The ethnic-spatial conservation fix: Contradictory tensions between restitution and enclosure within communally owned protected areas in South Africa

The history of protected areas in South Africa is inextricably linked to the forced removals of rural Black South Africans by the colonial and apartheid governments based on racially discriminatory laws. To redress historical injustices, the South African National Land Reform Programme enabled land claimants to reclaim land rights to their ancestral lands, which may include modern-day protected areas. The collective ownership of communal land has led to the formation of Communal Property Institutions as legal landholding entities for land reform beneficiaries – and the emergence of Communally-Owned Protected Areas (COPAs). This article explores the management and governance intricacies of 12 legally declared COPAs from KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Engaging theorisation of ethnic territories, we argue that they represent arguably the strongest example of the extreme flexibility of, and contradictory tensions within, resurgent collectivisation. This is because COPAs accommodate both processes of enclosure and dispossession of access rights and restitution of collective ownership rights and associated benefits through the territorialisation of conservation space. Furthermore, we will argue they are governmentalised in such a way as to represent an ‘ethnic-spatial fix’, not in the sense that it applied to anchor ethnicity in various territories through colonial indirect rule, but in the postcolonial period to fix and (re)territorialise conservation and ecotourism land use through ethnicity.