Mogende, Emmanuel

Dr Emmanuel Mogende is a Lecturer in the Department of Environmental Science, University of Botswana. Prior to joining the department in November 2021, he was a Research Scholar in Natural Resource Governance at the Okavango Research Institute, University of Botswana Maun Campus. The main body of scholarship that informs his research is the political economy and political ecology of natural resources with a particular focus on wildlife conservation and land governance. He holds a PhD in Political Ecology from the University of Cape Town (2020), where he previously obtained an MPhil in Environment, Society and Sustainability. His PhD thesis challenges the normative view assumptions that informs the debates on the green state which have excluded African states from the analyses of the green state. The thesis draws attention to the processes that produce the green state in the African context using the evolution of Botswana’s conservation policies and practices as an example and also highlights the significance of political leaders (presidents) in steering conservation agendas that often clashes with local demands. Currently his work focuses on: the changing nature of state-society-nature relations in wildlife conservation; conservation and sustainable rural livelihoods; land rights and land struggles in tourism concessions and environmental politics in Botswana. His research has been published in Natural Resource Forum, Review of African Political Economy, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space as well as several edited volumes. He is currently working on a co-edited volume titled Handbook on Tourism and Conservation.