Extractive conservation and green transitions in Southern Africa: a dialectical critical realist analysis of human-nature relations

This paper examines a paradox within the constellations of conservation and extraction that developed in Southern Africa: this relationship cannot be adequately understood through surface-level accounts of policy failure, governance deficits, or discursive contradiction. Drawing on dialectical critical realism, the analysis demonstrates that conservation and extraction are frequently co-produced through deeper generative mechanisms rooted in colonial land relations, neoliberal political economy, green transition imperatives, and epistemic hierarchies, operating within laminated social-ecological systems that promise ecological protection while reproducing social-ecological harm. Engaging with Anthropocene and Capitalocene debates, the paper situates dialectical critical realism in dialogue with political ecology, posthumanism, and new materialism, arguing that they encounter limits in explaining the persistence of extractive conservation regimes. By foregrounding ontological depth, causal mechanisms, absence, and contradiction, and engaging an eco-decolonial lens, critical realism provides a coherent philosophical framework for rethinking emancipation linked to human-nature relations given deep historical inequality and ongoing extractive pressures.