A so-called 'new' conservation of Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) attempts to address issues of equity and rural development by creating pathways whereby local 'communities' can benefit from, and ultimately hold decision-making power over, wildlife resources. As such, it is celebrated as a radical departure from the exclusive, centralised and alienating 'fortress' conservation practices of the past. In this paper, however, I suggest that 'new' conservation is severely constrained in terms of how qualitatively different - how 'new' - it is able to become regarding both ideology and practice in conservation. I argue further that this poses serious questions regarding the long-term sustainability of CBNRM as the route whereby environmental conservation can be integrated with meaningful economic redistribution and empowerment in the 'global South'. As a case study I focus on the emerging communal area 'conservancies' of Namibia's CBNRM programme. Namibia is a country where I have several years' fieldwork experience. Here, a national CBNRM programme has been funded primarily by USAID (the United States Agency for International Development), WWF (the World Wide Fund for Nature) and now the GEF (the Global Environment Facility of the World Bank). This programme has been internationally acclaimed as southern Africa's most progressive, people-centred conservation initiative (Sutherland, 1998). My intention is not to single this programme out for critique, but to draw on its unfolding to explore some features of CBNRM schemes, highlight their relevance for broader concerns regarding social and political equity, and indicate some possible implications for the 'sustainability' of such initiatives.