Restoration-as-development? Contesting Aspirational Politics Regarding the Restoration of Wildlife Corridors in the Kilombero Valley, Tanzania

Due to recent land-use change, wildlife migration through the Kilombero Valley has almost come to a standstill. In line with global restoration efforts, the African Wildlife Foundation has thus been given the task of implementing the Restoration Opportunity Assessment Methodology (ROAM), recently developed by IUCN and the World Resources Institute to foster the restoration of wildlife corridors in the area. Designed as a collaborative endeavour, it is in processes such as these that the aspirations of global restoration policies are confronted with specific local contexts. By focusing on specific situations and encounters, especially regarding the participatory aspects of the project, we illustrate how global policy aspirations are appropriated, partly contested and partly played along with, before finally turning into something of an illusion. This way, this article not only questions the more optimistic claims made for ‘conservation-as-development’, it also argues that a better understanding of the plurality of local aspirations and the ways in which they interact with the project’s goals is needed if global policy aspirations are to be realized more successfully.