CRC TRR 228 Project A04
Future Conservation
Towards an African Eden? Shifting bio-cultural frontiers and the (re)coupling of social-ecological relations in the conservation areas
A04 Future Conservation
Vision
We want to explore different manifestations of conservation and how conservation landscapes were designed and planned, as well as to understand what visions for the future are being formulated. We are particularly interested in ways that take the critique of existing approaches to conservation seriously and that explore new strategies of human and more than human coexistence.
Project Summary
Project A04 continues its work on practices of large-scale conservation in southern and eastern Africa. It will pursue research in both prior field sites (Namibia’s Zambezi Region and Kenya’s Baringo County) and widen its efforts in the KAZA transboundary conservation area including conservation areas in south-western Zambia. While the Namibian Zambezi Region is characterized by a declining significance of subsistence agriculture, increasing relevance of social transfers, continued significance of migrant labour, and a rapidly growing tourism sector, south-western Zambia’s population is highly dependent on agriculture, extractive resource exploitation (e.g. timber harvesting), and labour migration. In both settings, traditional authorities wield significant influence and conflict and cooperation between them, the government, and numerous NGOs shape environmental governance. In eastern Africa the project will concentrate on a large wetland conservation area, Lake Baringo and its savannah hinterlands (after successfully working on highland adjoining forest areas in the Lake Baringo catchment in the first phase). In contrast to the well-established conservation conditions of the KAZA conservation area, the situation in the Baringo region is highly fragmented. Lake Baringo itself has maintained a sizeable population of aquatic fauna, and the Lake Baringo wetland is of crucial significance for fishermen, and also for pastoralists and agro-pastoralists living along the lake and in its hinterlands, and eco-tourists visiting the lush savannah wetlands.
<span style="color:#2B71B5; font-weight:bold"Research Regions: KAZA TFCA; Lake Baringo Area, Kenya
Problem Statement
Social-ecological transformation in southern and eastern Africa is increasingly shaped by different forms of conservation: national parks, transboundary conservation areas, community-based conservation and conservation on freehold farmland. This project focuses on the coupling of social, cultural and material dynamics in social-ecological systems under various regimes of conservation from the perspective of political ecology, neo-materialist as well as multi-species approaches.
Key Questions
- How and to what degree do households incur costs and benefits from conservation? How are such costs/benefits distributed within households and across communities?
- In what way do incomes from conservation spur rural inequality? To what extent are they an option for rural poor to diversify their livelihoods and gain more security?
- How are projects of conservation co-produced between local power brokers, national elites, governmental officers, and international actors?
- How is conservation linked to other processes, such as economic intensification, infrastructure development, rewilding, ecological invasions, or defaunation?
- What role do specific multispecies assemblages play in the planning and implementation of conservation projects and what insights can we, as anthropologists, gain by using the multispecies approach in the conservation context?
Methodology
Qualitative ethnographic methods; structured and semi-structured interviews; household surveys; cognitive methods; cultural mapping; participatory observation; essay writing.
Key Findings from Phase I
The conservation landscape and its environmental infrastructure in north-eastern Namibia has been shaped by the impact of administrative measures and the gradual decoupling of humans and wildlife in a vast wetland. The path towards today’s conservation landscape was marked and marred by the enforced reordering of human-environment relations. In Kenya, colonial and postcolonial governmental projects of conservation and development transformed forest landscapes, and still continue shaping their ecologies, the lives of their inhabitants and forest-people relations.
(2) Beyond conservation, cattle husbandry in the Zambezi Region is a project of the local population, being an expression of wealth and as a means of saving. At the same time, cattle can be used in farming activities, produce milk and meat for consumption and sale, and fulfil important social functions (i.e. bridewealth payments or cattle loans). However, the needs and practices of expanding cattle husbandry often conflict with the demands and challenges of conservation and conservation-related tourism.
(3) The travelling idea of conservation (and CBNRM in particular) is often detached from the lives of conservancy members who are confronted with the repercussions of conservation, such as human wildlife conflicts or past displacements. For most conservancy members conservation is by far not as relevant as other livelihood strategies, which raises the question to what extent community-based conservation, as practiced today, is a viable future option for many smallholders in the conservancies.
(4) In Baringo, despite rights that allow residents to use public forests in certain ways, they often feel cut off from the benefits of forest exploitation. In turn, some subsistence practices in the forest conflict with governmental conservation goals, in a highly politicized context.
(5) Communities that were displaced in the designation and making of a conservation landscape in the Zambezi Region complain about, protest against and legally contest their estrangement from their former homes that now have become protected areas. They are often relegated to supply cheap manual labour or engage in ‘cultural’ events to well-paying tourists who visit their former ancestral land, a region that is now inhabited by large herds of wildlife and where little or nothing reminds visitors of earlier inhabitants. In Baringo, former forest dwellers are claiming justice for historical evictions from forest areas by colonial and post-independence governments for conservation and exploitation purposes. We argue that conservation of biodiversity can only be successful if issues of past and present environmental injustices are addressed comprehensively.
(6) In Baringo, despite formal dispossessions of forest areas, local populations continue living with the forests. Extensive ecological knowledge and practices of care bind residents to the forest and structure the local economic and social life.
(7) Intimate relations between people and natural environments are determining in the negotiation of future conservation and livelihoods. In Baringo, Kenya, forest histories are reappropriated in political claims. In these struggles, the role of traditional authorities regains significance and cultural identities are being reframed.
Relation to the CRC
Project A04 is the only project that directly focusses on the political ecology of various conservation measures as major trajectories of future-making in rural Africa. A04 aims to contribute relevant data on social-ecological coupling for all other projects engaged in research in the southern African KAZA area and the Kenyan Baringo area.
Our project is strongly linked to the ERC Rewilding (www.rewilding.de) that is conducting research on a variety of multispecies assemblages in the KAZA TFCA in southern Africa.
Publications
Alexiou, P., Brekl, J., Köhler, E., & van Engelen, W. 2024. Performing multispecies studies in Southern Africa: historical legacies, marginalised subjects, reflexive positionalities. Anthropology Southern Africa, 47(2), 254–267. DOI
Basukala, A.K., Vehrs, H.P., Bollig, M., Greiner, C., Thonfeld, F. 2019. Spatial-temporal analysis of land-use and land-cover change in East Pokot, Kenya. Documentation, ZFL, Bonn, Germany. DOI: 10.5880/TRR228DB.2
Basukala, A.K., Vehrs, H.P., Bollig, M., Greiner, C., Thonfeld, F. 2019. Dataset: Spatial-temporal analysis of land-use and land-cover change in East Pokot, Kenya. CRC/TRR228 Database (TRR228DB). DOI: 10.5880/TRR228DB.1
Bollig, M. 2024. Wildlife corridors in a Southern African conservation landscape: the political ecology of multispecies mobilities along the arteries of anthropogenic conservation. Anthropology Southern Africa, 47(2), 216–235. DOI
Bollig, M. 2018. Themenheft “Naturschutz – Teilhabe und Konflikte.” Geographische Rundschau 70 (12), darin: Naturschutz und Naturschutzgebiete weltweit: Chancen und Herausforderungen” (p.4-9) und “Gemeinschaftsbasierter Wildschutz in Nord-Namibia” (p.30-37).Link
Bollig, M. 2021. Future Conservation in Africa: Conserving what, and for whom, and how to do it? In: Greiner, C., van Wolputte S., & Bollig, M. (eds), African Futures. ECAS 9. 2021. Leiden. Brill.
Bollig, M. 2021. Materiality, inequality, and future‐making as focal points of future engagement of economic anthropology with climate change. Economic Anthropology 8:180-182. (Contribution to the Forum “What does economic anthropology contribute to the understanding of climate change?). DOI
Bollig, M. 2020. Shaping the African Savannah: From Capitalist Frontier to Arid Eden in Namibia. Cambridge University Press. Link
Bollig, M. 2019. The Anxieties, Thrills, and Gains of Rarity and Extinction: From Discourses on Remnant Fauna to the Globalized Protection and Marketing of Endangered Wildlife in Namibia’s “Arid Eden”. In S. Gänger & Bollig, M. (eds). Forum: Commodifying the “Wild”: Anxiety, Ecology and Authenticity in the Late Modern Era. Environmental History 24 (4). Link
Bollig, M. 2018. Afterword: Anthropology, Climate Change and Social-Ecological Transformations. Sociologus 68:85-94. Link
Bollig, M., Mosimane, A., Nghitevelekwa, R., Lendelvo, S. 2023. Conservation, Markets & the Environment in Southern and Eastern Africa, Commodifying the ‘Wild’. Boydell & Brewer, Woodbridge. Full Text.
Bollig, M. & Vehrs, H.P. 2020. Abundant herds: accumulation, herd management and land-use patterns in a conservation area. Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice. Vol 10. Link
Bollig, M. and Vehrs, H.P. 2021. The Making of a Conservation Landscape: The Emergence of a Conservationist Environmental Infrastructure Along the Kwando River in Namibia’s Zambezi Region. In: Africa. 91. No. 2: 270-95. DOI
Casimir, M., Vehrs H.P. 2019. Commenting on the article: Comparative Study of Pastoral Property Regimes in Africa Offers No Support for Economic Defensibility Model, published by Moritz, M., Gardiner, E., Hubbe, M. und A. Johnson. In: Current Anthropology. 60(5): 609-36.
Greiner, C., Vehrs, H.P. & Bollig, M. 2021. ‘Land-use and Land-cover Changes in Pastoral Drylands: Long-term Dynamics, Economic Change, and Shifting Socioecological Frontiers in Baringo, Kenya’, Human Ecology. DOI
2023. Valuing Nature in Global Production Networks: Hunting Tourism and the Weight of History in Zambezi, Namibia. Annals of the American Association of Geographers. DOI
Kalvelage, L., Bollig, M., Grawert, E., Hulke, C., Meyer, M., Mkutu, K., Müller-Koné, M., Revilla Diez, J. 2021. ‘Territorialising Conservation: Community-based Approaches in Kenya and Namibia’, Conservation and Society. Access Link
Kuiper, G., Kioko, E., & Bollig, M. (eds.) 2024. Agricultural Intensification, Environmental Conservation, Conflict and Co-Existence at Lake Naivasha, Kenya. Leiden: Brill. Link
Lacan, L. 2024. Killing tsetse and/or saving wildlife? A multispecies assemblage in colonial Zambia (1895–1959). Anthropology Southern Africa, 47(2), 133–151. DOI
Lacan, L. 2024. Forest Politics in Kenya’s Tugen Hills. Conservation Beyond Natural Resources in the Katimok Forest. Boydell & Brewer, Woodbridge. Link
Lacan, L. 2023. In the ruins of past forest lives: remembering, belonging and claiming in Katimok, highland rural Kenya, Journal of Eastern African Studies, DOI
Lacan, L., Alexiou, P., Brekl, J., Köhler, E., van Engelen, W., Vehrs, H.P., Bollig, M. 2024. The assemblage: A Framework for Anthropological Research in Multispecies Studies. Sociologus, Vo. 72 (2) (2022), 93-113 DOI
Lacan, L., Vehrs, H. P., & Bollig, M. 2024. Introduction: Multispecies encounters in conservation landscapes in Southern Africa. Anthropology Southern Africa, 47(2), 109–117. DOI
Mlilo, M., Bollig, M., Revilla Diez, J. 2024. Coloniality of power and the imaginaries of tourism in Victoria Falls, Geoforum, Volume 156, 2024. DOI
Mlilo, M., Bollig, M., Revilla Diez, J. 2024. Nation-state influence on tourism path creation in Southern Africa. Regional Studies, 1–16. DOI
Mosimane, A., Matengu, K. & Bollig, M. Traditional authorities, conservation and commodification of the wild: a Namibian perspective. A Namibian perspective. In: Bollig, M., Mosimane, A. W., Nghitevelekwa, R., V. & Lendelvo, S. (eds), Conservation, Markets & the Environment in Southern and Eastern Africa Commodifying the ‘Wild’. 2023. Suffolk. James Currey.
Nghitevelekwa, R., Lendelvo, S., Nakanyete, F. N., Likuwa, K., Matengu, K., & Mushavanga, D. 2024. “We have that connection, we have love; we take wildlife as gifts from our ancestors”: relations between antelopes and Khwe in Namibia’s Bwabwata National Park. Anthropology Southern Africa, 47(2), 183–196. DOI
Van Dam, A., van Engelen, W., Müller-Mahn, D., Agha, S., Junglen, S., Borgemeister, C., & Bollig, M. (2023). Complexities of multispecies coexistence: Animal diseases and diverging modes of ordering at the wildlife–livestock interface in Southern Africa. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 0(0). Full Text
Vehrs, H. P. 2024. Hunting the hippo: a brief history of wildlife hunting and the reconfiguration of animal-human relations in Namibia’s Zambezi region. Anthropology Southern Africa, 47(2), 152–166. DOI
Vehrs, H.P. 2022. ‘Pokot Pastoralism: Environmental Change and Socio-Economic Transformation in North-West Kenya’, James Currey, Future Rural Africa Series. Access Link
Vehrs, H. P., Lacan, L., & Bollig, M. 2024. Conclusion: Situating multispecies relations in Southern Africa in their local historical and political contexts. Anthropology Southern Africa, 47(2), 268–273. DOI
Vehrs, H.P., Kalvelage, L., Nghitevelekwa, R. 2022. ‘The Power of Dissonance: Inconsistent Relations Between Travelling Ideas And Local Realities in Community Conservation in Namibia’s Zambezi Region‘, Conservation & Society, [Epub ahead of print], Link to preprint
Vehrs, H.-P., Zickel, M., 2023. Can environmental injustices be addressed in conservation? Settlement history and conservation-induced displacement in the case of Lyanshulu in the Zambezi Region, Namibia. Human Ecology (2023) Full Text
Project News
New Publication: The Assemblage – A Framework for Anthropological Research in Multispecies Studies
Proposal for New Project on Medium-Scale Farmers in Rural Africa Approved by Volkswagen Foundation
New Publication: Coloniality of Power and the Imaginaries of Tourism in Victoria Falls
CRC-TRR 228 Future Rural Africa Dissemination Workshop in Kabarnet, Baringo County
Book Launch: Agricultural Intensification, Environmental Conservation, Conflict and Co-Existence at Lake Naivasha, Kenya
New Publication: Nation-State Influence on Tourism Path Creation in Southern Africa
Book Launch: Agricultural Intensification, Environmental Conservation, Conflict and Co-Existence at Lake Naivasha, Kenya
“Multispecies encounters in Conservation Landscapes in Southern Africa”: CRC-TRR Researchers Léa Lacan, Hauke-Peter Vehrs and Michael Bollig Edit Special Issue of Anthropology Southern Africa
New Publication: Agricultural Intensification, Environmental Conservation, Conflict and Co-Existence at Lake Naivasha, Kenya
Book Launch: Forest Politics in Kenya’s Tugen Hills – Conservation Beyond Natural Resources in the Katimok Forest
Modern Elephant Conservation and Environmental Anthropology in KAZA: Project A04 Contributes to the Wiesbaden Museum Exhibition
New Publication: Forest Politics in Kenya’s Tugen Hills – Conservation Beyond Natural Resources in the Katimok Forest
GSSC Public Lecture: Animals and Global Racial Capitalism in an Age of Misanthropy -Juno Salazar Parreñas
Wawili Toolbox Entry 6: Contested Roles and Expectations
Short Film: The Southern Buffalo Fence
Wawili Toolbox Entry 5: The Start of Fieldwork
Wawili Toolbox Entry 4: Introduction to our research area – The Amboseli ecosystem
Wawili Toolbox Entry 3: East Pokot
Wawili Toolbox Entry 2: Betty, Francis and Richard
Wawili Toolbox Entry 1: Kudee and Peter
Interdisciplinary Workshop: Rewilding Species, Landscapes, Society – Dialogues across the Humanities, the Social and the Natural Sciences
Research Initiative Sharing a Planet in Peril invited to submit full proposal for a Cluster of Excellence
Living with ruins: ruination and future-making in Kenya (and beyond) – CRC-TRR 228 Led Open Access Special Issue of Journal of Eastern African Studies
Joint Publication between CRC-TRR Future Rural Africa and University of Namibia among Outstanding Academic Titles 2023
Future Rural Africa Researchers Awarded Cologne International Forum Innovative Tandem Project Grant
[DE] Elefanten Kennen Keine Grenzen: Teilprojekt A04 “Future Conservation” & “ERC Rewilding the Anthropocene” im Kölner Unimagazin
Publication: “Little Dubai” in the crossfire – trade corridor dynamics and ethno-territorial conflict in the Kenyan–Ethiopian border town Moyale
[DE] Boas Blog: “Content Warning? Kritische und sensible Wissensvermittlung in der ethnologischen Lehre”
Publication: In the Ruins of Past Lives – Remembering, Belonging and Claiming in Katimok, Highland Rural Kenya
Cologne International Forum: Project Interview ERC Rewilding
CRC-TRR Future Rural Africa at ECAS 2023
Collaboration between CRC Projects B02, C03, A04 and the ERC Rewilding leads to new interdisciplinary publication on “Complexities of multispecies coexistence”
Joint Booklaunch: Future Rural Africa & University of Namibia
Future Rural Africa Researcher Dr. Hauke Vehrs Awarded Offermann-Hergarten-Prize
Book Presentation: “Pokot Pastoralism: Environmental Change and Socio-Economic Transformation in North-West Kenya” by Dr. Hauke-Peter Vehrs
Public Lecture Social & Cultural Anthropology
Virtual Booklaunch “African Futures” 22.04.2022
Publication: Power of Dissonance: Travelling Ideas & Local Realities – Community Conservation in Namibia’s Zambezi Region
New Publication: Power of Dissonance: Travelling Ideas & Local Realities – Community Conservation in Namibia’s Zambezi Region
Publication: Pokot pastoralism
Publication: Land-use and Land-cover Changes in Pastoral Drylands
New book: Securing land rights in Namibia
Publication: The making of a conservation landscape
Voices of rural communities
New Publication: Accumulation, herd management, and land-use patterns
New Publication: Local value capture from tourism in Namibia
