Bram Büscher

My book, Transforming the Frontier: Peace Parks and the Politics of Neoliberal Conservation in Southern Africa, was published by Duke University Press in 2013. If you are interested in ordering the book, you can check out the Duke website, Amazon, bol.com, amazon UK or any other bookstore. The preface and intro of the book are  available on scribd – just follow this link.

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• Book review by Prof Roderick Neumann in AAG review of Books: “Transforming the Frontier is a brilliant and original achievement and a highly readable one at that. As I read, I became increasingly awed by the magnitude of Büscher’s feat, in terms of both the expansiveness of ethnographic field work and the complexity and nuance of his theoretical interpretation”.
• Book review by Prof Larry Swatuk in Review of Policy Research: “Bram Büscher’s Transforming the Frontier is a masterful piece of scholarship that should find a hallowed place on our bookshelves between such classics as Adams and McShane’s The Myth of Wild Africa (1992) and Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine (1990)”.
• Click here for a radio interview about the book, on Hoe?Zo! Radio (aired on 1 May 2013 – IN DUTCH)
• The launch of my book, and Lorenzo Fioramonti’s excellent ‘Global Domestic Problem’, at Ike’s books in Durban, 18 July 2013. For more info on Lorenzo’s book, please click here.

“Bram Büscher offers an original approach to conceptualizing and examining neoliberal modes of government in action. It uses a richly grounded empirical analysis to shed light on a key puzzle with important political stakes: How are implausible win-win scenarios sustained despite their manifold contradictions, and what kinds of critical work are needed to puncture them? An excellent read.” — Tania Murray Li, author of The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics

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“Making a major contribution to political ecology, conservation studies, and the critical analysis of neoliberalization, Transforming the Frontier will appeal to a wide readership of anthropologists, sociologists, Africanists, historians, geographers, and those in development and environmental studies. Bram Büscher sheds new light on our understanding of environmental conservation and economic development projects by providing a truly brilliant critique of the intersection of conservation development and neoliberalization in southern Africa.” — Paige West, author of From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea

Description

International peace parks—transnational conservation areas established and managed by two or more countries—have become a popular ways of protecting biodiversity while promoting international cooperation and regional development. In Transforming the Frontier, Bram Büscher shows how cross-border conservation neatly reflects the neoliberal political economy in which it developed.

Drawing on extensive research in Southern Africa with the Maloti-Drakensberg Transfrontier Conservation and Development Project, Büscher explains how the successful promotion of transfrontier conservation as a “win-win” solution happens not only in spite of troubling contradictions and problems, but indeed because of them. This is what he refers to as the “politics of neoliberal conservation,” which receives its strength from effectively combining strategies of consensus, anti-politics, and marketing. Drawing on long-term, multi-level ethnographic research, Büscher argues that transfrontier conservation projects are not as concerned with on-the-ground development as they are purported to be. Instead, they are reframing environmental protection and sustainable development to fit an increasingly contradictory world order.