An Inside Look at Namibian Ministry of the Environment and Tourism

    After doing my project on the natural capital of Namibia I have been really interested in the effectiveness of the project and the relationships between the different stakeholders that wrote the report.
   In order to put the different pieces together of this puzzle I meant with Mark Gardiner, a lecturer at Stanford who spent 3 years in working in Namibia on environmental regulation.  Together we sketched out kind of a map of the Ministry of Environment and Tourism and all the different stakeholders that the work with.
   For  a bit of background, in 2013 Namibia released a report called the The Second Report on Biodiversity and Conservation.  This report documents all the ways that Namibia can work to create economic growth and environmental sustainability.  More information can be found on the preceeding blog post.
    The report was commissioned by the Namibian MET or ministry of environment and tourism. This sector of the government works closely with the Namibian Wildlife resorts which a part gov and part private organization on the tourism side. MET also works with the Department of Environmental Affairs on the policy and legal side of their jurisdiction.
     The Department of Environmental Affairs in collaboration with the Desert Research Foundation and many foreign players including the UN, WWF, UNESCO, a Danish organization an two German groups were the ones that put together the report and are tasked with enforcing different sections of it.     Namibia is in an interesting place because there is so much foreign aid and organizations working out of the country.  Because of the genocide and subsequent colonialization until 1990, many foreign powers and the UN have invested heavily in Namibia. They have programs to train Namibians overseas and work to with the Namibian government on projects like this. According to Gardiner, people switch between the organizations on a regular basis.
     However having foreign influence inside the Namibian government can also lead to some tension,  so in country it will interesting to see how the power dynamic plays out in terms of who is running different environmentally related projects on the ground.

- Chris LeBoa