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5. Environmentalities of Namibian conservancies: How communal area residents govern conservation in return

Chapter of: Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast: Conservation Histories, Policies and Practices in North-west Namibia(pp. 167–190)

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Metadata
Title5. Environmentalities of Namibian conservancies
SubtitleHow communal area residents govern conservation in return
ContributorRuben Schneider(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0402.05
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0402/chapters/10.11647/obp.0402.05
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightRuben Schneider
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2024-08-02
Long abstractThis chapter explores how communal area residents in north-west Namibia experience, understand, and respond to their conservancies. Drawing on philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ and specifically its ‘environmentality’ variant, conservancies are understood as localised global environmental governance institutions which aim to modify local people’s behaviours in both conservation- and market-friendly ways. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across four conservancies in Kunene Region, the chapter reveals how local communities culturally demystify, socially re-construct, and ultimately govern a global, neoliberal(ising) institutional experiment in return. Confirming stark experiential discrepancies and distributional injustices, the analysis cautions against a simplistic affirmation of the conservation dictum that ‘those who benefit also care’. Instead, it demonstrates that experiences of neoliberal incentives such as ownership and benefits are a limited predictor of local conservation practices. In the context of Namibian conservancies, ‘friction’ between global and local ways of seeing and being in the world produces novel, hybrid environmentalities characterised in part by what political scientist Jean-François Bayart calls ‘the politics of the belly’. The chapter explores how communal area residents seek to opportunistically work the conservancy system to their advantage. It highlights an accountability gap within conservancies which not only entrenches local inequalities but effectively transfers frictions between global and local environmentalities to the community level where they have the potential to develop into intra-community conflicts.
Page rangepp. 167–190
Print length24 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Ruben Schneider

(author)
Lecturer in Sociology at Robert Gordon University
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2022-0636

Ruben Schneider is a Lecturer in Sociology at Robert Gordon University and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen. Rooted in Political Ecology, his research uses an ethnographic approach to examine the local experiences of global interventions for conservation, security, and development. His doctoral thesis The Inclusive Fortress analyses the local experiences of militarised and community-based conservation in north-west Namibia in the context of a new wave of rhino poaching. It highlights both the promises and risks of combining militarised and community-based forms of wildlife conservation, while shining a light on how local people are able to transform global logics of environmental governance from below. Through partnerships and collaboration with the Namibian Government, NGOs, community organisations and the private sector, Ruben’s research aims to help to promote more sensible, locally acceptable, and sustainable conservation interventions.

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