The Village, the Elephant, and the State: Land Access and Vulnerability in Rural Botswana

Throughout the world, people resettle to reduce vulnerability to potentially dangerous wildlife, including elephants. In turn, they may become subject to development policies and practices that can either exacerbate or alleviate their vulnerability. Our ethnographic study in the Okavango Delta of Botswana, where 18,000 elephants share territory with 16,000 people, examines how resettlement decisions and settlement policies impacted vulnerability to elephants. We found that people who came into regular conflict with elephants frequently relocated from cattleposts to villages. Although people historically resettled near family, in 2015 a newly introduced “first-come, first-served” residential plot allocation policy spatially separated families within the village, creating further vulnerability for households relying on kinship networks. We found that government planning that incorporates locally available strategies, such as the ability to access support from kinship networks, may reduce vulnerability for those forced to resettle by elephant encroachment on their land.