Transforming the frontier

ln Transforming the Frontier Bram Buscher questions why peace parks - large areas that protect biodiversity while stimulating international development through ecotourism - have become such a popular conservation model. Drawing from extensive fieldwork in the Maloti-Drakensberg Transfrontier Conservation and Development Project (MDTP), Buscher looks at the reasons and ways transfrontier conservation has been touted as a global solution. While frontier politics previously focused on ecological preservation, Buscher claims that the discourse has drastically shifted away from preservation, and instead transfrontier conservation has become an integral mechanism of neoliberal political economies. Moreover, Buscher argues that the grandiose diplomatic presumptions of peace park initiatives and community-based conservation efforts fail to take into account the limited resources and leadership of local groups, as well as the complexities of everyday life that inhibit the implementation of this `global solution'. Buscher begins by situating conservation within South Africa's colonial and postcolonial history and tracing how that history affected the political mobilisation and Iegitimation of transfrontier conservation. He examines how struggles over consensus undermined the Maloti-Drakensberg's twofold goals of conserving biodiversity and pursuing development through ecotourism. Buscher then studies the people and actors centrally involved in the implementation of these efforts -the South African and Lesotho Project Coordination Units (PCUs) -and the difficulties they encountered as they tried to govern these policies and convince outside stakeholders to fund and support transfrontier conservation. Buscher shows how neoliberal conservation became less about on-the-ground developments and instead centered on politics, power and governance in a political ecology reframed by geography and conservation practices.