This thesis is a research about the recent complex spatial changes in Namibia and
Tanzania and local communities’ capacity to cope with, adapt to and transform the
unpredictability engaged to these processes. I scrutinise the concept of resilience and its
potential application to explaining the development of local communities in Southern
Africa when facing various social, economic and environmental changes.
My research is based on three distinct but overlapping research questions: what are
the main spatial changes and their impact on the study areas in Namibia and Tanzania?
What are the adaptation, transformation and resilience processes of the studied local
communities in Namibia and Tanzania? How are innovation systems developed, and
what is their impact on the resilience of the studied local communities in Namibia
and Tanzania? I use four ethnographic case studies concerning environmental change,
global tourism and innovation system development in Namibia and Tanzania, as well as
mixed-methodological approaches, to study these issues.
The results of my empirical investigation demonstrate that the spatial changes in
the localities within Namibia and Tanzania are unique, loose assemblages, a result of
the complex, multisided, relational and evolutional development of human and nonhuman
elements that do not necessarily have linear causalities. Several changes coexist
and are interconnected though uncertain and unstructured and, together with
the multiple stressors related to poverty, have made communities more vulnerable to
different changes. The communities’ adaptation and transformation measures have
been mostly reactive, based on contingency and post hoc learning. Despite various
anticipation techniques, coping measures, adaptive learning and self-organisation
processes occurring in the localities, the local communities are constrained by their
uneven power relationships within the larger assemblages. Thus, communities’ own
opportunities to increase their resilience are limited without changing the relations in
these multiform entities.
Therefore, larger cooperation models are needed, like an innovation system, based on
the interactions of different actors to foster cooperation, which require collaboration
among and input from a diverse set of stakeholders to combine different sources of
knowledge, innovation and learning. Accordingly, both Namibia and Tanzania are
developing an innovation system as their key policy to foster transformation towards
knowledge-based societies. Finally, the development of an innovation system needs
novel bottom-up approaches to increase the resilience of local communities and embed
it into local communities. Therefore, innovation policies in Namibia have emphasised
the role of indigenous knowledge, and Tanzania has established the Living Lab network.