Contribution short abstract:

This paper analyses a community-based rewilding project in southwestern Zambia as an emerging multispecies political community. It explores who counts as political actors, human and non-human, and how they are commoning together.

Contribution long abstract:

The Simalaha conservancy in southwestern Zambia has reintroduced thirteen wildlife species over the past decade into a wildlife dispersal area at the heart of the vast Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area. Rewilding in Simalaha aims to promote the ecological connectivity between key conservation zones in this area. As a community-based conservation project, Simalaha promotes human-wildlife coexistence while involving local residents in decision-making and sharing the benefits of conservation with them. This paper analyses the multispecies community that emerges from community-based rewilding by looking at how people and wildlife interact and coexist in the conservancy and the changing political roles of local humans and reintroduced wildlife in this process. This ethnographic research is based on semi-structured interviews, observation and participatory wildlife mapping with local residents and leaders in Simalaha. The paper shows that Simalaha imposes commoning with wildlife on local farmers, who contest human-wildlife coexistence and feel marginalized in the conservancy’s management and decision-making. The paper also highlights that wildlife are political actors, considered in the management of Simalaha, but that their political role is obscured by depoliticizing narratives of rewilding and wildness. Based on these results, the paper argues that who counts as a political actor is being redefined in the emergence of a more-than-human political community, with risks for already marginalized humans. Commoning in this case of community-based rewilding goes beyond the sharing and management of resources in common among humans, as it opens up a common political space in which humans and non-humans must find ways to coexist.