The Park Multiple: Practices of Coordination in a Conservation–Tourism Partnership in South Africa

Abstract

Conservation–tourism partnerships are often promoted as win–win solutions to the twin problems of underfunded conservation and unsustainable development. Critics on the other hand have warned about the tendency toward win–lose outcomes, when nature is reduced to a tourism commodity. This article intervenes in this debate by contributing to a scholarship in Science and Technology Studies on ontological multiplicity. We present an ethnographic case study of a nature park in South Africa that analyzes its partnership and its outcomes as emerging from situated and messy political dynamics. Our findings demonstrate the ontological politics taking place in the interactions between two enacted versions of the park: a tourism version and a conservation version. We show how in some cases one version comes to matter over the other and also how the outcomes of these ontological politics are not total. In doing so, our analysis furthers the study of ontological multiplicity of natural places by going beyond the mapping of multiplicity, to also explicitly consider power relations. Focusing on the work of coordination, we challenge both win–win and win–lose accounts of conservation–tourism partnerships, revealing possibilities for doing partnerships otherwise. We also make the argument for expanding these possibilities through a move toward “response-able” tourism.