Towards an Arid Eden? Boundary-making, governance and benefit-sharing and the political ecology of the new commons of Kunene Region, Northern Namibia

Over the last two decades many sub-Saharan African countries have devolved rights and obligations in rural natural resource management from state to local communities in an effort to foster social-ecological sustainability and economic development at the same time. Often these governmental projects were launched in settings in which traditional commons, informed by both the demands of traditional subsistence-orientated agrarian systems and the tenure policies of colonial and postcolonial states were well established, and in which power struggles between rivaling traditional authorities, between seniors and juniors, and between state agents and local communities were pertinent. These moves were also embedded in (partially contradictory) discourses on decentralization, political participation, economic empowerment, and neo-liberally inspired commoditization of natural resources. In the process of devolvement rights and obligations were handed over to communities which were formalized in the process: formal membership, social and spatial boundaries, elected leadership, established models of governance, and accountability both to the wider community and to state bureaucracy. New commons1 were established around specified resources: pastures, water, forests, game. In the process these resources were (partially) commoditized: game owned by the community could be sold as trophies for hunting, lands could be rented out to private investors, and water had to be paid for. This contribution is intended to shed light on the process of establishing new commons - in the local context named conservancies - of game management in north-western Namibia. Game on communal lands had been state-owned and state-controlled in the colonial past. This did not preclude poaching but certainly inhibited significant degrees of commoditization. The new commons of game management are meant to do exactly this, in two steps: first specific rights (in this case management rights and transfer rights) are devolved to a well-defined community; then this community (or its committee) decides how to put the newly gained rights to good use and transfers such rights to private investors, tourism entrepreneurs and commercial hunters. While the first step is informed by discourses on participation and co-management, the second step is market-oriented and seeks so-called public-private partnerships.