Michael Bollig

• University of Cologne

What does it mean to decolonise academia in Africa? Is this important project limited to the humanities? Is it a project for the future? Are there forerunners at African universities today? The contributors to this volume show different trajectories for anthropology as a discipline and for decolonising academia across the continent and beyond. They...

Wildlife corridors are seen as essential environmental infrastructure guaranteeing species connectivity and biological diversity in contemporary conservation landscapes. Harking back to recent social science literature on infrastructure in general and environmental infrastructure in particular this contribution will analyze one contested wildlife c...

Desertification poses significant environmental and socio-economic threats to pastoral systems within the drylands of sub-Saharan Africa. However, there remains a paucity of interdisciplinary studies delving into the anthropogenic drivers of desertification at the local level of social-ecological systems, resulting in an inadequate understanding of...

This paper explores the role of agency in the emergence and evolution of tourism paths in the post-colonial states of Southern Africa. Building on the Trinity of Change Agency concept, we emphasise the critical role of the nation-state by spotlighting the multi-scalarity of institutional entrepreneurship and the impact of triggering events. These e...

This introductory chapter starts with an overview of the field of multispecies studies and its criticisms to situate the special issue in this literature. Then, it goes on to detail the overall contributions of this collection of articles. This special issue adds to the field of multispecies studies by developing a distinct Southern African perspec...

In this special issue we assess different multispecies relations in Southern Africa and bring together scholars from various fields to contribute to the still emerging field of multispecies ethnography and add our perspectives to the ongoing debate, which we situate in Namibia, South Africa and Zambia. We shortly summarize the key aspects of the co...

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...

Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast examines the conservation histories and concerns of one of southern Africa’s most iconic conservation regions: the variously connected ‘Etosha-Kunene’ areas of north-central and north-west Namibia. This cross-disciplinary volume brings together contributions from a Namibian and international group of scholars and co...

Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast examines the conservation histories and concerns of one of southern Africa’s most iconic conservation regions: the variously connected ‘Etosha-Kunene’ areas of north-central and north-west Namibia. This cross-disciplinary volume brings together contributions from a Namibian and international group of scholars and co...

This interdisciplinary volume provides a comprehensive and rich analysis of the century-long socio-ecological transformation of Lake Naivasha, Kenya. Major globalised processes of agricultural intensification, biodiversity conservation efforts, and natural-resource extraction have simultaneously manifested themselves in this one location. These pro...

Article impact statement: Simultaneous refaunation with cattle and elephants poses both ecological and governance challenges, emphasizing the need for balanced conservation policies Abstract: Human-wildlife conflict poses a significant challenge to 21st-century conservation, with a limited understanding of these interactions within the broader soc...

Southern African ecosystems are threatened by biodiversity loss, but it remains highly controversial whether nature conservation can be successfully achieved by commodifying ecosystems through tourism or by withdrawing habitats from their integration into globalized production. This article contributes to the debate by applying the global productio...

The transmission of diseases between wildlife and livestock poses a major challenge to both conservation and livestock sectors in Southern Africa. Focusing on the cases of foot and mouth disease and trypanosomiasis in the Kavango–Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, this article explores the complexity of coexistence between humans, livestock,...

This article examines the concept of “assemblage” in anthropological research on multispecies relations. The contribution begins by situating “the multispecies assemblage” within the theoretical legacy of Deleuze and Guattari. Then, it delves into three case studies of multispecies research in southern Africa, first to highlight their use of the as...

Community-based Conservation seeks to strike a balance between nature conservation and economic growth by establishing spatial and institutional settings that maintain and even regain biodiversity while simultaneously allowing for sustainable land use. The implementation of community-based conservation blueprints on communal, often agronomically ma...

The ongoing fragmentation of pastoral drylands is a matter of concern throughout Africa. Using the example of rangelands in northern Baringo County, Kenya, that were under uniform pastoral use until the late 20th century, we trace land-use and land-cover changes (LULCCs) since the 1980s and beyond. Based on ethnographic, historical, and remote sens...

Land degradation and desertification is a primary environmental and socio-economic concern in Namibia's semi-arid communal lands. To date, however, only a few studies have taken a community-level perspective to trace back the causal anthropogenic processes generating current states of land degradation at the local level. This study addresses this r...

There are high aspirations to foster growth in Namibia's Zambezi region via the development of tourism. The Zambezi region is a core element of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), a mosaic of areas with varying degrees of protection, which is designed to combine nature conservation and rural development. These conservation a...

The Kwando Basin of north-eastern Namibia is firmly embedded in current national and international conservation agendas. It is a key part of the world's largest transboundary conservation area, the Kavango–Zambezi (KAZA) Transfrontier Conservation Area, and the home of seven community-based conservation areas (conservancies) and three smaller natio...

There are high aspirations to foster growth in Namibia's Zambezi region via the development of tourism. The Zambezi region is a core element of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), a mosaic of areas with varying degrees of protection, which is designed to combine nature conservation and rural development. These conservation a...

North-eastern Namibia’s Zambezi Region became part of the world’s largest transboundary conservation area in the early 2010s: the Kavango–Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area. While wildlife numbers and wildlife-based tourism are increasing rapidly in this conservation zone, cattle herds and livestock-based economies are expanding as well. More...

Cambridge Core - Environmental History - Shaping the African Savannah - by Michael Bollig

High hopes are pinned on tourism and its catalytic potential to foster growth in remote rural areas. In the Zambezi region of northeastern Namibia, tourism plays a key role in the design of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) programmes for nature conservation. Local communities form conservancies, small village-based entities of bo...

This article introduces ethnographic upscaling, an innovative procedure to explore and test hypotheses drawn from in-depth ethnographic findings in spatially continuous cases. The approach combines the strength of localized ethnographic descriptions with questionnaire-based regional surveys to study the distribution of ethnographic findings across...

This data set contains a time series analysis of land use classifications from 1985-2015 in northern Baringo County, Kenya. The region is located in one of the study areas of the CRC/Transregio 228: “Future Rural Africa: Future-Making and Social-Ecological Transformation”. The analysis illustrates the land-use and land-cover changes over a period o...

Land-use and land-cover changes pose major challenges to local communities in many parts of the world. In the case of East Pokot in the Rift Valley of north-western Kenya, land-cover changes have a huge impact on livelihoods. While until the 1980s cattle husbandry was the prominent livelihood in the area, the socio-ecological dynamics of the past d...

In den vergangenen 20 Jahren sind sowohl die Anzahl als auch die Ausdehnung von Naturschutzflächen weltweit deutlich gewachsen. Paradoxerweise hat gleichzeitig das Artensterben enorme Ausmaße angenommen. Artensterben und Biodiversitätsverlust sind eng verknüpft mit rasch voranschreitendem Habitatverlust, klimawandelbedingten Umweltveränderungen und...

Multispectral Landsat surface reflectance products at 30 m spatial resolution from Landsat 4/5 Thematic Mapper, Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus and Landsat 8 Optical Land Imager were classified to five classes i.e. water, maize fields, bare soil, dense shrubs and trees and shrub savanna using random forest algorithm for the years 1985, 1990...

Since embarking on the study of African great apes in the 1950s, Kyoto University has promoted research on Africa from the perspective of various fields, including primatology, anthropology, ethnology, ecology, paleoanthropology, linguistics, and agriculture. The CAAS and the Africa Division at ASAFAS grew out of this history of research and are in...

This paper argues that pastoral commons are under increasing pressure not just from overuse by pastoralists themselves, but from land management policies. Since colonial times, these have been based on a persistent misconception of the nature of pastoral economies and combined with increasing land alienation and fragmentation through government pol...

Over the last two decades many sub-Saharan African countries have devolved rights and obligations in rural natural resource management from state to local communities in an effort to foster social-ecological sustainability and economic development at the same time. Often these governmental projects were launched in settings in which traditional com...

In the past decades, social-ecological systems (SESs) worldwide have undergone dramatic transformations with often detrimental consequences for livelihoods. Although resilience thinking offers promising conceptual frameworks to understand SES transformations, empirical resilience assessments of real-world SESs are still rare because SES complexity...

Throughout the past 120 years, hunting has linked the semi-arid Kaokoveld (northwestern Namibia) to global trade networks simultaneously embedding it within global aspirations to preserve African fauna untrammelled. The hunting of elephants for ivory, of endemic species for scientific inventories, of large game for the leisurely hunt, and clandesti...

The management of common-pool resources is a key problem in global environmental governance: forests, freshwater resources, pastures, and land are often managed by communities and organisations (bureaucracies, NGOs) at different organisational scales that are competing for the right to manage the resource in question, and often find ambiguous negot...

In the course of decentralization, pastoral communities in Namibia have had to find new ways to share their most salient resource, water, and the costs involved in providing it. Using data from sixty communities, we examine (1) whether and to what extent different sharing rules emerge, (2) how variations can be explained, (3) how rules are perceive...

In Namibia, rural water governance has changed profoundly during the last two decades. Today, in many rural communities, user associations administer water and set the rules for management practices. Their rules typically define boundaries and specify contributions that vary for members and outsiders. When the rains failed in 2012-14, the mobility...

In the semi-arid savannahs around Lake Baringo, Kenya, the recent spread of bush encroachment by the invasive alien species Prosopis juliflora and the native Dodonaea viscosa has changed human–environment interactions. This article suggests how the spread dynamics of Prosopis and Dodonaea have operated. It also describes the strategies Baringo's pe...

The concept of resilience is now applied across the natural and social sciences to provide a means of examining and understanding adaptation and transformation over a longer time period, in response to environmental, economic, cultural, or political shocks or adverse events. This essay introduces a collection of 10 studies that analyse resilience i...

Comparative evidence from Eastern Africa suggests the emergence of a highly specialized mobile pastoral livelihood came about in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. Developments in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen a distinct turn away from this model of pastoral specialization, towards a more mixed and spatially varie...

This paper explores the value of cross-cutting ties and conflicting loyalties for the peaceful management of conflicts and the emergence of collective action across previously violently contested community boundaries in two communities in the Lake Naivasha Basin, Kenya. In the researched communities cross-cutting ties result from intermarriages, la...

Drawing upon the dynamic interrelationship between human agency and space, this article sheds light on the constitution of and relation between "place" and "path" among the pastoral Pokot of East Pokot District in the Kenyan North Rift Valley. It discusses the transformation from a more mobile pastoralist model of spatialization, which relies on a...

Contemporary theoretical accounts of common pool resource management assume that communities are able to develop institutions for sustainable resource management if they are given security of access and appropriate rights of management. In recent years comprehensive legal reforms of communal rural resource management in Namibia have sought to creat...

The resilience concept has gained much attention during the past two decades. Not only has the concept in its many variations ecological resilience, social resilience, psychological resilience gained prominence in academic publications, but nowadays the development world too is defining resilience as a key goal: in many parts of the Global South, p...

This article sketches the contribution of an anthropology aiming at the development of explanatory models - an endeavour that has been dubbed analytical by some and scientific by others. In the first part we will trace the developments that the analytical endeavour has undergone since Thomas Schweizer's publication of Muster sozialer Ordnung (1993)...

In the past few years, adaptation to climate change has emerged as a dominant new theme in development politics, to an extent that it can almost be considered as a new development paradigm. Yet, this new paradigm and its effects are not unproblematic, as the empirical research in three East African countries presented in this article indicates. The...

The following article comments on contents and organisation of the 22nd Conference of the African Studies Association in Germany (Vereinigung fur Afrikawissenschaften in Deutschland, VAD e.V.), which took place from 30 May until 2 June 2012 at the University of Cologne, Germany. Thirty-seven panels and five round tables organised around four themat...

Pastoralism has shaped livelihoods and landscapes on the African continent for millennia. Mobile livestock husbandry has generally been portrayed as an economic strategy that successfully met the challenges of low biomass productivity and environmental variability in arid and semi-arid environments. This volume focuses on the emergence, diversity,...

Was charakterisiert die zeitgenössische Ethnologie und weshalb brauchen wir sie auch im 21. Jahrhundert? Was ist heute noch ethno an der Ethnologie, wenn es nicht mehr um die Erforschung »primitiver« Ethnien gehen kann? Zu diesen Fragen bieten 13 Sozial- und KulturwissenschaftlerInnen engagierte Innen- und Außenansichten auf das Fach. In einem sind...

Contribution to the Debate on Property and Land Rights in Africa Spectrum.

Chiefs, in academic literature often addressed as neo-traditional chiefs, traditional authorities, or intermediaries of power, have been popular topics of research among social anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists, and perhaps to a lesser extent also among historians since the 1990s.1 One might wonder justifiably why they have st...

Water constitutes an integral component of human livelihood security. In Benin, the local management and use of scarce water resources has made necessary the application of multiple risk strategies to cope with uncertainty. Socio-scientific research over several years has identified a great variety of individual strategies for protecting one’s live...

The anthropology of landscape has dealt mainly with the intricate relationships amongst memory, identities, and power and how these relations are engraved physically and intellectually in space. Many accounts have delineated how hegemonic discourses and counterdiscourses have reflected upon the conceptualisation of landscape in local cultural setti...

Landscape studies provide a crucial perspective into the interaction between humans and their environment, shedding insight on social, cultural, and economic topics. The research explores both the way that natural processes have affected the development of culture and society, as well as the ways that natural landscapes themselves are the product o...

The management of communal pastures and wells has become a standard topic of research on pastoral societies and on the theory of common pool resource management. The paper sets out to discuss the history of scientific engagement with pastoral land tenure: after a focus on overstocking and degradation caused by irrational accumulating behaviour, the...

The fact is that war comes in many guises and its effects continue to be felt long after peace is proclaimed. This challenges the anthropologists who write of war as participant observers. Participant observation inevitably deals with the here and now, with the highly specific. It is only over the long view that one can begin to see the commonaliti...

It is widely accepted that successful grazing management strategies in semiarid ecosystems need to be adapted to the highly temporal and spatially heterogeneous forage production. Nevertheless, a full understanding of the key factors and processes for sustainable adaptive management has yet to be reached. The investigation of existing, successful r...

In today's complex web of socio-economic, political and environmental changes, natural sciences' approaches may offer insufficient understanding of the dynamics underlying socio- ecological systems. Local knowledge is an important key to understanding pastoralist strategies of resource management. It is particularly interesting to investigate how l...

The nilotic speaking Pokot of northern Kenya (Rift Valley Province, Baringo District) and the Bantu speaking Himba of northern Namibia (Kaokoland, nowadays Kunene Region) are both pastoral nomadic peoples living on the fringe of young African states. To the traveller, the Himba and Pokot may look similar at first sight: both are exotic looking trib...

In this final chapter hazards, risks and risk-minimising strategies will be compared with reference to the two cases studied and to data recorded on other African pastoralists. What is to be gained from such a comparison? The emphasis of this final chapter will be on the causal relations between various hazards, risks and risk minimising strategies...

The perception of hazards and vulnerability is the foundation for risk management. Ian Scoones who looked at disasters in rural Zimbabwe stated aptly: “People must attempt to explain uncertainty in order to cope with it to offer some provisional certitude in order to provide some basis for action rather than despair. Drought has personal, emotional...

Pokot and Himba pastoralists face environmental as well as political hazards. These hazards are clearly distinguishable along the lines of duration, spatial scope and reversibility of impact. Environmental degradation, for example, is slow working and has a gradual impact but, at the same time, is highly irreversible. A drought on the contrary, is...