State paternalism and institutional degradation at Treesleeper Eco-camp: Community-based tourism and the loss of sovereignty among Bushmen in Namibia

ABSTRACT

The Namibian government promotes community-based tourism (CBT) as market-based development. At Treesleeper Eco-camp, a CBT-project among marginalised Hai//om and !Xun Bushmen (San), we investigate how Bushmen's historically developed paternalist relations shape contemporary local institutional processes. Institutional design principles, seen as prerequisites for stable and robust institutions (norms, rules and regulations), and thus successful CBT, are used to analyse local changes of the project in relation to a government grant. Ironically, after the grant, Treesleeper generated less income and the consequent ‘upgrade’ intensified conflicts. This study shows that community control, ownership and participation are key factors for successful CBT-projects, but currently the state has obstructed these, just as various other ‘superior’ actors have also done (throughout history) in relation to ‘inferior’ Bushmen. We argue that paternalist ideologies perpetuate today in the Bushmen's relation with the state, leading to weaker institutions locally through dispossession of their sovereignty.

KEYWORDS:

• Community-based tourism
• institutional design principles
• Namibia
• Bushmen
• state paternalism

Acknowledgements

Our sincere gratitude goes to all respondents, to Moses //Khumûb for his assistance and Elvis// Gamaseb for translating interviews.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We prefer the use of ‘Bushmen’ instead of ‘San’, because most of the Hai//om and !Xun of Tsintsabis explained to us that they prefer this term. We are aware, however, of the colonial, patronizing and derogatory connotations that the term ‘Bushmen’ (and, to a lesser degree, ‘San’ too) can have (see, e.g. Gordon & Douglas, 2000). This local preference shows, for example, also at Treesleeper, where the term ‘Bushmen’ was specifically added to the logo of the project by the Hai//om camp manager around 2007–8 (see Koot, 2018).

2 Due to inflation and changing currency rates, in March 2016, during the fieldwork period, €1.00 would have been worth N$ 16,76 and at the time of writing, in July 2019, this would be N$ 15,97 (Currency XE, 2019).

3 It goes beyond the scope of this paper to analyse all institutional design principles in relation to Treesleeper—for full details see Bijsterbosch (2016).