Selling extinction : The politics of cheetah conservation in Namibia : “Cheetah capital of the world”

Summary

This thesis highlights the importance of examining how environmental crises are communicated, especially over social media platforms. With the rise of ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ online, it has become increasingly difficult to discern validated sources of evidence. This is particular concern as claims of the extinction of globally-valued, charismatic species—like the cheetah—are circulated at the global scale. This work describes the findings of an embedded case study of cheetah conservation in Namibia and provides a nuanced and complex understanding of cheetahs’ Extinction Spectacle online. Using a wide lens, this research examines intersecting perspectives and experiences of cheetah conservation, cheetah conservation NGOs, international volunteers, researchers in the field, commercial farming communities, Namibian government, and global audiences and incorporates various media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter). By developing an analytical framework drawn from Debord’s (1995) concept of the Spectacle, this thesis contextualizes the conditions and processes of selling extinction. Furthermore, this work extends the concept of the Spectacle to account for changes over media platforms in the attention economy.

The findings of this thesis revealed an anomaly in the field of political ecology. Cheetahs’ ecological adaptation(s), captivity, and territory on commercial, freehold farms in Namibia moved cheetah conservation into the private sector. As land-owning conservation elites and part of a conservation capitalist class, the NGOs studied owned the means of production. In this thesis, private land ownership codifies (absolute) rights to land and wildlife and renders on-site conservation a private good. When conservation is a private good, it changes the avenues through which private actors and the NGOs access, engage, and participate in local, national, and global conservation politics. For example, the NGOs are outside of the political realm in Namibian conservation governance as private sector actors. Private property is governed by different legal, regulatory, social, political, and economic structures than property in the commons and in political ecology more broadly. Conservation as a private good requires a different approach and frame of analysis than what is currently in place in the field of political ecology.

Knowledge that is produced by these NGOs about cheetah conservation and their broader work in conservation in Namibia is constructed under the aegis of private property. Private property rights include the right of access and of exclusion and these rights extend to what information about conservation is communicated and circulated globally as well as on-the-ground in Namibia. The institutional context of the NGOs required that this research consider the role of non-state private actors, private property ownership, and (absolute) private property rights in conservation in Namibia as well as in the spatial production of conservation knowledge claims. Consequently, this thesis illustrates how problematically inaccurate information is circulated in ways that disrupt politics and power in conservation masking the economic and political interests of the NGOs. Ultimately, this research suggests widening the political ecology lens to include political epistemology and account for the role of private property, private property ownership, and (absolute) private property rights in local and global conservation approaches and conservation claims.