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

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 project utilizes qualitative research methods integrated into the framework of the grounded theory to provide an account of the unique constellation of property rights underlying the institutional arrangement of communal wildlife conservation. 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 contributes to the understanding of the dynamics of the socio-ecological transformation in the Global South and examines how property arrangements are shaped by competing logics and dynamics of ecological and social justice and economic development.