Parks, perks, conflicts, and resistance in Gilgit-Baltistan's conservation paradigm

This article critically evaluates how environmental conservation in Gilgit-Baltistan (GB), Pakistan, functions as a vehicle of dispossession masquerading as ecological care. Through the struggle of the Shimshali community against the imposition of Khunjerab National Park (KNP), I reveal how national parks reinforce colonial fantasies of pristine wilderness by violently severing human communities from the lands they have long inhabited and governed. National parks in GB were established by external experts who envisioned pristine wilderness as separate from human life, erasing local and traditional worldviews that recognize humans, other-than-humans, and land as co-constituted. I show that instead of preserving biodiversity, conservation in GB legitimizes cosmological and material ruptures. Traditional grazing and hunting are criminalized while trophy hunting for wealthy outsiders is celebrated. Against this backdrop of exclusion, Shimshalis have mobilized the Shimshal Nature Trust to advance a radically different vision of environmental governance rooted in local governance and collective autonomy. I draw on activist testimonies and critical conservation scholarship to argue conservation not as exclusion but as a practice of justice grounded in local autonomy and ethical relations with land. Conceptually, I situate the KNP case within global critiques of “external supervision” and “fortress conservation,” to show how the displacement of local communities in the name of biodiversity echoes broader colonial and capitalist patterns. I argue that the survival of local ecological livelihoods is intricately tied to alternative ecological futures.