Clare Gupta

Ph.D Candidate

cgupta@nature.berkeley.edu
Phone/Fax: 510-643-3918
Mailing address: 137 Mulford Hall #3114 University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-3114

Research Interests

As a student in both the Society & Environment and Ecosystem Sciences divisions of ESPM, I am working to develop an interdisciplinary approach to the study of environmental problems. I am particularly interested in understanding the nature of conflicts over wildlife conservation in southern Africa. Specifically, my dissertation research seeks to explain how local visions of the environment and of human-wildlife relations play a role in the politics of natural resource management in wildlife and human-populated areas of northern Botswana. In Botswana, as in most parts of the world that still support populations of charismatic wildlife species, the introduction of Western neoliberal models of wildlife management has heightened struggles over control, access, ownership and benefits from these wild animals. Despite the name “community-based natural resource management” (CBNRM), these programs have been criticized for failing to incorporate local conceptions of appropriate environmental practice into their design. I propose to study the different ways community members in CBNRM villages in rural Botswana engage with wildlife—including CBNRM schemes’ influence on these interactions—and how these engagements shape and are shaped by local imaginaries for wildlife. By making visible the complexities of these material and metaphorical relationships, my research will contribute to a set of interdisciplinary bodies of literature, including recent political ecology, that aim to understand how nature politics is both materially and discursively constituted. My findings will also inform critical examinations of how CBNRM policies in Botswana might begin to take local human-wildlife relations into account. This ethnographic research will take place within the Chobe Enclave Community Trust, Botswana’s first CBNRM program.