Explores how community-based conservation shapes rural communities' relationships with time, development and the environment.


Namibia's communal conservancies were established to empower rural communities to manage their own wildlife, integrating ecological protection with economic incentives. However, in Salambala, in the Zambezi Region, while the game guards go on patrol and the committee holds meetings, a sense of indefinite waiting for the promised development grows.

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this book argues that community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) is, above all, a regime of temporal governance. It examines how the future conceptualised in CBNRM, with its focus on streamlined planning and bureaucratic data sets, intersects and sometimes clashes with more seasonal and ad hoc temporalities on the ground. CBNRM can result in increased numbers of iconic wildlife but, as yet another attempt to subordinate the environment to Western spatio-temporal frameworks, ultimately does not challenge the modern capitalist expansion project at the heart of the nature crisis. At the intersection of the anthropology of time, the anthropology of human-environment relations, the anthropology of development, and political ecology, the book contends that CBNRM can be seen as a temporal fix - binding people to bureaucratic schedules and deferred rewards in the name of a future that seldom arrives.