5. Environmentalities of Namibian conservancies

This chapter explores how communal area residents in north-west Namibia experience, understand, and respond to their conservancies. Drawing on philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ and specifically its ‘environmentality’ variant, conservancies are understood as localised global environmental governance institutions which aim to modify local people’s behaviours in both conservation- and market-friendly ways. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across four conservancies in Kunene Region, the chapter reveals how local communities culturally demystify, socially re-construct, and ultimately govern a global, neoliberal(ising) institutional experiment in return. Confirming stark experiential discrepancies and distributional injustices, the analysis cautions against a simplistic affirmation of the conservation dictum that ‘those who benefit also care’. Instead, it demonstrates that experiences of neoliberal incentives such as ownership and benefits are a limited predictor of local conservation practices. In the context of Namibian conservancies, ‘friction’ between global and local ways of seeing and being in the world produces novel, hybrid environmentalities characterised in part by what political scientist Jean-François Bayart calls ‘the politics of the belly’. The chapter explores how communal area residents seek to opportunistically work the conservancy system to their advantage. It highlights an accountability gap within conservancies which not only entrenches local inequalities but effectively transfers frictions between global and local environmentalities to the community level where they have the potential to develop into intra-community conflicts.