• DEVELOPMENT PRINCIPLES - 57.537

Rachel DeMotts’ research focuses on African political ecology, particularly the social impacts of conservation, women's participation in community conservation, transboundary natural resource management, and linkages between HIV/AIDS and the environment.    One of her current projects examines the gendered benefits of community-based conservation through an understanding of women’s participation in craft making in rural Namibian conservancies.  To this point, most examinations of benefits from conservation initiatives at the local level focus primarily on income from wildlife – which is traditionally the domain of men.  Leadership of these community initiatives is also often tied to chiefs and their headmen, which heavily influences the ways in which benefits are distributed. Consequently, this project seeks to disaggregate the notion of benefits and consider social, political, environmental, and cultural outcomes of linking women’s roles with crafts and conservation.  This includes a fuller understanding of how women participate in and relate to conservancy power structures as well as how men and women use benefits differently.  Rachel is also working on projects on human-elephant conflict in Botswana, the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (including parts of Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe), and a comparison of community-based conservation policies and projects in Botswana and Namibia.

“Cross Sectoral Commons Governance in Southern Africa,” two year comparative project on common property resource management (Botswana, Malawi, South Africa, Zambia), funded by the European Union through the Harry Oppenheimer Okavango Research Centre (HOORC) of the University of Botswana

Forthcoming book chapter on women and water in Namibia

Forthcoming article on HIV and conservation policy

“Placing the Local in the Transnational? Communities and Conservation Across Borders in Southern Africa,” pp 189-212, in B. Logan and W.G. Moseley, eds, African Environment and Development: Rhetoric, Programs, Realities. 2004.  Aldershot:  Ashgate Press.

Dissertation: Democratic Environments?  Conservation and Development Across Southern African Borders

Why do efforts to create local participation in conservation and development marginalize rather than empower local people?  This project focuses on a comparative analysis of how local residents in South Africa and Mozambique, two partners in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, participated in the establishment and implementation of this massive new park.  It examines the processes by which local participation structures were created, how they function, and whether local residents are able to influence park outcomes.  By dissecting these local structures and place them in the context of national and transnational policy processes, it show the larger effects of ignoring local political structures in conservation and development projects.  It argue that not only are some participation structures not truly participatory, but that they may actually reinforce existing inequalities and be detrimental to local residents who face livelihood restrictions, political marginalization, and the threat of resettlement.