The idea that ‘society’ and ‘nature’ are interrelated but separate domains of reality is a central tenet of modernity. It has helped structure the intellectual division of labour between the social and natural sciences and has powerfully influenced modernist politics whether liberal conservative, socialist, nationalist and fascist. Environmental politics has had a complicated relationship with this worldview. At the same time, a great deal of environmental rhetoric in the affluent World has been premised on dualistic assumptions, notably, the idea that the aim of environmental politics is to protect something called “Nature” from something called “society”.

In the African rainforests, the contemporary shifts in approaches to biodiversity conservation and logging operations within and around protected areas peak the anticipation of a new era of collaboration among the multiple parties involved. Participants from various sectors, including private companies, state agencies, NGOs, international and local communities, are currently developing alternative solutions to traditional approaches to conservation, ones that pitted removal industry against forest conservation. The partnerships emerging between private and public sectors are at the same time similar to dynamics from the colonial era, and reflective of innovative administration of resource use. An historical perspective on the growth of this collaborative process is useful because it sets the stage for recent trends in the relationships among the contemporary participants in forest management. Specifically, conservationists are now turning from attempts to collaborate with state officials to working with participants in the private sector to develop plans for sustainable exploitation of tropical forests, or at least plans with an aim to diminish direct and indirect impacts of logging on wildlife. State agencies, constantly fasten the resources, have long used private companies as tools for developing forest infrastructures and providing services to remote populations of the forested areas. Such practices were found during the colonial era, although in most cases before, or in opposition to, notions of wildlife protection. New union between protection and exploitation of forest resources, then, must be understood within the deep historical patterns that have formed the attitudes and practices of both rural and urban African populations. The approach of fixing the goals of protecting and exploiting forest resources stresses the political-economic context in which management choices for forest resources have long been made.

The discussion must therefore begin with the recognition of the unequal power relations that characterise management choices as we trace change and continuities in trade and territorial relations over time. The acknowledgement of what we call “concessionary politics” may prevent the development of conservation practices through a broader, but struggling secular society in Africa. We also acknowledge the alarming historical, cultural, and economic power that resides in the concessionary logging economy. Given this power, we argue that managers, and activists should turn their attention to describing how these systems are both unjust and insufficient to nourish efforts to build systems for more equitable, sustainable long-term forest use. At the same time, however, argue goes on to the social, economic, and geographic facets of logging concessions should be studied to reveal what we believe may be strong potential solutions to the ecological damage their exploitations inevitably perpetrate.

There seems to be a worldwide lack of political will for conservation that leads, inevitably, to an undermining of conservation policy. This is a standard complaint but one that has received little attention. In an attempt to better understand the gap between conservation policy and practice, examined conservation policies and practice as they have played out in the Great Himalayan National Park, Himachal Pradesh, India, over the past two decades. In particular one would consider the park's experience within two larger contexts: (1) Himachal's current development orientation, which seeks to transform the state into the electrical powerhouse of the country by building over 300 medium and large power projects and (2) electoral politics that result in politician's support for villagers and others denied access to national parks and wildlife sanctuaries. Each of these factors works to undermine state conservation policies. Conservationists need to build political bridges with local communities if they are to use electoral power to work for rather than against conservation. Only such electoral power can be expected to force governments to adopt more cautious policies in advancing a particular development agenda. In the absence of strategic alignments in places such as Himachal Pradesh with strong democratic traditions, one must expect continued political support for potentially destructive megaprojects and an absence of political support for the conservation of biological diversity.

One describes how ideas about particular wildlife species as both economic and symbolic resources constitute “transvaluations” (i.e., species’ economic, ecological, and symbolic importance) across cultural, economic, and geographical boundaries. Such transvaluations structure trade, tourism, and policy in the RDS area and shape species-specific variation in wildlife abundance and behaviour in management zones. Transvaluation enables analysis of human communities beyond binding notions of local versus global and of animal communities in light of species-specific reactions to increasing human uses of wildlife habitat. We contextualize the ways varied human actors value wildlife, how those values are mediated by management practices and social inequality, and how they influence interactions with animals.

Transvaluation of species is applicable to different landscapes or animal species over time, as their meanings to various human actors change. Cross-cultural saliency is rooted in specific landscapes and is contingent on ecological and economic parameters; it makes some species more widely known in a given context than others.