Project Interview

We spoke to Dr Léa Lacan from the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne about Rewilding the Anthropocene, an environmental research project funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant, with field studies in the massive Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA).

Cologne International Forum:
Hello Léa, thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. Tell us a little bit about the project that you are taking part in.

Léa Lacan:
Our project is called Rewilding the Anthropocene, it is led by Prof. Michael Bollig, who is a professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne. We are seven researchers working on the project, five PhD researchers, one post-doctorate, me, and one professor. We started our project last year in January of 2022 and the planned duration of the project is until 2026.
 
 

What is the focus of your project?

Rewilding the Anthropocene looks at one of the world’s largest transboundary conservation areas, the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), which spreads over five different countries: Zimbabwe, Botswana, Angola, Namibia and Zambia. The broad focus of the project is to look at the social-ecological changes that are happening as a result from nature conservation initiatives within KAZA.

Questions that we want to examine are: How are the ecosystems, human livelihoods, and institutions changing with conservation and increasing wildlife numbers? How does the wildlife and conservation programs impact the lives of the people living in and around the conservation area? How are the relations between humans and other species transforming? As a team, we aim to look at the opportunities and challenges brought by social-ecological changes in conservation contexts.

 

What is the research approach for your project?

We focus on human-nonhuman relations in different multispecies assemblages. Being seven researchers, we are able to spread out into different countries and topics, with a comparative approach spanning across the KAZA landscape.

Emilie Köhler is focusing on elephant-human relations in Botswana and in Namibia, while Julia Brekl is researching lion-human relations in Botswana. Professor Michael Bollig, who has a long research experience on conservation in Northern Namibia looks among other things at changing institutions, livelihoods and multispecies relations in wildlife corridors. Wisse van Engelen studies the multispecies assemblage of the Foot-and-Mouth disease transmitted by buffaloes to livestock, in Botswana. Manuel Bollman compares transforming human livelihoods in conservation contexts in Zimbabwe and Botswana. Paula Alexiou’s project is in Western Zambia and looks at assemblages involving forests and the rosewood tree.

Finally, my research is also based in Western Zambia, and focuses on changing traditional environmental governance and human-wildlife relations shaped by conservation.

The idea is that each of us has our own study, which we situate and contextualize in our specific research settings. We put together and compare our insights from our diverse studies and research locations to analyze what conservation means for multispecies relations across the KAZA landscape.

 

What is your goal with the project?

The goal of the project is of course primarily a scientific one. We want to contribute with new knowledge to understand better the ways in which human livelihoods and institutions are transforming with shifting ecologies. We want to document the opportunities and challenges for humans to coexist with other species in conservation areas. This is especially important in the context of the recent biodiversity summit held in Montreal in December 2022, where it was agreed that 30% of the world should be put under protection by 2030. Africa has been coined the “conservation continent”, and will play an important part in meeting these aims.  So, our research and the knowledge we produce could also support decision-makers on conservation policies and programs.

What is your favorite part about your fieldwork?

It is a very rich experience, but one aspect, which is particularly important to me is to make certain voices visible which are often not very  visible, the ones of the local people. Working with regional communities during long periods of fieldwork and using an ethnographic approach, allows us to spend time to understand the lives of the local inhabitants in conservation areas. Their perception of conservation projects helps us accomplish that goal.

 

What can your project gain from international collaboration?

International collaboration is definitely an important part of the project, especially because we work in different countries. In each region that we work in, we are always trying to involve national institutions, like universities and research institutes. For example, we have a collaboration with the University of Namibia. The doctoral researchers of the project working in Botswana are also partnering with the Okavango Research Institute. In our research in Zambia, we collaborate with colleagues from the University of Zambia. So, it is crucial for us to stay in contact with the resident researchers of the countries that we work in and not lose sight of the currently relevant topics in these countries. We want to do research, exchange, plan and eventually write publications together. It is a mutual enrichment.