Around the world, decision-making is looming regarding the displacement of people resident in and reliant on the natural capital in protected areas. While policies such as the World Bank's safeguard policy on involuntary resettlement guides decisions about the potential displacement of people in protected areas, there are often political and other obstacles to implementation. In the case of displacement decision-making in Banhine National Park (BNP), Mozambique, district-level government officials promoted the displacement of BNP-area residents and their resettlement into villages outside the park in a manner that was inconsistent with the World Bank safeguard policy. The decision to displace park residents was influenced by communication and capacity challenges, pressures for political decentralisation, the local-level operationalisation of international poverty reduction and development agendas, and a national-level agenda to concentrate or villagise dispersed rural populations. Ideas regarding inhabited versus uninhabited protected area models only influenced how displacement and resettlement occurred and not whether it occurred. Protected area displacement debates that do not account for broader and more powerful political forces may be of little significance to real decisions regarding displacement.

This paper examines the place of hunting in the construction of identity for both British colonial sportsmen and indigenous hunters on the north-western frontier region of the British Indian empire, illustrating how their competing moral orders are placed in tension in the colonial encounter through the shared experience of hunting. I show that the British sportsmen generally used ideas of fairness in hunting to mark themselves off from the indigenous hunters while colonial frontier officers specifically, through their adeptness in hunting, differentiated themselves from other colonial officers. I argue that ideas of fairness had a different place in the indigenous hunting practices, and often clashed with the 'moral ecology' of the colonial hunters. Using the example of 'palming off', I show how unlike the clash of moral ecologies in relation to hunting practices, the process through which the identities of colonial hunters were constructed was a precarious and contingent one in which indigenous collaboration played a crucial role.

Tropical forests are rapidly being lost across Southeast Asia and this is predicted to have severe implications for many of the region's bird species. However, relationships between forest disturbance and avifaunal assemblages remain poorly understood, particularly on small island ecosystems such as those found in the biodiversity 'hotspot' of Wallacea. This study examines how avifaunal richness varies across a disturbance gradient in a forest reserve on Buton Island, southeast Sulawesi. Particular emphasis is placed upon examining responses in endemic and red-listed species with high conservation importance. Results indicate that overall avian richness increases between primary and 30-year-old regenerating secondary forest and then decreases through disturbed secondary forest, but is highest in cleared farmland. However, high species richness in farmland does not signify high species distinctiveness; bird community composition here differs significantly from that found in forest sites, and is poor in supporting forest specialists and endemic species. Certain large-bodied endemics such as the Knobbed Hornbill (Rhyticeros cassidix) appear to be sensitive to moderate disturbance, with populations occurring at greatest density within primary forest. However, overall endemic species richness, as well as that of endemic frugivores and insectivores, is similar in primary and secondary forest types. Results indicate that well-established secondary forest in particular has an important role in supporting species with high conservational importance, possessing community composition similar to that found in primary forest and supporting an equally high richness of endemic species.

Since the collapse of socialism, Central and Eastern Europe has experienced a massive rush on forest resources. This paper examines the concrete mechanisms through which the postsocialist transformation has spurred this rush through a case study of a forest sector in southeastern Albania, where various kinds of actors collide in a struggle over rent from illegal firewood extraction and trade. I argue that the broader political and economic changes of postsocialism have altered rural resource values, changed the mechanisms through which forest users gain access to productive resources, and shifted the creation and distribution of resource rent among actors. Together, these changes affected forest users' incentives, decision-making and practices. Over the past two decades they have caused this rush and severe forest degradation.