Local Institutions in Globalized Societies (LINGS)

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The question of how institutions evolve and change is one of the major theoretical challenges in the cultural and social sciences. Namibia currently offers a very interesting opportunity to analyze the transformation of communal resource management in practice. While, on the one hand, the state is partly withdrawing from natural resource management, on the other hand, it is setting new guidelines as to how communities should manage their resources collectively. In the first funding phase, we developed a comprehensive research design to capture institutional change in the Kunene Region comparatively. Building on that, extensive ethnographic data were collected in four case studies. The results were analyzed in detail in monographs. In addition, we were able to test a number of hypotheses derived from our ethnographic work in a larger sample of communities (N=61). The regional upscaling technique has proven to be very useful and first comparative results were published in World Development, Human Ecology, Human Nature, Environmental Policy and Governance and the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie. In the forthcoming final phase, we will focus primarily on the diachronic perspective and systematically exploit the potential of a long-term project. This will allow us to show, which economic, social and political consequences the observed institutional dynamics have in the communities we study. In addition, we will work on the integration of the theoretical results.