Wildlife as a Commodity and More-than-Human Property: On the Model Environmental Stewardship in Namibia (A08*)

• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 424638267

The proposed research project focuses on the unique constellation of property rights connected with the model of communal wildlife conservation in Namibia. On the basis of a single-case qualitative ethnographic analysis of one wildlife reserve, the project focuses on two clusters of property rights – the rights concerning wildlife (the combination of the more-than-human habitat rights of the animals and the commodification of wildlife in safari tourism and trophy hunting) and the communal property rights of the conservation communities. The main aim of the project is to analyze which distribution of property rights serves as a response to the need to combine nature conservation with the demands of social justice and economic development; and how the hybrid constellation of human and more-than-human property rights characterizes the model of environmental stewardship.

• DFG Programme: CRC/Transregios
• Subproject of: TRR 294: Strukturwandel des Eigentums
• Applicant Institution: Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
• Project Head: Privatdozentin Dr. Petra Gümplova