Brock Bersaglio’s research while affiliated with University of Birmingham and other places

Game meat contributes to human nutrition, food security and sociocultural practices around the world. Game meat also comes with risks, including overharvesting and zoonotic and food‐borne disease. These may be pronounced where game meat travels along complex value chains from rural to urban areas. Formalising and improving regulation of the game meat value chain is one approach to mitigating risks. Focussing on the game meat value chain in Zambia, this study conducted semi‐structured interviews with government and other regulatory industry actors (n = 9); game ranchers (n = 31), the largest producers of legal game meat locally; licensed resident hunters (n = 20); retailers selling game meat (n = 25); and retailers not selling game meat (n = 15). Zambia is supporting the regulation of the game meat sector to respond to existing demand and reduce illegal hunting, mitigate public health risks and support wider socio‐economic development. Our study sought to understand how the sector has changed, which actors are involved in what value chain activities, and barriers to participating in and benefiting from the value chain. Drawing from political ecology, our analysis was informed by the concept of access, which describes the ability to benefit from things, including land, resources and the institutions and regulations that govern these. Because access is interconnected to wider social and power relations, centring access offers further insights into who has access to what game meat value chain activities, why and what the potential implications are for biodiversity conservation, socio‐economic development and public health. Despite recent improvements in the game meat sector, access to the value chain remains uneven, with existing ranches benefiting most and populations likely to benefit from game meat for food security, nutrition and other subsistence purposes facing the greatest barriers. There also continues to be significant unmet demand for game meat, raising concerns about illegal hunting and public health risks. Policy implications suggest a need to further develop frameworks to strengthen the position of communities and customary institutions in the legal game meat value chain, as this is where riskier forms of hunting and game meat consumption might occur in response to unmet demand. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

This article critically reviews geographical scholarship to develop five categories for conceptualising the plurality of zoonotic disease situations configured through infrastructure. These are infrastructures that (1) unmoor zoonoses, (2) mobilise zoonoses, (3) immobilise zoonoses, (4) leak zoonoses, and (5) surveil zoonoses. Our analysis of these categories complicates notions that infrastructure either spreads or stops zoonoses and reveals the varied bio- and necro-politics associated with zoonotic disease situations configured through infrastructure. Before concluding, we review principles of infrastructuring zoonoses otherwise to help mobilise geographical scholarship in support of anti-anthropocentric, care-full, and probiotic approaches to modulating zoonoses in the (post)pandemic era.

This article examines the relationship between settler colonialism and biodiversity. Focusing on Laikipia, Kenya, we argue that the types of plant and animal species present in the landscape have been shaped by historical and present power relations and often support settler colonial projects. We introduce five modes of violent ecological transformation that have been used to prolong and advance structures of settler colonialism in Laikipia: eliminating undesirable species from landscapes; rewilding landscapes with species deemed more desirable; selectively repeopling nature to create seemingly inclusive wild spaces; rescuing species at risk of extinction to shore up moral support for settler ecologies; and extending the range of settler ecologies by scaling wild spaces. Through these modes of ecological transformation, ecological relations of use and value to settler colonialism live on while other(ed) ecological relations are suppressed or erased. As efforts to implement the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) gain momentum, attention to settler ecologies is vital. Although there is no denying that radical action is needed to halt and reverse global biodiversity loss, there is a pressing need to question what types of nature will be preserved through the GBF and whose interests these natures will serve.

Rapidly evolving drone technologies are taking the conservation sector by storm. Although the technical and applied conservation literature tends to frame drones as autonomous, neutral technologies, we argue that neither drones nor their implications can be adequately understood unless they are grounded, conceptually and methodologically, in the context of broader societal structures that shape how drones and the data they produce are used. This article introduces the value of a political ecology framework to an interdisciplinary audience of biophysical and social scientists interested in the multiple possibilities and complications associated with conservation drones. Political ecology provides the tools for studying and critically engaging with drone use in conversation in ways that are politically engaged and attuned to power relations – historic and present, local and global – in a more-than-human world. In making this argument, we point to four conceptual tools in political ecology that offer a framework for unveiling the power relations and structures that surround drones in different contexts: political economy, territoriality, knowledge and expertise, and more-than-human relations. Using empirics from our work across Latin America (Colombia and Guatemala), Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa and Mozambique), and North America (the US and Canada), we illustrate the salience of this framework and demonstrate why evaluating what drones do in and for conservation requires first understanding the complex set of power relations that shape their use.

This chapter argues that district-level bureaucrats participate in mediating different visions of infrastructure held by the many actors to which they have responsibility, ranging from local village assemblies to international contractors and state agencies. These acts of mediation are animated by the specific challenges and tensions that arise with the implementation of new infrastructure projects within their jurisdictions. As mediators, bureaucrats engage in various acts of negotiation that intervene in the original ‘blueprints’ of infrastructure projects and produce adapted infrastructures and spaces. Thus, it explores how district-level bureaucrats play an integral role in East Africa’s infrastructure scramble and show that their offices are everyday spaces in which global economic and geopolitical competition is negotiated.

Measures adopted to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and economic shocks caused by the pandemic have affected food networks globally, including wild meat trade networks that support the livelihoods and food security of millions of people around the world. In this article, we examine how COVID-related shocks have affected the vulnerability and coping strategies of different actors along wild meat trade networks. Informed by 1,876 questionnaires carried out with wild meat hunters, traders, vendors, and consumers in Cameroon, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Guyana, the article presents qualitative evidence as to how COVID-19 impacted different segments of society involved in wild meat trade networks. Our findings largely align with McNamara et al. (2020) and Kamogne Tagne et al.'s (2022) causal model hypothesising how the impacts of the pandemic could lead to a change in local incentives for wild meat hunting in sub-Saharan African countries. Like McNamara et al. (2020) and Kamogne Tagne et al. (2022), we find that the pandemic reduced wild meat availability for wild meat actors in urban areas while increasing reliance on wild meat for subsistence purposes in rural areas. However, we find some impact pathways to be more relevant than others, and also incorporate additional impact pathways into the existing causal model. Based on our findings, we argue that wild meat serves as an important safety net in response to shocks for some actors in wild meat trade networks. We conclude by advocating for policies and development interventions that seek to improve the safety and sustainability of wild meat trade networks and protect access to wild meat as an environmental coping strategy during times of crisis.

The rise of zoonotic disease-related public health crises has sparked calls for policy action, including calls to close wildlife markets. Yet, these calls often reflect limited understanding of where, precisely, exposure to risk occurs along wildlife and wild meat trade chains. They also threaten to negatively impact food security and livelihoods. From a public health perspective, it is important to understand the practices that shape food safety all along the trade chain, resulting in meat that is either safe to eat or managed as a potential vector of pathogens. This article uses ethnographic methods to examine the steps that lead a wild animal from the forest to the plate of an urban consumer in Yangambi and Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Focusing on hunters, village-level consumers, transporters, market traders and urban consumers, we highlight specific practices that expose different actors involved in the trade chain to wild meat related health risks, including exposure to food borne illnesses from contaminated meat and zoonotic pathogens through direct contact with wild animals, and the local practices in place to reduce the same. We discuss interventions that could help prevent and mitigate zoonotic and food borne disease risks associated with wild meat trade chains.

This article explores how new technologies – such as drones and satellites – are incorporated into disaster management and questions the implications for power relations between disaster authorities and subjects. This is a critical area of research, as the proliferation of aerial and networked technologies has made their use in disaster management and response more common. Although concerns have been raised about the potential use of aerial and networked technologies in the surveillance and spatial discipline of populations by commercial and government actors, few have considered the implications for disaster management. In response, this article turns to geographical literature on necropower, verticality, and planetary spatialities to analyse technological innovations in responses to desert locust upsurges in Kenya. Drawing from qualitative research carried out between February 2020 and January 2021, we explain how desert locust control operations have shifted from horizontal to vertical to networked and planetary in nature through experimentation with new technologies over the past century. We argue that aerial and networked technologies have led to a volumetric shift in desert locust management and response, giving remote and increasingly automated actors who operate ‘above’ greater power over the life and death of populations ‘below’. In making this argument, we adopt a more-than-human perspective to account for how nonhuman entities and lifeforms shape and are subjected to necropolitical disaster management and responses. We conclude by reflecting on what this analytical approach has to offer the study of vertical and volumetric geographies.