Our cross-disciplinary humanities research project Historicising Natures, Cultures and Laws in Etosha-Kunene proposes a multivocal and historical analysis that contributes new thinking on colonialism, indigeneity and ‘natural history’ in Namibia. Funded through a new bilateral Humanities funding initiative of Research Councils in the UK and Germany, the project builds on international collaborations between Bath Spa University (UK), the University of Cologne (Germany) and the University of Namibia. Our aim is to support laws and practice in biodiversity conservation to more fully recognise the diversity of pasts, cultures and natures constituting this internationally-valued region. Our project is supported by a Research Permit from Namibia's National Commission for Science, Technology and Research (NCRST) and began in February 2020. It is built around three core research questions, a set of six objectives, and six intersecting work packages. Research questions: How can conservation of biodiversity-rich landscapes come to terms with the past [Vergangenheitsbewältigung], given historical contexts of extreme social exclusion and marginalisation? How can key biodiversity areas whose global value rests on ahistorical ideas of Nature resist an uncritical presentism, to be better understood as entangled with diverse human histories and values? How can conservation policy and practice recognise deep cultural and linguistic differences around ‘the nature of nature'?  Objectives: We seek to provide historical and ethnographic depth to questions of contemporary concern regarding global reductions of biological and cultural-linguistic diversities, for a set of contiguous territories that are themselves of global significance in terms of biocultural diversity. Our overlapping objectives are thus to: 1. amplify understanding and recognition of the globally-significant conservation territories of ‘Etosha-Kunene’ as entangled with diverse human histories and values, involving cultural and linguistic differences around ‘the nature of nature’ in these territories; 2 connect, compare and extend ethnographic research with varied indigenous groupings of people with regard to natures-beyond-the-human in Etosha-Kunene; 3 explore new methods and tools to represent, map, mediate and translate indigenous understandings and knowledges of the spaces and places comprising Etosha-Kunene, so as to support the recognition and representation of cultural diversity in conservation praxis; 4 integrate people, places and histories into a dense “meshwork” for Etosha-Kunene conservation territories by compiling an environmental and cultural landscape history that attends to complexity through entwining and juxtaposing multiple data sources; 5 contribute to a much-needed decolonisation of patriarchal-colonial thought regarding ‘the nature of nature’ through detailed analysis and deconstruction of how European colonial praxis objectified, collected and colonised both natures and cultures in Etosha-Kunene; 6 support formal and institutional dimensions of environmental conservation policy and practice through creative compilation, publication and exchange of project analyses.