‘Bedouin overgrazing’ and conservation politics: Challenging ideas of pastoral destruction in South Sinai

This paper examines the relationship between scientific research, political understandings and conservation policy. It presents a case, the St Katherine Protectorate, South Sinai, Egypt, where conservation policy has been driven by a dominant narrative of environmental destruction by indigenous people – in this case, ‘Bedouin1In general I use Bedouin as an adjective, and Bedu as a proper noun in both singular and plural denoting ‘people of the desert’. In StKP it is how people describe themselves. grazing’. However, the science underlying this idea has proved questionable, often ignoring known evidence and failing to examine changing theory. In such situations the challenge is to explain the power of fixed ideas in the face of alternative evidence. I do so by examining the empirical and attitudinal basis of conclusions drawn by researchers from ecological data, and the uses to which they are put in conservation policy and practice. I use the terminology of the ‘new conservation debate’ to make sense of conservation policy in St Katherine, and a social scientist’s analysis of Egyptian policy to identify a political rationale for the persistence of the ‘overgrazing’ concept. In conclusion I argue that by sustaining national ideas of indigenous backwardness, this unchallenged conservation narrative has helped perpetuate Bedouin inequality – a lesson relevant to conservation scientists and practitioners working with indigenous pastoral peoples elsewhere in the world.