The dissertation locates the structure for ecological management in Uganda as a framework for centralised despotic rule. It considers that the critical ecological scholarship in Uganda that has laid prominence to the political economy framework to explain the persistent PA related conflicts between their managing authorities and adjacent communities to be narrow. It shows that a shift to the political dimensions provides a broader and more holistic view of the conflicts. Using Foucault's theory on governmentality and Gramci's theory on hegemonies, an archival analysis of the reforms in the management of PAs in Uganda was undertaken to show that those for the 1990s turned them into instruments of covert surveillance and pacification of the rural masses that also shaped their political economy. It also shows that the political economy based explanations are only valid for the colonial regime and the early post-colonial states in Uganda but it does not fit well with the current government, which has ruled since 1986