Since Independence in 1990, the Namibian government and a growing number of private actors have defended the need to open the country’s Communal Lands (CLs) to economic investment, as well as the urgency to amend the Communal Land Reform Act in order to enhance individual tenure. In the last decades, official and unofficial private plots have been demarcated, commercial cropping and livestock husbandry have expanded and population pressure on the CLs has increased. To complicate things further, conservation and tourism have also claimed extensive areas of land, mostly in the form of partnerships between Communal Conservancies and private investors. The danger of a so-called “green grabbing” has been detected. At the same time, it is necessary to highlight that the Namibian case is not following the typical path of “land grabbing” as described in some academic and activist literature. The amount of land that has fallen into the hands of foreign investors is very small, and – most importantly – the government policies are far from univocal: neither the type of land tenure, nor the economic sector(s) to be encouraged or the role of large investors are clearly stated. Conservancies and other wildlife-related actors are sometimes contributing to the process of commercialization and to the limitation of areas open to communal agriculture, but they are also curtailing State, corporate and elite economic schemes and assisting communal resilience in some ways. The analysis of the evolution of land policies in Namibia’s Communal Lands and the place of conservation in it might illuminate the diverse ways in which both land grabbing and opposition to it are being developed in an African context.

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land grab,conservation,agriculture,Namibia,communities