This article chronicles the livelihood strategies of smallholder farmers in the village of Naledi2 on
the edge of Chobe National Park in northern Botswana (Figure 1). Here, the presence of wildlife weighs
heavily on peoples' lives. Elephants roam the village and raid arable fields, leaving a wake of destruction as
they move freely, protected under conservation law, through an extensive mosaic of designated park land,
forest reserves and wildlife management areas that encircle human settlements. For some farmers, crop
raiding by 'problem animals' such as elephants is one of the reasons that they have stopped farming their
larger arable landholdings, intended for both commercial and subsistence purposes, and now only grow a
few fruits and vegetables in small backyard gardens. Others continue to farm, but lament the prevalence of
crop raiding by elephants and express little hope that their farming efforts will yield a harvest with
commercial or even subsistence value.
Broadly speaking, human-wildlife conflict in Naledi is representative of tensions between the
conservation of wildlife and the development of rural agrarian livelihoods in and around protected areas in
many parts of the world. A large body of literature specifically addresses the nature of human-wildlife
conflict (HWC) and potential solutions (Hill 2000; Inskip and Zimmerman 2009; Campbell-Smith et al.
2012). As this article shows, however, a narrowly circumscribed focus on human-wildlife interactions risks
overlooking the way in which the effects of wildlife damage on human welfare, and human responses to
wildlife conflict, are mediated by the broader socio-economic, political and environmental context in which
those interactions are situated (Quirin and Dixon 2012). In this article I use a political ecology approach to
move beyond explication of proximate causes and local forces, and to identify the broader systems that
influence the way in which human-wildlife conflict in a given place unfolds. This case study explains how
farmers' livelihood strategies in areas of high wildlife disturbance in Naledi are affected by a broader sociopolitical
context that includes, but is not restricted to, wildlife conservation policy.
My research questions were shaped by farmer sentiments as described above. For households who
have given up farming, what alternative livelihood sources (if any) do they access in order to survive and
remain living in the Chobe Enclave? 3 For those who still plow their fields despite marginal returns, what
influences them to continue to farm? These questions guided twelve months of ethnographic research, in
which I employed a political ecology framework in order to understand the livelihood decisions of these
villagers, and their implications for conservation and development policy.