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Paper short abstract:

The Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area recently became a new big player within the conservation networks of Namibia’s borderlands North-Eastern Namibia. Its practices to secure transnational spaces for conservation - particularly mapping - are analysed within historical contexts of the region.

Paper long abstract:

In March 2012 one of the largest nature conservation areas of the world - the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Area (Kaza TFCA) - was launched in the five countries corner of Zambia, Angola, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe. The Conservation Area or Peace Park was envisioned, promoted and facilitated by a large South African NGO and is criticised by many scholars as a neo-liberal project to secure capitalist interests in the region or as a neo-colonial re-territorisation of the region.

In this paper I elaborate on practices used to 'secure' such a vast area for conservation and discuss them within broader histories of space and borders in the region. Dominant actors such as the national states or the army but also international NGO actively used the concept of conservation over the last century as means to define space and enforce policies within them.

My research focuses on mapping as a particularly powerful practice of spatial ordering and elaborates on how mapping reproduced power structures behind nature conservation and how it is still used to legitimate major player's interests within transnational environmental policies.