Transforming the Frontier

International peace parks-transnational conservation areas established and managed by two or more countries-have become a popular way of protecting biodiversity while promoting international cooperation and regional development. In Transforming the Frontier, Bram Buscher shows how cross-border conservation neatly reflects the neoliberal political economy in which it developed.Based on extensive research in southern Africa with the Maloti-Drakensberg Transfrontier Conservation and Development Project, Buscher explains how the successful promotion of transfrontier conservation as a "e;win-win"e; solution happens not only in spite of troubling contradictions and problems, but indeed because of them. This is what he refers to as the "e;politics of neoliberal conservation,"e; which receives its strength from effectively combining strategies of consensus, antipolitics, and marketing. Drawing on long-term, multilevel ethnographic research, Buscher argues that transfrontier conservation projects are not as concerned with on-the-ground development as they are purported to be. Instead, they are reframing environmental protection and sustainable development to fit an increasingly contradictory world order.