Accounting for Climate Change in Community-Based Natural Resource Management: Reflections on Wildlife Conservation in Namibia

Abstract

Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) has emerged as a key technique for resource governance across much of southern Africa. While it was seen early on in its inception in many countries as a virtual panacea for sustainable development, its success has waned over time. While the predominant literature points to a number of reasons for diminished benefits, I argue in this article that climate change is the binding constraint to programme success. I further argue that this has been largely omitted from scholarly research owing to CBNRM being analysed predominantly as a domestic policy for conservation, which ignores the global dynamic of this form of resource governance and the power imbalances created by the many players involved. I argue that CBNRM is best understood as a global assemblage in which competing actors exercise various forms of power that are at times synergistic and at other times in opposition to one another. The article specifically outlines the issue of trophy hunting as a form of ‘consumptive’ conservation, which is generally framed in contrast to photographic tourism, seen widely as a ‘non-consumptive’ form of conservation. Based on fieldwork conducted in Namibia, I argue that all forms of tourism are in fact consumptive and that all variables need to be accounted for in deciding what is consumptive or not consumptive.