Wilder landscapes, shifting powers: The political ecology of rewilding in Zambia

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Rewilding is increasingly popular as a new paradigm for conservation advocating the return of an autonomous nature, the 'wild', in closer coexistence with people. This approach resonates with transboundary conservation initiatives like the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA) in southern Africa. The Simalaha Community Conservancy in southwestern Zambia is KAZA's poster child on the local level, to show how rewilding can simultaneously achieve transboundary conservation, economic development, and peaceful coexistence between wildlife and humans. This article proposes a multi-scalar political ecology of rewilding, bringing together ethnographic research at the regional level of KAZA and at the local level in Simalaha. It analyses how rewilding reshapes the political authority of international and regional NGOs, traditional authorities (TAs), local communities and national governments. The article shows that rewilding revitalizes the KAZA conservation vision, but also reactivates power struggles: national states seek to reassert control over the expansion of conservation in customary lands, NGOs backed by international donors consolidate their influence through partnerships with TAs, and TAs leverage these dynamics to gain new authority. Rewilding thus remains largely a top-down process, steered by NGOs and governments, yet simultaneously opens up new opportunities for traditional authorities and communities to negotiate power in Simalaha and KAZA.