📚 Save Big on Books! Enjoy 10% off when you spend £100 and 20% off when you spend £200 (or the equivalent in supported currencies)—discount automatically applied when you add books to your cart before checkout! 🛒

Copyright

Arthur Hoole; Sian Sullivan

Published On

2024-08-02

Page Range

pp. 375–402

Language

  • English

Print Length

28 pages

14. Living next to Etosha National Park

The case of Ehi-Rovipuka

Chapter of: Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast: Conservation Histories, Policies and Practices in North-west Namibia(pp. 375–402)
This chapter considers the implications of being park-adjacent for ovaHerero pastoralists now living in Ehi-Rovipuka Conservancy. Using PhD research conducted in 2006 and 2007 as a baseline, the chapter focuses on three dimensions. First, some aspects of the complex and remembered histories of association with the western part of what is now Etosha National Park (ENP) are traced via a “memory mapping” methodology with ovaHerero elders. Second, experiences of living next to the park boundary are recounted and analysed, drawing on a structured survey with forty respondents. Most interviewees indicated that no benefits were received at the time from the national park. They also expressed desires for grazing rights––especially for emergency grazing during dry periods, as well as access to ancestral birthplaces, graves and traditional resource use areas, and involvement in joint tourism development ventures inside the park. Finally, different dimensions of local knowledge are recounted, including of wildlife presence and mobilities through the wider region, “veld-foods”, and school-children’s perceptions of ENP and the conservancy. Although the research reported here was carried out some years ago, circumstances in Ehi-Rovipuka have changed rather little. The conservancy remains along the border of a national park, and peoples’ histories of utilising, moving through, and being born and desiring to be buried in the western reaches of the park remain. The chapter argues that more awareness of how social, ecological and historical dimensions of the broader Etosha landscape are connected is essential for achieving biodiversity conservation outcomes.

Contributors

Arthur Hoole

(author)

Arthur Hoole is Canadian and he enjoyed a long and diverse career in park planning, wildlife conservation and environmental assessment. Early on he completed park planning assignments in Canada’s Banff National Park, Kluane National Park Reserve, Yukon and Nahanni National Park Reserve, among many other protected area planning and resource management projects in Western Canada. He then worked internationally, as a national parks advisor in Antigua and Barbuda, West Indies, followed by five years living in Zimbabwe as an advisor on natural resource management policies and programmes. These assignments engaged him with indigenous and local communities and his work focused on indigenous and local community governance in resource management and conservation. This culminated in his doctoral research interest in Namibia and the Etosha-Kunene region. He completed his PhD at the Natural Resources Institute, University of Manitoba, much inspired by his principal advisor Professor Fikret Berkes.

Sian Sullivan

(author)
Professor of Environment and Culture at Bath Spa University
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0522-8843
http://www.futurepasts.net/

Sian Sullivan is Professor of Environment and Culture at Bath Spa University. She is interested in discourses and practices of difference and exclusion in relation to ecology and conservation. She has carried out long-term research on conservation, colonialism, and culture in Namibia (www.futurepasts.net and www.etosha-kunene-histories.net), and also engages critically with the financialisation of nature (see www.the-natural-capital-myth.net). She has co-edited Political Ecology: Science, Myth and Power (2000), Contributions to Law, Philosophy and Ecology: Exploring Re-embodiments (2016), Valuing Development, Environment and Conservation: Creating Values that Matter (2018), and Negotiating Climate Change in Crisis (2021).