Painting at an elementary school outside Kruger National Park, South Africa. (Source: Stasja Koot)
By Stasja Koot, Lerato Thakholi, Bram Büscher
Southern Africa’s wildlife economy is often hailed as a major success and model to be emulated. Using biodiversity and wildlife as the basis for economic growth is seen to both increase wildlife numbers and economic revenue, leading to sustainable economic development. But does it actually do that? A recent special issue in the scientific journal Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space argues that it does not. It concludes that the southern African wildlife economy is socially and environmentally unsustainable and that it needs urgent transformation towards a more ‘convivial’ conservation.
During colonialism, southern Africa was at the forefront of the global establishment of protected areas, including Kruger National Park in South Africa, Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe and Etosha National Park in Namibia. Their establishment was motivated by worries on declining wildlife numbers, an interest in hunting but also the need for cheap labour that people evicted from these areas provided. Following the establishment of state protected areas, the 1960s saw an increase of private conservation enterprises such as hunting, wildlife breeding and photographic tourism, especially in South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe. Many of these state and private conservation initiatives were created by evicting Indigenous and local communities from their land and later erecting fences in what would be termed ‘fortress conservation’.
Given the negative consequences of fortress conservation, and in the wake of shifts in development thinking in the 1970s-1980s, community-based conservation (CBC) was increasingly promoted alongside fortress conservation. Classic examples from southern Africa include CAMPFIRE (Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources) in Zimbabwe and communal conservancies in Namibia. CBC focused on combining conservation with development, largely based on the premise that financial benefits through tourism and trophy hunting would benefit local communities. Despite some successes, CBC had mostly disappointing results and its popularity waned. This was followed in the late 1990s by yet another initiative that promised to combine poverty alleviation and nature conservation: transfrontier conservation or ‘peace parks’. In transfrontier conservation, local participation, democracy and poverty alleviation were still key, but a swift increase of wildlife crime in the region (especially rhino poaching) around 2007 reinvigorated older ideas about fortress conservation, accompanied by a drive towards ‘green militarization’.
Clearly, this is a crude overview of various conservation paradigms that have come and gone in South Africa over the past century. What the special issue shows, however, is that throughout this period, environmental, socio-economic and racial injustices were not or hardly addressed, let alone overcome. It is in this context that the latest paradigm of the wildlife economy has presented itself as a new solution to these injustices. But how new and effective is this paradigm?
The wildlife economy
While often presented as a novel approach, the wildlife economy follows a long history of market-based approaches to conservation that have affected all the above paradigms. One older form is (luxury) nature-based tourism, though many new ways to commodify nature have been invented, including the establishment of wildlife estates (where wealthy people live together with wildlife in gated communities), timeshare -agreements in private reserves, DNA-based wildlife breeding and a new attempt to mainstream ‘wild’ meat.
Despite taking place against the background of highly uneven socio-economic and racial inequalities all over southern Africa, the wildlife economy is based on the idea that privatization and commodification of wildlife is moral, inclusive and environmentally sustainable. In conservation, success is mostly defined based on quantitative criteria, including commercial development, tourists, revenues accrued, numbers of wildlife and jobs created. The authors of the papers in the special issue have done long-term research on these promises and found that, rather than a solution going forward, the wildlife economy is deeply unsustainable and strengthens previous injustices. Three reasons for this come out of the special issue.
Indigenous peoples and original inhabitants of Etosha National Park at the Tsintsabis resettlement farm, Namibia. (Source: Stasja Koot)
Why the wildlife economy is unsustainable
First, the wildlife economy is environmentally unsustainable because it largely depends on fossil fuels. The promotion of consumption-driven lifestyles at wildlife estates and in (luxury) tourism, long-haul flights and high demands for energy, lead to the contradictory situation that while some local wildlife may benefit, it simultaneously degrades the global climate that enables all biodiversity to thrive. Fossil fuel companies are not only providing energy, some also use conservation to promote their ‘green’ reputation (e.g. by sponsoring national parks). This contradiction is rarely addressed in the wildlife economy. Environmental successes are all ‘local’ and focus on iconic species, while the erosion of global biodiversity and the climate are ignored.
Second, the wildlife economy is socially unsustainable because its market-driven approach perpetuates historical structures of colonialism and Apartheid. This is most visible at wildlife estates, but also in tourism, where ownership of land or access to natural resources (e.g. at private nature reserves) remains highly unequal along racial lines. Furthermore, because Apartheid was formally abolished, many private actors and conservationists now regard the sector as an equal playing field, disregarding these inequalities. As a manager of a wildlife estate wondered: “why you would want to make it a race thing. It’s an open market, whoever wants to come buy can buy here”. In practice, however, these inequalities create a ‘new green Apartheid’: a society in which Black labourers barely have enough water for survival, while mostly White tourists and estate inhabitants receive water for boreholes to enjoy wildlife, for swimming pools, or for golf courses. This hierarchy of how different lives are valued, is also visible in how iconic animals are often considered more important than Black people. This became particularly visible during the rhino poaching crisis around Kruger National Park where conservation workers, rangers and poachers take enormous risks, even to lose their lives, while poachers were often publicly dehumanised. In this way, the wildlife economy impedes steps towards spatial and social justice that it allegedly supports.
Third and last, the wildlife economy approach tends to ignore local realities while advancing biodiversity conservation goals. Take the case of cheetah conservation in Namibia. The business model of saving cheetahs in Namibia is spearheaded by conservation NGOs whose interests lie mainly in pleasing global audiences and funders while largely ignoring local livestock farmers’ concerns. In Botswana, environmental policies that are highly revered globally in reality contravene local customs of democratic participation. And in South Africa, many victims of colonial and Apartheid evictions from now world-renowned protected areas will never get their land back. Conservation goals in this setting trump their demand for land restitution. These examples show how local people’s livelihoods, land ownership and cultures tend to fall on the wayside in pursuit of species numbers and landscape restoration.
Communication about conservation at a private tourism facility, central Namibia. (Source: Stasja Koot)
Conclusion: Towards convivial conservation?
Despite southern Africa’s global and historically leading position in conservation, it has never truly addressed the deeply-rooted racial-capitalist contradictions that conservation grew under and helped develop. In fact, it increasingly embraced racial-capitalist ways of working and thinking, culminating most recently in the wildlife economy. What this shows over the long run is a logic where wildlife increases have gone hand in hand with social and environmental injustices, sometimes making these worse.
If solutions do not focus on root causes, they end up carrying coals to Newcastle. They benefit some—especially elites—in the short run, including some wildlife. But the special issue shows it is not a viable long-term strategy. Conservation in southern Africa is, therefore, ripe for a solution that goes to the roots of the problems and combines these in an integrated way, as is done under convivial conservation. Convivial conservation addresses structural injustices of conservation by going beyond market mechanisms and protected areas to focus on ‘living with’ biodiversity within planetary boundaries. Recently a Manifesto was published outlining the core idea and its ten main principles. As the special issue shows, instead of continuing to carry coals to Newcastle under the banner of a wildlife economy, these convivial conservation principles could spearhead southern African conservation into a truly sustainable and just enterprise.
Authors Bio:
Dr. Stasja Koot works at Wageningen University (Netherlands), and the University of Johannesburg (South Africa). He has worked and lived in Namibia. His research focuses on nature conservation, Indigenous peoples, racial inequality, tourism, capitalism, development and land matters in South Africa, Namibia and Indonesia. He has published in well-known journals, including Nature; Ecology and Evolution, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Geoforum, Annals of Tourism Research.
Lerato Thakholi is a lecturer at the Sociology of Development and Change Group, Wageningen University and Research and a senior researcher in the Living Landscapes in Action project at the Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape (South Africa). Lerato’s research investigates the historical development of property rights in land and environmental resources and how this has evolved in tandem with shifts in labour regimes.
Bram Büscher is a Professor and Chair of the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University, visiting professor at the University of Johannesburg, and senior editor of Conservation & Society. Bram’s research investigates changing human-nature relations and environment-development interactions in and beyond the context of late capitalism. He is the author of ‘The Truth About Nature. Environmentalism in the Era of Post-Truth Politics and Platform Capitalism (University of California Press, 2021) and co-author of ‘The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature Beyond the Anthropocene’ (Verso, 2020).
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