The Back Forty

Namibia is an African country that tends to avoid the headlines. Less than twenty years old after gaining independence from apartheid South Africa only in 1990, and with less than two million people, it is a generally peaceful and, by African standards, a wealthy nation. Taking its name from the Great Namib Desert, the country is the driest south of the Sahara, and land use is dominated by cattle and sheep ranching, with mining providing a major source of foreign exchange as it does in neighboring Botswana. The most attention received by Namibia in recent years occurred when Hollywood couplet and aspiring humanitarians, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, decided to give birth to their first child there, and holed up in the coastal city of Swakopmund for several months.Namibia, though, has achieved something extraordinary in the realm of wildlife conservation, establishing one of the most successful track records in Africa, if not the world. Moreover, Namibia’s success is based on an iconoclastic approach which runs counter to much conventional wisdom about how to conserve wildlife and endangered species.

Despite its stark environment, Namibia is home to a rich array of wildlife. The country’s red valleys and sand rivers are reminiscent of the American southwest, but Namibia’s are inhabited by black rhinos, desert elephants, mountain zebra, and brown hyenas. What makes Namibia unique in today’s world is that its wildlife populations are generally on the increase, expanding in both size and distribution during the course of the past thirty years. Namibia now has an elephant population of over 15,000 animals, up from about 6,000 in 1990. Black rhinos have more than tripled since 1980, from 300 to over 1,100, with Namibia now home to about a third of this species’ total wild population. About 20% of the world’s cheetahs, another heavily endangered species, are found in Namibia. Nearly all of these rare cats live on private lands outside national parks, where they co-exist with local human residents.These wildlife population increases are largely a result of Namibia’s unconventional approach to wildlife management. In the late 1960’s, Namibia granted private landowners- which at this time meant only the white minority population- legal rights to manage and harvest wild animals on their lands. Subsequently, wildlife numbers on private lands gradually increased, driven by the reality that once landowners were allowed to use wildlife for meat or trophy hunting they had an economic reason to invest in wildlife production. The best available estimates suggest that wildlife numbers on privately held ranches in Namibia increased by about 80% from 1970 to 1990, with most of this represented by the more common species of large antelope such as gemsbok, springbok, and kudu. After Namibia gained independence from South Africa, it set about extending this conservation model to communal lands comprising over 40% of the country and where most rural Namibians reside. In 1996, Namibia formalized its ‘communal conservancies’ program through an amendment to national wildlife laws, allowing rural communities to acquire the same rights to manage wildlife that white ranchers had possessed for nearly two decades. Since the first conservancies were certified by the Namibian government in 1998, over 40 communities around the country have entered the program. According to a review of these conservancies published last year by the Namibia Association of CBNRM Support Organizations, by the end of 2006 over 14% of Namibia’s total land area- over 118,000 km2- is now included in communal conservancies, with more 220,000 people living in these areas. Conservancy formation has enabled local communities to earn income from wildlife in a number of ways, including hunting animals for meat, granting a concession to a safari hunting company, and starting tourism ventures with private operators. The returns from these activities are now about $2.6 million annually, with the wealthiest conservancies earning over $100,000. Some, like Torra Conservancy, have paid out annual dividends to their members in addition to investing in development projects like schools and health services.

Wildlife’s increasing economic value at the community level has helped to fuel its recovery in these conservancies, as had begun earlier on the private ranches. This recovery, in turn, contributes to Namibia’s booming tourism industry, creating positive feedbacks between increasing wildlife populations, economic growth, and expanding local opportunities.

Namibia’s conservation record stands in direct contrast to other countries in the east and southern Africa region. Kenya, which banned hunting in 1977, has lost about half of its wildlife since then. Tanzania, which contains a greater abundance and diversity of large mammals than anywhere else on earth, possesses a vast network of large protected areas, but is still losing wildlife both inside and outside of parks and reserves.

Namibia’s approach also stands out when compared to conservation practices in North America. The basic tenet of the U.S. Endangered Species Act, for example, is that when a species is rare the best thing for it is to place it under strict government protection. Namibia’s philosophy is quite the opposite. Conservationists there contend that when something is rare, it becomes valuable by virtue of its scarcity, and the key to recovering endangered species is to allow moderate levels of use of these rare animals in order to establish economic incentives for producing more of them. Species that have benefited from this approach include the Hartmann’s mountain zebra, found almost entirely in Namibia, and the black rhino. Indeed, while other countries have concentrated on stopping the trade in rhino horn, Namibia has recently re-introduced strictly controlled trophy hunting of black rhinos as a way to increase this rare species’ income-generating potential in order to produce revenue and give local landholders more reason to support conservation. While this move is controversial, it will almost certainly reinforce Namibia’s successful rhino conservation practices and result in both more money for conservation and more rhinos.In his classic work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn describes the importance of anomalies in gradually laying the basis for paradigm shifts in scientific knowledge. In the realm of wildlife conservation, Namibia is an anomaly, both in terms of its increasing wildlife populations in a world of faunal depletion, and in the decentralized and utilitarian strategies it has used to achieve them. Beyond its own success, the Namibian anomaly demonstrates how the interests of local communities can be reconciled with global biodiversity concerns in a synergistic way. Whether or not these strategies lead to broader paradigm shifts in the design of African wildlife conservation strategies, only time will tell.For more information on conservation in Namibia, see the following sites:

• Namibia Nature Foundation
• Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation
• Namibian Ministry of Environment and Tourism