Conservation, peasants and class: critical reflections on the political economy of climate change strategies in West Senegal

Environmental conservation has become a key climate mitigation strategy in the last two decades. Through the multiplication of ‘conservation’ projects, Africa is one of the main centres of this kind of intervention. While scholars have shown conservation to be a vehicle for the advancement of capitalist interests, scarce attention has been paid to agrarian labour and class dynamics in the African countryside sustaining this development. Drawing on the authors’ research in West Senegal, this article develops a conceptual framework for integrating class and peasant labour in the study of capitalist conservation. It shows how conservation-related climate mitigation strategies in Africa nurture and are nurtured by neoliberal and imperialist processes of agrarian change, reinforcing the economic and political vulnerability of African peasants. Alternative, anti-imperial climate change mitigation strategies need to be centred around peasant environmentalisms and their liberation from labour oppression.