Presentation short abstract

The paper examines how Himba herders sustain rangelands through mobility, reciprocity and ecological knowledge. Their practices offer alternative ways of caring for the landscape, prompting reflection on how well NbS approaches fit pastoral life.

Presentation long abstract

In Namibia’s northern rangelands, emerging interventions framed as Nature-based Solutions (NbS) meet pastoral worlds shaped by mobility, social reciprocity, and long-standing ecological knowledge. Drawing on qualitative research with Himba herders in Northern Kunene, this contribution examines how external narratives of rangeland degradation, productivity, and “repair” circulate into pastoralist communities—and how they are quietly resisted, reinterpreted, or folded into existing practices. While interventions often emphasise technical fixes such as controlled grazing, improved breeding, and intensified disease surveillance, pastoralists’ own accounts foreground flexibility, multi-species relations, and the everyday labour of navigating uncertainty. These perspectives complicate assumptions embedded in NbS framings, particularly imaginaries of equilibrium, scalable solutions, and linear pathways toward resilience.

The findings highlight frictional encounters between externally promoted visions of ecological repair and locally grounded understandings of rangeland dynamics, labour, and value. Pastoralists situate current pressures not primarily in ecological decline, but in tightening enclosures, uneven veterinary service provision, market-oriented policy agendas, and the disruptive temporalities of state and donor interventions. Their narratives offer counter-imaginaries to dominant NbS discourses—centred on flexibility rather than fixity, relational care rather than technocratic optimisation, and negotiated co-existence rather than restoration to a presumed past state.

By foregrounding these lived stories, the paper argues for rethinking NbS through the politics of pastoralism: attending to whose knowledges count, whose labour enables “solutions,” and how interventions reshape social and ecological futures in Namibia’s rangelands.