Introduction: Multispecies encounters in conservation landscapes in Southern Africa

This special issue, “Multispecies Encounters in Conservation Landscapes in Southern Africa,” investigates the changing conditions of multispecies coexistence in conservation contexts that transform entire ecosystems, including wildlife, plants, microbes and humans. With this focus, we draw from the theoretical field of multispecies studies to stimulate and promote scholarly discussion in this field in Southern Africa. Departing from the postulate that human lives cannot be studied in isolation from other forms of life (Van Dooren, Kirksey and Münster 2016; Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Locke and Münster 2015), we focus on the dynamic ways in which human inhabitants in the conservation areas of Southern Africa coexist with the plants, mammals, insects, microbes and other non-human species. We do so whilst paying particular attention to the historical and political contexts that shape and are constituted by transforming multispecies relations and whilst reflecting local perspectives on the practicalities of multispecies coexistence and conflicts. The contributions in this special issue are distinguished by considerable diversity. First, they reflect a wide geographic range with research conducted in Namibia, Zambia, South Africa and Botswana. Second, they include a wide range of non-human actors, some of which are often not represented in scholarly social science and humanities studies (including multispecies studies): mammals, from hippopotami to elephants, but also donkeys, cattle and antelopes; plants (honeybush); insects and parasites (tsetse flies and trypanosomes); and landscapes (wildlife corridors and rivers). This introductory chapter starts with an overview of the field of multispecies studies and its criticisms to situate the special issue in this literature. Then, it goes on to detail the overall contributions of this collection of articles. This special issue adds to the field of multispecies studies by developing a distinct Southern African perspective. The articles reflect the specificities of Southern African contexts in three ways. First, they do so by historicising multispecies relations and tracing their genealogies in the contested colonial and postcolonial histories of this region. Second, they delve into local perspectives on the practicalities of multispecies coexistence on the ground in conservation landscapes. Finally, influenced by political ecology approaches, they politically contextualise multispecies relations by highlighting how they connect to power imbalances inherited from the colonial contexts and from socio-economic inequalities. Thus, the special issue rebuts the arguments raised against multispecies approaches of being too abstracted and removed from local realities, insufficiently embedded in historical and political dynamics and lacking actionable knowledge to deal with (environmental) crises in practice (Hornborg 2017; Giraud 2019; Büscher 2021).