Human mobility persists in the post-war, post-independence, and post-apartheid contexts of present-day Southern African nations. Because onservation areas are expanding, there is an increasing interface between historically mobile people and spatially bounded protected areas. Previous research has linked landscape change in Africa to tree clearing by mobile people, who clear trees to claim user-rights to land. However, there is also research that shows that rural resource users also plant and protect trees. Thus the relationship between human mobility and landscape change needs further investigation.
This dissertation research will examine the relationship between human mobility, tree management, and land claims in Mozambique's Limpopo National Park (LNP). The LNP ison the Mozambican side of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP), an international Peace Park that also encompasses South Africa's Kruger National Park, and Zimbabwe's Gonarezhou National Park. On the LNP landscape, resource management is shifting from a customary regime to a park regime, and as a result, residents of this Shangaan population are being relocated. Witter, a PhD candidate from the University of Georgia, will focus on: 1) how mobile and displaced people manage trees to claim land and 2) how these tree management practices change as people move. She will employ an integrated methodology of observation, interview, and mapping techniques to examine approximately 60 years of resident mobility and tree management in the LNP.
This project will advance our understandings of the relationship between human mobility and tree management and contribute to the socially and ecologically sound management of historically mobile people and an historically inhabited landscape.
