| This thesis examines how Botswana's Community-Based Natural Resource Management Program (CBNRM) simultaneously moderates and reproduces the competing priorities, interests and understandings of its numerous and diverse actors. The proponents of CBNRM utilize a management framework based on a discourse of “sustainable development”, which facilitates the interaction between these participants. However, this framework also produces, reveals and intensifies the participants contradictory stances, specifically within CBNRM's administrative, commercial and environmental management processes. The Government of Botswana's attempts to utilize the environment in a sustainable manner for the purposes of development rely upon the institutionalization and bureaucratization of the CBNRM organizational structure, the commodification and globalization of Botswana's wildlife, and the science-based management of Botswana's environment. Through an examination of these processes, the underlying contradictions and differences of the various CBNRM actors are exposed and explored. The thesis concludes that while the concept of sustainability has the ability to reconcile different strategies and interests at a surface level, underlying and systemic contradictions often prevail, potentially jeopardizing the long-term viability of Botswana's CBNRM program. |
