Wildlife corridors in a Southern African conservation landscape: the political ecology of multispecies mobilities along the arteries of anthropogenic conservation

Abstract

The decline of biodiversity is a key topic in public discussions around the globe. These debates have triggered massive efforts to increase protected areas and to safeguard the corridors connecting them. The wildlife corridors dealt with in this article are mainly thought to facilitate the mobility of elephants and some other large herbivores (for example, zebra and buffalo). Wildlife corridors are not only essential for species connectivity but also an integral part of the booming ecotourism in north-eastern Namibia’s conservation landscapes. Coexistence infrastructure is meant to contribute to economic development and local incomes. Conservancies — community-based conservation organisations in the Namibian context — gazette corridors and market wildlife abundance to ecotourists, potential investors in tourism and commercial hunters. The coexistence of humans and wildlife is challenging, though. Human-wildlife interactions frequently result in damage, and often conservationist environmental infrastructuring runs against the aims of farmers to expand their fields for commercial crop production and to gain pastures for growing cattle herds. It also runs against other governmentally endorsed infrastructuring that brings tarred roads, water pipelines and boreholes. This article analyses contested wildlife corridors as part of a larger conservationist project in the western parts of Namibia’s Zambezi Region.