Wildlife as a commodity and more-than-human property: On the model environmental stewardship in Namibia

Nature conservation has in recent years become the key policy goal to combat the rapid decline of biodiversity, the climate crisis, and the overall degradation of the environment. The push to step up efforts to protect nature often emphasizes the role of small-scale environmental stewardship by local communities who are believed to be best equipped to safeguard the environment due to their proximity to, dependence on, and knowledge of their surroundings. In light of this emphasis, the focus of the research project is the model of communal wildlife conservation, developed and implemented in Namibia as part of its community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) program, and the unique property constellation it involves. Communal wildlife conservancies are local cooperatives established from below but regulated by the state’s conservation policies. The community protects the wildlife and its habitat and is allowed to use the animals partially as a subsistence source and to commercially valorize them on the global tourism markets.

Albeit local, communal, and small-scale, wildlife conservancies are a trans-local policy innovation emerging at the intersection of several levels of governance and combining multiple goals – inclusion, recognition, economic opportunity, and rural development on the one hand, and environmental protection and biodiversity conservation on the other. The connection to global efforts to protect endangered species and the safari tourism markets embeds communal wildlife conservancies in a network that links a great variety of external and heterogeneous actors across the globe (scientific communities, donors, NGOs, the global public, tourists, and hunters) through regulatory structures, markets, scientific knowledge production, and media representations. The research project focuses on the account of the unique constellation of property rights underlying this institution and asks how it forges the practice of environmental stewardship. Two clusters of novel property arrangements are in focus. First, the project looks at the rights, uses, and other forms of appropriation around wildlife and accounts for the coexistence of more-than-human property elements (habitat rights of the animals) with the commodification of wildlife in safari tourism and trophy hunting. Second, the project looks at the communal property rights of the conservation communities, with the aim to determine whether they involve innovative ‘commons’ arrangements. The main aim of the project is to analyze what distribution of property rights exists as a response to the need to combine nature conservation with the demands of social justice and economic development; and how the hybrid constellation of human and more-than-human property rights enables environmental stewardship. The project asks how the community negotiates its role of environmental stewards of wildlife in this network of diverse agents, governance levels, and competing logics of environmental protection, market-based economic assetization, and social justice.

The project employs several qualitative methods integrated into the framework of the grounded theory to provide a detailed and thick single-case analysis of one wildlife conservancy. The account of formal property elements that relies on the analysis of legal and administrative regulations is complemented by an ethnographic study of the field. Utilizing Adele Clarke’s method of situational analysis, the project will produce a map of the assemblage of property rights and relations between human and non-human entities and property chains including subjects, objects, activities, and forms of appropriation within one conservation community. The project contributes to the understanding of the dynamics of the socio-ecological transformation in the Global South and examines how property arrangements are shaped by it, paying special attention to how the demand for just conservation may involve making nature simultaneously an object and a subject of property rights. In this project, a new constellation is analyzed as it emerges from the intersection of global, national, and local governance levels, resulting from competing logics and dynamics of ecological and social justice and economic development typical in the Global South.