach has been designed in such a way as to separate human beings from their natural environment. This approach leads to the creation of what are known as ‘protected areas’, which effectively exclude people from the local environment. The second approach is known as the community-based approach and this approach emphasizes the need to ensure that the local people are not physically or politically excluded from their local environment. Instead, this approach encourages the fostering of an environment in which the local people are able to participate in their surroundings. The idea that the local people must actively participate in their local environments is driven by the notion that communities are able to better manage their areas because they live in those areas and thus have a working knowledge of the way in which the resources in those areas can best be managed. State management of resources is less efficient than community management of resources because the state does not have knowledge of the internal workings of that local environment. However, the community-based management approach began to lose its influence in the 1990s when numerous critiques were levelled against it. Many argued that it was too romantic and unrealistic and so privatization was seen to be a more effective solution to ensuring conservation.

The idea that many people are championing today, is that conservation means keeping people out. The irony is that people have been living with other species for hundreds of years and have developed their own ways of conserving their natural environments. Local people are not oblivious to the interdependent nature of the relationship between human beings and their environment. Conservation today, has become highly militarized. What we have witnessed in recent decades is the building of high fences designed to keep people out because people are seen as the enemy that must be kept at a distance to ensure the survival of the animal species. Capital too, in an increasingly globalized world, has infiltrated the conservation space in the name of ‘doing good’. Big multinational corporations are involved in sponsoring huge amounts of money to campaigns and initiatives dedicated to saving rhinos, for an example. This alienation of local people from their environments demonstrates a complete disregard for the way in which local people have previously interacted with their environments.

Natural resource management works best when power is given to the local people to manage their own resources within their own environment. With that said, wildlife have become highly valuable in terms of profits. This means that a country that is run by an elite has an interest in maintaining national and game reserve parks that have been created to ‘protect’ wildlife because they can generate huge profits from this opportunity; profits which they can use to consolidate and maintain their power. For this reason, the possibility of reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa is significantly reduced because the benefits to be obtained from maintaining the status quo are far greater. The more resources that are available to a country, the more likely resources are to be centralized because a centralization of resources means a centralization of power. A system of decentralization or devolution to the local people in resource management would be desirable however because it would ensure various accountability mechanisms and transparency.

The ‘conservation’ of nature has taken priority over securing the livelihoods of people. Profiteering from the natural environment has significantly disadvantaged local people because it has meant that they can no longer interact with their natural environment in the way that they used to. The interests of the elite are prioritized while the poor get the short end of the stick. The focus needs to be shifted from the dominant way of thinking about conservation, which is that people and other species need to be separated, to people’s rights over resources and people’s needs. We need to interrogate whose conservation practices matter and why. Who are the winners and who are the losers?