Paper short abstract:

This paper highlights how the perpetuation of the myth of a people-less wilderness (which buoys Botswana’s tourism industry), produces differentiated modes of state infrastructure in rural areas, shifting local peoples ability to interface with the state, the tourism industry, and other citizens.

Paper long abstract:

This paper interrogates how the provision or absence of state infrastructure (roads, bridges, permanent buildings, water and power, transport facilities) on Botswana's lucrative rural tourism spaces are linked to the manner in which the state controls and regulates the use of space within its territory, and organizes residency and migration patterns of its citizens living adjacent to sites of tourism. It examines how ambiguous, and seemingly contradictory government expansions and retractions of state infrastructure function as mechanisms of state-building in relation to natural environments.

In the western region, the provision of infrastructure acts as a means through which to draw out previously sparsely populated and seasonally mobile people from 'the bush' to live in state-sanctioned villages, pulling them into a relationship of 'legibility' with the state. In the north of the country, where the bulk of the tourism industry is based, the calculus is different. The allocation of infrastructure is delayed or denied in order to maintain the fiction of a people-free wilderness that appeals to tourist consumers—pushing local people into 'illegibility', limiting their ability to travel freely throughout the region and shrinking their infrastructural footprint to near imperceptibility on the part of tourist visitors.

This study in contradictions across Botswana's rural conservation estate highlights the manner in which the perpetuation of the myth of a people-less wilderness (a perception buoying Botswana's tourism industry), produces highly differentiated modes of state intervention in rural areas, shifting local peoples ability to interface with the state, the tourism industry, and other citizens.