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Copyright

Diego Menestrey Schwieger; Michael Bollig; Elsemi Olwage; Michael Schnegg

Published On

2024-08-02

Page Range

pp. 219–242

Language

  • English

Print Length

24 pages

7. The emergence of a hybrid hydro-scape in northern Kunene

Chapter of: Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast: Conservation Histories, Policies and Practices in North-west Namibia(pp. 219–242)
This chapter shifts from land and boundaries to consider the management of water in Etosha-Kunene, and specifically the materiality of infrastructures linked to water resource management and its social-ecological implications. In north-western Namibia a unique “hydro-scape” has emerged. Before the 1950s, the area was characterised by the scarcity of permanent water places and sources. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, the then-ruling South African administration drilled hundreds of boreholes in the region as part of its apartheid “homeland” policy and “modernisation” impetus. Initially, local leaders and traditional authorities rejected the idea of water development through borehole drilling; many felt that once such a complex and expensive infrastructure was operational, the state was there to stay as the guarantor of water infrastructures providing the basic hydro-infrastructure for vast herds of livestock. Since 1990, the independent Namibian state continued the borehole-drilling program, especially as part of its drought-management approach. From the 1990s onwards, responsibility for maintaining the above-ground infrastructure of boreholes was transferred to local pastoral communities. Nonetheless, the state once again expanded its reach as material water infrastructures opened the door for national and global governance regimes which increasingly permeated communities, even as the state began to “withdraw” through community-based management policies. The result is a dynamic bricolage of institutions shaped by different practices, power relations, norms, and values. Nowadays, local communities reliably maintain water supply, but not always on an equitable basis for all users.

Contributors

Diego Augusto Menestrey Schwieger

(author)
Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Cologne
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6874-9291

Diego Augusto Menestrey Schwieger is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne, Germany, with affiliations to the Namibia University of Science and Technology and the Namib Research Institute Gobabeb. His work focuses on the collective management of environmental resources and infrastructures by agro-pastoral societies in Namibia, such as water and rangelands, using ethnographic methods and political ecology as an analytical perspective. He is currently engaged in collaborative, interdisciplinary research on the social-ecological implications of land degradation, desertification, and rangeland restoration in Namibia's communal areas and the future of pastoralism in the face of global climate change and the threat of ecological tipping points.

Michael Bollig

(author)
Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at University of Cologne
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7133-6132

Michael Bollig is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne where his key interests lie in the environmental anthropology of sub-Saharan Africa. His current research projects focus on the social-ecological dynamics connected to large-scale conservation projects, the commodification of nature and the political ecology of pastoralism. He is the author of Shaping the African Savannah. From Capitalist Frontier to Arid Eden in Namibia (2020), Risk Management in a Hazardous Environment (2006), co-editor of African Landscapes (2009) with O. Bubenzer, Pastoralism in Africa (2013) with M. Schnegg and H.P. Wotzka, Resilience and Collapse in African Savannahs (2017) with D. Anderson and Environmental Anthropology - Current Issues and Fields of Engagement (2023), co-authored with F. Krause.

Elsemi Olwage

(author)
Post-doctoral Researcher at University of Namibia

Elsemi Olwage is a Namibian Social Anthropologist, with a background in Development Studies and Political and Environmental Anthropology. She is currently based at the University of Namibia as a post-doctoral researcher in the One Ocean Hub Project. Within this project she is focusing on histories of exclusion and erasure in Walvis Bay, and questions of memory, place, and culture within human rights and global paradigms of ocean governance. She conducted her PhD research in the Kunene Region in 2014-2016 on a land and grazing dispute. Her present and past research interests include post-colonial and post-apartheid land-relations, spatiality, and place-making, in both rural and urban contexts, and its intersections with questions of social and environmental justice, institutional change, the politics of belonging, mobility and migration, ecology, and self- and grass-roots organisation. In the last years she has worked in both academia and consultancy.

Michael Schnegg

(author)
Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Universität Hamburg
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9240-8836

Michael Schnegg is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Universität Hamburg. His work engages anthropology with a range of disciplines to better understand how people collectively enact and make sense of the world. To do so, he combines long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico and Namibia with conceptual philosophical work and modelling.