Market-community wildlife collaborative management in Malawi: institutional reconfiguration, disempowerment and shifting dynamics of protests and celebrations

While wildlife management models across the world have since the early 1980s shifted from top-down fortress conservation to different labels of people-friendly community-based conservation, their outcomes remain contested. This paper explores how, and in whose interests, approaches to wildlife conservation in Malawi have been reconfigured from fortress conservation to market-community collaborative management. Based on qualitative field data, we demonstrate how varying levels of communities' participation in the processes of wildlife conservation transformed the identities and interests of powerful groups of people towards wildlife conservation in the Majete Game Reserve. We highlight how commodification and monetarization of wildlife conservation served the interests of the emergent powerful groups while marginalizing those of the weak. The work indicates how new communities’ identities with regard to wildlife conservation mask power hegemonies that dictate mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion over natural resource use.