Conservation that creates protected areas by removing resident people and then polices their exclusion, named and documented by Dan Brockington (2002).
Extended definition
Dan Brockington’s Fortress Conservation (2002) studies Tanzania’s Mkomazi Game Reserve, from which pastoralists were evicted in the late 1980s, and the conservation case made for their removal. The term names a model in which nature is protected by separating it from the people who live in and use it, and in which that separation is held by fences, patrols and law.
The wiki uses the term for catchment protection carried out on the same model: water towers and source areas cleared of residents to secure water for users elsewhere. The Ogiek evictions from Kenya’s Mau Forest are the documented case on the wiki.
Contrast with adjacent terms
- Community-based conservation. Conservation run with or by resident communities. The fortress model excludes them.
- Convivial conservation. Büscher and Fletcher’s proposal (The Conservation Revolution, 2020) for conservation built on democratic engagement with the people who live with nature.
- Conservation violence. The harm. Fortress conservation is one model that produces it.
Related terms
Sources
- Brockington, D. (2002). Fortress Conservation: The Preservation of the Mkomazi Game Reserve, Tanzania
- African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (2017). ACHPR v. Kenya (Merits)
- Büscher, B. and Fletcher, R. (2020). The Conservation Revolution
Provenance
Created 25 October 2026 from the evidence brief behind Exclusion from Water Finance. The definition follows the cited author’s published wording; the paragraph on the wiki’s use is the wiki’s own reading.