Event Description
Drylands, which cover 41% of the Earth’s land surface and are home to 2.47 billion people, are increasingly threatened by severe land degradation. We investigate the political economy of land degradation and conservation in Namibia’s communal drylands. Using a dataset of all made-made water points and land conservancies in Namibian history and ground-truthed satellite measures of rangeland degradation since 1980, the speakers show that the South African Apartheid government (1960-1990) invested heavily in water point development to secure short-term popular approval, but that these investments contributed to the long-term degradation of commonly held rangeland. The speakers will identify three mechanisms driving the effect: an increase in livestock numbers, a reduction in seasonal grazing rotation, and a degradation of traditional land management institutions. They will then show that the devolution of land management to communal conservancies since 1998 has helped ameliorate these effects. However, while the effects of Apartheid-era boreholes and conservancies are statistically discernible, we find that they pale in comparison to the effects of climactic variations, suggesting that coercive and costly policies based on theories of direct human influence on the rangeland environment may be unjustified.
Event Speakers
- Max Mauerman, Senior Staff Associate at Columbia University
- Veno Tjiseua, PhD student in Natural Resources Management and Policy at the Namibia University of Science and Technology
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. Registration closes at 1 PM on November 13. Contact [email protected] with any questions.
Part of the Co-Production of Knowledge Initiative at the Center for Science and Society.
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