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The Nature State

Workshop

15.07.2014 – 17.07.2014

Location: Gran Paradiso National Park, Italy

Conveners: Conveners: Matthew Kelly, Claudia Leal, Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, and Emily Wakild

For the program, please click here.

For the conference report, please click here.

This workshop deals with the role nature conservation plays in the development of the state, that peculiar form of divination whereby the state endeavors to produce a nature based on what its experts perceive to be nature’s blueprint. During the twentieth century, almost all polities—national, transnational, colonial, and imperial—made nature conservation a matter of government intervention. The most visible global consequence of the "conservation turn" was the decision to place particular territories under special state protection, the most prestigious form being the National Park. By considering how park creation around the world drew upon a shared language of landscape conservation and honored (or violated) particular local political customs, land tenure arrangements, and relationships between state and society, we can more fully analyze the reach and fetch of nature conservation on human and nonhuman populations. Subjects that need further explication include the local face of the state (forestry technician, park guard, etc.), the changing roles of intermediaries, and transnational influences, including the emergence of "rooted cosmopolitanism" and what Arun Agrawal terms environmentality, all processes that contribute to the formation, contestation, and arrangement of the Nature State.

Particular historical circumstances and political processes facilitated the emergence of what we're calling the Nature State, a form of polity that acquires added legitimacy through the adoption of a conservationist agenda. The goal of this workshop is to advance a new historical literature on the Nature State that creates a space between the literature on nature (including nature conservation and the recent preoccupation with nature's constructedness), which often foregrounds institutions without the explication of the polity, and the literature on states, which has not fully considered the environment.