'In this important new book, Michael Bollig provides an environmental history of the Kaoko region in North-Western Namibia while contributing to wider debates on colonialism, conservation, and land-use in Africa … this is just one of the many issues that Bollig's book compels us to revisit and reconsider.' Eduard Gargallo, Human Ecology
I. Introduction; 1. Doing research on a changing savannah landscape; II. The evolution of pre-colonial environmental infrastructures; 2. The prehistory of North-western Namibia and the riddled emergence of pastoralism; 3. Elephants and humans in the late 19th and early 20th century; III. Encapsulation and pastoralisation, 1900s to 1940s; 4. Scientist, cartographers, photographers and the establishment of western knowledge of the Kaokofeld; 5. The establishment of colonial administration and the re-immigration of pastoralists into the Kaokoveld – 1900s to 1920s; 6. The politics of encapsulation: game protection, instituting borders and controlling mobility; IV. The state, intervention, and local appropriations between 1950s and 1980s; 7. A hydrological revolution in an African savannah; 8.Conservation and poaching in the 1970s and 1980s; V. Dynamics of social-ecological relations between the 1990s and the present; 9: Pastoralism, environmental infrastructures and state-local society relations in the late 20th and early 21st century; 10. The establishment of “new commons” by government decree; 11. Into the future – envisioning, planning and negotiating environmental infrastructures; VI. Theorizing time, space, and change in a pastoral system; 12. The changing environmental infrastructure of the north-western Namibian savannah