This panel explores the options of convivial constitutionality in co-habitation of humans and predators as a new approach in a messy global-local (‘glocal’) world. It looks for the analysis of the several layers of colonial and post-colonial legacies in the way powerful actors view the environment as pure nature based on a naturalist ontology and how this is contrasted with heterogeneous local actors’ views of cultural landscapes interconnected systems in a more than human way (animist/totemist ontology). We focus on the relation of local actors and predators, often based and included in common property institutions, and the complex ways how these have been transformed and grabbed by states, neo-liberal privatization and open access processes in the past. We discuss how the local views on these transformations and frontier processes impact and shape the way new innovative bottom-up institution building - constitutionality – (Haller, Acciaoli and Rist 2016) - for co-habitation (convivial constitutionality) have to be researched in participation with local indigenous and non-indigenous actors providing a basis for such new institution building processes. The panel focuses on the way asymmetric power relations unfolds in hegemonic narratives and discourses on conservation of predators (wolf, lion, jaguar, bear and others) as being the important animals for biodiversity conservation but in danger because of local human-predator conflicts. The panel discusses this assumption from a combined institutional and political ecology approach debating this rather should be considered a human-human conflict based on commons grabbing since colonial times and continued in neoliberal top-down conservation.

WHEN HUNTERS BECOME HUNTED: THE POLITICS OF CRIMINALIZATION IN KENYA’S POST-INDEPENDENCE CONSERVATION LANDSCAPE (Samuel Weissman)

The sense one gets in Kenya’s conservation landscape is one of dramaturgy, where rare and few Megafauna face dire circumstances. Survival is crucial and conservation necessary. The politics around this urgency have shaped a narrative that justifies a radical strategy to combat and prevent any harm done to wildlife. This narrative, which has always blamed humans as the major cause is in the general blaming population pressure and in the particular ‘harmful practices’ by locals, not least poaching. There is however simultaneously an amnesia around the historical circumstances where game- and trophy-hunting in the colonial past fed a global market trading in animal goods. In colonial Kenya, the period where hunting became regulated to exclude local hunting practices save for the ruling class, certainly, ecologies were influenced. The real tragedy however is marked by an unregulated phase starting with a complete hunting ban in the newly independent state and an absence of resources to enforce new laws, leading to an increase of what is now called poaching. In the years before new regulations can be enforced, poaching reaches unprecedented levels. What has evolved from this is a very radical and highly militarized countermovement, which has everything to do with a settler and tourist game-hunting practice, and very little with the previous institutions by groups who have for centuries regulated a co-habitation in complex cultural landscape ecosystems. The immense scrutiny and regulatory enforcement, however, is also equally urgently pressuring people who are not responsible for the legacy they must now weather.

Keywords: Conservation, Poaching, Human-wildlife conflict