Paper short abstract:

Wildlife corridors are becoming an integral part in large-scale elephant conservation in southern Africa. By considering wildlife corridors as a way of infrastructuring elephant mobilities, this presentation will trace their emergence, maintenance and governance in north-eastern Namibia.

Paper long abstract:

Tracking, Mapping, Monitoring: Wildlife Corridors as More-than-human Infrastructure

Elephants are a highly mobile species. With the help of modern technologies such as satellite collars, scientists document their far-ranging movements in and between protected areas, across national borders and through human settlements. The largest contiguous elephant population of the world comprises around 230.000 individuals, representing over 50% of the remaining African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana). This spectacular population ranges within the boundaries of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA TFCA), one of the largest terrestrial conservation areas in the world where they share their habitat with nearly 3 million people. In order to maintain a connected metapopulation in this anthropogenic landscape, wildlife corridors, which are patches of relatively undisturbed land where elephants and other species frequently move through, are becoming an integral part of regional and international land use planning. Based on one year of ethnographic, multi-sited fieldwork, the presentation will engage with a case study of the Sobbe wildlife corridor in north-eastern Namibia. By considering wildlife corridors as a way of infrastructuring elephant mobilities, it will explore how new practices, materialities and discourses unfold in the process.

How are corridors defined, mapped, monitored and inscribed in the landscape? How are they enacted by human and more-than-human actors? Whose mobilities are encouraged and whose are restricted? Which forms of collaboration, governance and contestation emerge? And which implications do they have for large-scale conservation planning?