Decolonising mainstream natural resource economics: the case of Community-Based Natural Resource Management in Southern Africa

Mainstream conservation has undergone a profound shift over recent decades, from exclusionary ‘‘fortress’’ models toward participatory approaches that promise to reconcile biodiversity protection with community development. Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) in Southern Africa stands as the region's most celebrated expression of this promise, a framework designed to devolve rights, deliver benefits, and empower local communities to steward the wildlife on their lands. However, despite decades of implementation and billions of dollars in investment, a substantial body of critical scholarship contends that CBNRM consistently fails to transfer genuine power and deliver equitable outcomes. This persistence of failure despite progressive rhetoric suggests a deeper problem, that economic theory underpinning these models may itself carry forward colonial logics that systematically exclude alternative ways of knowing and valuing nature. This thesis addresses this possibility, asking, what do the contours of a decolonised resource economics look like, considering the practice of CBNRM in Southern Africa? The study employed a qualitative, multi-stage design that moves sequentially from conceptual groundwork to theoretical critique, methodological innovation, and empirical application to examine what an alternative framework might entail.
A systematic literature review (n=35 articles, 2003-2023) maps how decolonisation is framed in conservation scholarship. The review reveals a critical gap that, while the discourse robustly critiques Western conservation models, it largely bypasses the economic rationality, specifically the theories of incentives, property, and value, that undergird them. A theoretical critique chapter then deconstructs mainstream resource economics through a decolonial lens, analysing its core axioms (mechanistic ontology, methodological individualism) and prescriptive models (Prisoner's Dilemma, incentive theory). A methodological intervention chapter documents participatory feedback workshops conducted with communities in Mucusso, Angola (n=27 community members, 12 key stakeholders) and Wuparo Conservancy, Namibia (n=52 stakeholders, 27 in-depth participants), operationalising the Relational Science Model through practices of cyclical dialogue, embodied engagement, and co-production with local NGO partners ACADIR and IRDNC. The final empirical case study applies this integrated framework to analyse Namibia's human-wildlife conflict (HWC) compensation scheme, drawing on workshop transcripts, survey data (n=154 households), conservancy event book records, and immersive ethnographic engagement, including night patrols with game guards and witnessing an elephant raid, experiences that fundamentally transformed the researchers’ analytical perspective.
The findings suggest that mainstream natural resource economics is not a neutral technical discipline, but a field historically shaped by colonial worldviews. Its core axioms, the mechanistic conception of ‘‘nature-as-resource’’ and the universalised homo economicus, systematically exclude relational, place-based ontologies central to many Southern African communities. Its prescriptive models, the Prisoner's Dilemma and incentive theory, function as technologies of ‘‘colonial silencing’’ through three interconnected strategies. First, by pathologising communal, relational systems of resource governance as inherently prone to failure, thereby justifying external intervention. Second, through economising complex socio-ecological relations and plural values such as cultural, spiritual, and intrinsic into a single, monetary metric. Third, through functionally appropriating local knowledge and social norms which are not valued in themselves but instrumentalised to serve market-based goals, without ceding control over defining goals of conservation. When embedded in CBNRM, these logics transform the ‘‘community’’ from a living social entity into a manageable corporate agent, modernising rather than dismantling colonial hierarchies.
The methodological findings demonstrate that participatory feedback workshops, when designed as relational encounters rather than procedural obligations, can become sites of decolonial practice. The act of returning to communities, sharing meals, walking fields at night, and engaging in co-interpretation of data operationalised the values of integrity, respect, humility, and reciprocity. This process generated actionable outcomes, community-developed event books, refined compensation process maps, and conservancy action plans, while transforming researcher positionality from external expert to accountable partner.
The empirical case study provides granular evidence of how commodifying logics operate on the ground. Namibia's HWC compensation scheme, despite its progressive intent, systematically excludes those it purports to serve. The analysis reveals that the scheme individualises structural problems, treating spatial vulnerability (some farmers located wildlife corridors through land-use planning implemented without community consultation) as individual non-compliance. It produces and penalises vulnerability through criteria that systematically exclude widows, mothers with young children, and unsupported farmers. It also frames HWC as a financial transaction, rendering invisible the incommensurable values of safety, emotional well-being, and cultural integrity. The mother who remained home ‘‘still crying’’ after an elephant raid, the widow who cannot guard her field at night, the farmer demanding that the President ‘‘come and see for herself what it means to run after elephants in the night’’, these testimonies are not data points for improved compensation models but evidence that the current framework asks the wrong questions.
The thesis makes several interconnected contributions to knowledge. Significantly, it extends decolonial critique to the ontological foundations of NRE, revealing that the mechanistic worldview is not merely conceptual, but a world-making project embedded in the very models that govern conservation policy. This demonstrates that genuine decolonisation requires not better incentives but different worlds. By engaging ontology, the nature of reality itself, the thesis also contributes to a decolonised epistemology of natural resource economics. Second, the research moves beyond critique to reconstruction, proposing a fundamental reframing of core questions, from ‘‘what incentives will change behaviour?’’ to ‘‘what makes stewardship meaningful?’’ and from ‘‘payment’’ to ‘‘reparation’’, and operationalising convivial conservation as a framework grounded in ontological pluralism and epistemic justice. Third, the thesis provides an empirical, transferable template for relational methodology, showing how values like humility and reciprocity require concrete, resourced practices. Fourth, it offers rich, grounded evidence of how commodification produces suffering, charting pathways toward recognition-based approaches that honour multiple languages of valuation.
Ultimately, the research advances understanding of how coloniality persists not only in visible structures of power but in the invisible axioms of economic theory. Dismantling these axioms requires not better models but different worlds. The thesis calls for an ontological reorientation, a turn towards economics as if relationships, plural worlds, and reparative justice mattered, and a commitment to building resource futures founded on reciprocity, conviviality, and the enduring sovereignty of those who call the land home, the Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.