Development, Conservation, Empowerment: The Trilemma of Community-Based Natural Resource Management in Namibia

Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) is a form of resource governance that has been widely popularized across southern Africa. CBNRM consists of three main goals or pillars which include economic development, environmental conservation, and community empowerment. It is intended to devolve control of certain natural resources from national government to local communities. The idea being that local residents will manage resources more sustainably and break neopatrimonial webs that have led to mismanagement and protracted underdevelopment. However, with communities there are important politics that often go understudied and there are instances where the same type of issues that going local was intended to circumvent, are re-engendered at the local level. Beyond this, CBNRM cannot only be understood as a form of domestic resource governance that happens in a vacuum and instead there are important politics and power imbalances between local, national, and global actors, that sees the will of some win out over others. As a result of these power asymmetries, I argue that the three goals of CBNRM form a trilemma in which the realization of one goal undermines success in achieving one or both of the others. As a result, CBNRM programs have failed to achieve the success proponents envision. Thus, it becomes integral to understand and account for the politics involved, rather than to analyze CBNRM as an apolitical policy fix for domestic conservation as much of the literature presents it as.