For decades, critical scholars have critiqued some of the most violent, colonial, oppressive, and racist tendencies in conservation thinking, management, and practice. South Africa is no exception, and is perhaps one the best examples of a country with a long history of fraught conservation thinking, community exclusion and gating as well as conservation practice that engages in “fortress conservation”. This includes increasingly militarized and securitized conservation enforcement, linked human rights abuses, privatization of wildlife commons, the gaslighting of indigenous knowledge systems and top-down approaches to human-wildlife conflict management.

Today, there is increasing tension within the conservation community as poaching of high-profile species is accelerating at the same time there is increasingly scrutiny of conservation practices and potential human rights abuses amidst an atmosphere of greater foreign donor oversight and public and media attention.

However, a new generation of conservation practitioners is emerging. This is a community of conservation professionals exposed to or directly engaged in the study of conservation conflicts and inequalities, who either engage with or practice the work of political ecology. This panel is therefore an important opportunity for an open dialogue and critical discussion between a mix of conservation practitioners working in South Africa on how they balance their professional duties and pressures alongside working to enact decolonial, emancipatory, pragmatic, and perhaps even “convivial” forms of conservation. This panel will include both practicing conservation professionals trained in the theory and practice of political ecology, as well as scholars engaged in both academic and more applied conservation research.

Short conversational input