Between law and land: Conservation in Italian regional parks though the experience of volunteer rangers (Guardie Ecologiche Volontarie)

Abstract

This thesis aims at exploring the making of taskscapes and biopolitics inside protected areas through the experiences of voluntary park rangers in Italy, and in particular in the Parco di Montevecchia e della Valle del Curone. The rangers are lay citizens who have chosen to go through a specific training in order to engage into conservation projects. They have many tasks; on one side, they relate to the more-than-human inhabitants of reserves doing biodiversity monitoring and other practical management tasks. On the other hand, they are in charge of surveillance and environmental education, practically becoming the link between the park as an institution and the “public”. They are supposed to enforce rules and inform visitors and locals. This puts them at the center of the tensions between the different ideas (or lack of ideas) about protected areas held by different stakeholders, and between the law that defines the protected area and its application and reality. This ethnography thus aims at describing management structures created by the coalescence of different levels of legislation within protected areas by asking: What are the effects of the laws that define regional parks? How do they shape the volunteer rangers’ taskscapes? In the first section, relevant anthropological and geographical literature will be presented, and in particular the concepts of biopolitics and taskscape. A brief history of protected areas and protected areas legislation follows. The second section contains my methodology and the ethnography. The methods used are semi-structured interviews, participant observation and legal text analysis.