Botswana’s Hunting Ban and the Transformation of Game-Meat Cultures, Economies and Ecologies

When the government of Botswana ended its five-year prohibition of commercial safari hunting, comparatively little attention was directed at the policy reversal’s effect on communities that had engaged in non-commercial and subsistence hunting prior to the moratorium. The ban, in force from 2014 until 2019, fundamentally upended and criminalised the game-meat culture and economic systems common to many San groups, especially in the western Kalahari region. Despite substantial policy divergences between the incumbent president and his predecessor, the post-ban institutional framework offers much of the same for communities that articulate a preference, largely ignored by policy makers, for game-meat consumption. This speaks to an elite consensus with regard to conceptions of development and natural resource use. San people frequently differentiate themselves from mainstream society on the grounds of their contrasting meat-consumption cultures and draw a comparison with dominant Tswana cultural and economic norms associated with cattle production. The Botswana state’s development and conservation efforts to end non-commercial hunting and promote cattle farming are interpreted by San communities as policies of forced assimilation into mainstream Tswana culture and society. Cattle production and beef consumption are promoted as a development approach that is rendered ‘modern’ in contrast to supposedly ‘primitive’ hunting practices. Nevertheless, top-down policies that facilitate the continued abolition of subsistence hunting are justified along ecological and conservation lines without fully engaging with localised environmental and social effects of a widespread transition away from game meat and towards cattle production.