Fortress conservation is a model of nature protection built on a single premise: the best way to save wild places is to wall off humans entirely. In practice, this means creating parks and reserves where no one lives, farms, hunts, or gathers resources, often backed by armed enforcement. The approach has shaped protected areas across every continent since the late nineteenth century, and it remains deeply influential today. But its track record is more complicated than its advocates suggest, tangled with forced displacement, contested ecological evidence, and a growing body of research showing that less exclusionary approaches can match or exceed its conservation results.
Where the Model Comes From
The roots of fortress conservation run back to the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872. Yellowstone was established as a space of “pristine” wilderness set aside for public enjoyment, a vision that required removing the Indigenous peoples who had lived on and shaped the land for millennia. This template spread widely, and conservation scholars now refer to it as the “Yellowstone Model” of exclusionary conservation.1Conservation and Society. Is that Gun for the Bears? The National Park Service Ranger as a Historically Contradictory Figure Colonial administrators in Africa, Asia, and Latin America adopted the same logic throughout the twentieth century: draw a boundary, remove the people inside it, station guards along the perimeter. The underlying assumption was that human presence and biodiversity cannot coexist, that wildness and human livelihood are fundamentally incompatible.
This assumption was never purely scientific. The idea of “untouched wilderness” reflected a particular Western aesthetic and philosophical tradition, one that overlooked the fact that many of the landscapes it sought to preserve had been actively managed by Indigenous and local communities for centuries through burning, selective harvesting, and rotational land use. The fortress model did not just exclude people from land; it excluded their knowledge of that land from conservation practice.
Displacement and Its Costs
The human toll of fortress conservation is well-documented and difficult to overstate. When governments designate strict protected areas, someone usually has to leave. Sometimes this process is explicitly coercive. In 1991, the Ugandan government formally established national parks within the ancestral homelands of the Batwa people. No consultation was carried out with local Batwa communities, and they were forcibly evicted from the forests they had inhabited for generations.2PubMed Central. Batwa Indigenous Peoples forced eviction for “Conservation”: A qualitative examination on community impacts The Batwa lost not just their homes but their entire livelihood system, their cultural identity tied to the forest, and their health outcomes deteriorated sharply in the years that followed.
Even when displacement is labeled “voluntary,” the reality on the ground often tells a different story. Research examining supposedly consensual relocations from protected areas has found that a well-known case of voluntary resettlement was arguably involuntary, and the study’s authors noted that the case was likely not unusual.3World Development. Protected Areas and Resettlement: What Scope for Voluntary Relocation? Communities may face restricted access to food and water sources, loss of livelihood options, and pressure from authorities, all of which blur the line between choice and coercion. By the time relocation is formally proposed, the conditions that would allow people to stay may have already been stripped away.
The scale of these displacements is enormous. Estimates vary, but conservation-related displacement has affected millions of people globally, disproportionately affecting Indigenous communities and rural poor populations in the Global South. The irony is sharp: the communities most dependent on natural landscapes, and often most knowledgeable about them, are the ones pushed out in the name of protecting those same landscapes.
Green Militarism
Fortress conservation does not just displace people; it often deploys armed force to keep them out. Concerns about poaching and wildlife trafficking have increasingly led conservationists and governments to adopt military-style enforcement, a trend researchers call the militarization of conservation.4PubMed Central. Why we must question the militarisation of conservation This ranges from equipping park rangers with assault rifles to embedding actual soldiers inside wildlife agencies.
Uganda provides a stark example. The collaboration between the Ugandan military (UPDF) and the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) began formally in 2002, and by 2005 a memorandum of understanding mandated that soldiers be deployed in all national parks. Rangers and soldiers were integrated into specialized units, trained together, and deployed jointly.5Oxford Academic. ‘We are soldiers now’: green militarism and (foreign-assisted) military training in conservation Attached soldiers are selected from nearby army units while seconded officers are interviewed and contracted directly by the wildlife authority. The result is a conservation apparatus that functions, in organizational terms, like a branch of the military.
Advocates argue that militarized protection is the only realistic response to well-armed, commercially driven poaching networks. Critics counter that the approach turns local communities into suspects and adversaries, breeds resentment that can actually undermine long-term conservation goals, and creates conditions ripe for human rights abuses. Reports of rangers shooting suspected poachers on sight, of communities being harassed for gathering firewood, and of entire villages living in fear of uniformed conservation officers are not isolated anecdotes. They recur across Sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and parts of Central America.
The debate over green militarism also raises questions about who funds and shapes these enforcement strategies. International conservation organizations and donor governments often provide the training, equipment, and financing that make militarized enforcement possible, sometimes without robust accountability mechanisms for how force is used. The distance between the conference rooms where conservation strategy is designed and the forest paths where it is implemented can be vast, and the communities on the receiving end rarely have seats at the table.
Does Strict Protection Actually Protect Better?
The ecological case for fortress conservation rests on a straightforward claim: excluding human activity leads to better outcomes for biodiversity and habitat. The evidence, however, is messier than the claim.
A study across Bolivia, Costa Rica, Indonesia, and Thailand found that more strictly protected areas did reduce deforestation by a greater amount than less strictly protected areas in three of the four countries studied, with the difference ranging from roughly 10 to 13 percentage points. In Bolivia, the difference was small and not statistically meaningful.6Environmental Research Letters. More strictly protected areas are not necessarily more protective: evidence from Bolivia, Costa Rica, Indonesia, and Thailand That sounds like a partial win for strict protection, until you look at the broader literature.
A wider analysis comparing strictly protected areas globally with areas that permit multiple human uses found that the differences in conservation outcomes were often small and not statistically significant. The authors concluded that factors other than a protected area’s official management category are likely driving how well it actually works.7PubMed Central. Strictly protected areas are not necessarily more effective than areas in which multiple human uses are permitted In other words, a well-managed reserve where local people farm, fish, or harvest sustainably can perform as well as or better than a heavily enforced exclusion zone. What matters is not whether people are present but how well the management functions on the ground: adequate funding, clear governance, local buy-in, and adaptive monitoring.
This finding is uncomfortable for fortress conservation advocates because it undermines the core logic of the model. If strict exclusion does not reliably outperform less restrictive approaches, the justification for displacing communities weakens considerably. Strict protection may still make sense in some specific contexts, such as small habitats harboring critically endangered species with no tolerance for disturbance. But as a default template applied across entire nations and continents, the ecological evidence does not clearly support it.
When Communities Are Part of Conservation
A global assessment of protected area outcomes found that positive conservation and socioeconomic results were more likely to occur when protected areas adopted co-management regimes, empowered local people, reduced economic inequalities, and maintained cultural and livelihood benefits.8PubMed. A global assessment of the social and conservation outcomes of protected areas The study found that while the strictest management regimes attempted to exclude human influence entirely, areas that explicitly integrated local people as stakeholders tended to be more effective at achieving both biological conservation and socioeconomic development outcomes. The authors noted that strict protection may be warranted in some circumstances, but their results demonstrated that conservation and development objectives can be synergistic rather than contradictory.
This is a significant finding because it reframes the debate. The question is not whether to protect land but how to structure the governance of that protection. Co-management, where authority over a protected area is shared between the state and local or Indigenous communities, allows for combining scientific and traditional ecological knowledge. Communities who depend on a landscape for food, water, medicine, and cultural practice have strong incentives to maintain its health, provided they have genuine decision-making power and are not simply consulted as a formality.
In Canada, Parks Canada has moved toward co-management agreements with Indigenous groups in the national park system. A comprehensive review of 23 negotiated co-management agreements found that while Parks Canada has implemented innovative approaches and shown willingness to support Indigenous-led conservation, true shared governance as defined by international standards remains limited. The Canadian government has been reluctant to amend the foundational legislation needed to effectively share authority.9PubMed Central. A Typology of National Park Co-management Agreements in the Era of Reconciliation in Canada This pattern, progressive rhetoric layered over institutional structures that retain state control, is not unique to Canada. It recurs wherever governments attempt to transition from fortress models to participatory ones without redistributing actual power.
The Ecotourism Paradox
Fortress conservation is often presented alongside ecotourism as a package deal: we remove local communities from the land, but we compensate them with tourism revenue and jobs. In practice, this promise frequently fails to materialize in any meaningful way for the people who lost the most.
Research on gorilla tourism in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park found that the commodification of Bwindi as a “wild and unspoilt destination” marketed to foreign visitors promoted external control of conservation spaces by international organizations. Rather than alleviating poverty and dependency in local communities, the tourism-based model actually created new forms of control and vulnerability.10Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Ecotourism: The Modern Predator? Implications of Gorilla Tourism on Local Livelihoods in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda The people living around the park did not become stakeholders in a thriving nature-based economy; they became dependent on an industry they could not control, one shaped by international conservation organizations and tourist market dynamics thousands of miles away.
The gorilla tourism example matters because Bwindi is often held up as a success story for conservation-as-business. The park generates substantial revenue, mountain gorilla populations have recovered, and tourists pay hundreds of dollars per permit. But success measured at the level of species recovery and revenue generation can coexist with failure measured at the level of the communities whose land the park sits on. This disconnect, between what conservation celebrates and what displaced communities experience, runs through the fortress model like a fault line.
The 30 by 30 Debate
The political stakes of fortress conservation reached a new peak with the adoption of the Global Biodiversity Framework’s Target 3, commonly called “30 by 30,” which commits signatory nations to protecting 30 percent of the world’s land and ocean areas by 2030. The target has been hailed as a landmark commitment, but it has also raised urgent questions about which model of protection will fill that 30 percent.
If 30 by 30 is pursued primarily through fortress-style exclusion zones, the human cost could be enormous. Much of the land targeted for protection is inhabited by Indigenous peoples and local communities who hold customary rights that may not be formally recognized in national legal systems. Researchers have identified several opportunities that countries should seize to avoid repeating past harms: securing communities’ tenure rights, respecting self-determined conservation priorities, and recognizing Indigenous and traditional territories as a distinct conservation pathway under the framework.1110.53892/jvxn6355. Enabling Pathways for Rights-based Community-led Conservation Critically, these researchers emphasize that national laws and conservation policies should not dilute, contradict, or override tenure protections.
Whether these principles translate into practice depends on political will. The 30 by 30 framework is a target, not a binding enforcement mechanism, and how each nation chooses to meet it will determine whether the next decade of conservation looks more like Yellowstone in 1872 or something genuinely different. The risk is real that governments facing pressure to hit numerical targets will take the path of least political resistance, which historically has meant drawing lines around lands occupied by marginalized communities rather than confronting powerful industries or reforming agricultural subsidies.
Trophy Hunting and the Economics of Wild Land
One of the less intuitive arguments for maintaining large exclusion zones is economic: in parts of Africa, trophy hunting generates enough revenue to keep wild land financially competitive with livestock production or agriculture. An analysis of trophy hunting’s financial viability across several African countries found that if lion hunting were discontinued, hunting operations across roughly 60,000 square kilometers could become unviable, representing about 11.5 percent of the area where lions are currently hunted in the assessed countries.12PLoS ONE. The Significance of African Lions for the Financial Viability of Trophy Hunting and the Maintenance of Wild Land Even where viability would be retained, restricting lion hunting would reduce the overall profitability of trophy hunting and make wildlife-based land uses less competitive against alternatives like livestock production.
This does not mean trophy hunting is inherently good conservation. The study also noted that in most areas, other species like elephant, buffalo, and leopard are more important financially than lions, and that strategic restructuring of hunting quotas could compensate for lost revenue in some places. But the broader point matters for the fortress debate: in regions where governments lack the budget for intensive park management and ecotourism is not viable, hunting revenue is sometimes the only thing keeping wild land from being converted to ranching or farming. Remove the economic incentive without replacing it, and the fences come down, not because anyone decided to stop conserving, but because no one can afford to continue.
The uncomfortable truth is that conservation on the ground is inseparable from economics. Fortress models that rely on enforcement alone are expensive and often dependent on foreign donor funding that can dry up with a political shift in Washington, London, or Brussels. Models that generate local revenue, whether through tourism, sustainable harvesting, or yes, even regulated hunting, have a different vulnerability: they tie conservation outcomes to market forces. Neither approach is immune to failure, and the most resilient systems tend to draw on multiple revenue streams rather than betting everything on one.
What Gets Lost With the People
When fortress conservation removes communities from a landscape, it does not just displace people. It displaces ecological knowledge. Many Indigenous and local communities possess detailed, place-specific understanding of species behavior, seasonal patterns, fire management, water systems, and plant uses that has been accumulated over centuries. This knowledge is often oral, embedded in practice and ritual rather than written in manuals, and it disappears when the community that holds it is scattered.
Fire management is a telling example. In many ecosystems around the world, Indigenous burning practices maintained habitat diversity, reduced wildfire risk, and promoted the regeneration of key plant species. When colonial and postcolonial governments suppressed these burns in the name of protecting “natural” landscapes, fuel loads built up, invasive species moved in, and catastrophic wildfires became more frequent. Australia, the western United States, and parts of the African savanna have all experienced versions of this pattern. The fortress model’s insistence on removing human influence treated fire-managed landscapes as pristine and then watched them degrade in the absence of the management they depended on.
This loss is not recoverable on demand. You cannot evict a community, wait forty years, and then invite them back to teach you what they knew. Knowledge systems atrophy when disconnected from the landscapes that sustain them. The younger generation raised outside the forest does not learn what the older generation knew inside it. By the time conservation agencies recognize the value of traditional ecological knowledge, the people who held it may no longer possess it in any usable form. This is arguably one of the most irreversible costs of the fortress approach, and one of the least discussed.