Throughout much of the twentieth century, wildlife management found in Sub-Saharan Africa mirrored that found across the globe - primarily relying on a "fortress-model" approach of demarcated protected areas, nationalization of wildlife, and bans on the hunting or utilization of protected species.1 This approach has deep historical roots, beginning with the setting aside of certain hunting ground for elites of the Roman Empire2 and continuing through the assertion of sovereign ownership over wildlife within Europe's Medieval and Renaissance kingdoms.3 The modern form of the approach, starting with the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, involves the use of national parks (along with wildlife refuges and other governmental protected areas).4 However, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, countries in southern Africa began experimenting with devolv ing control over wildlife resources—first to private landholders and sub sequently to communities located in communally owned lands.5 These experiments coincided with the rise of the "Washington Con sensus" in the 1980s - a neoliberal development policy that emphasized the free market and limited involvement by the state.6 The resulting de volution of wildlife management rights to rural communities—often referred to as either Community-Based Natural Resource Management ("CBNRM") or Community-Based Conservation ("CBC") (the term used herein)—marked a notable shift from the paternalistic and increasingly rigid wildlife management policy favored by the countries' prior colonial rulers.7 The CBC approach has had both notable successes and failures, and it has been criticized on both theoretical and practical grounds.8 Among other things, states, NGOs, and local officials are often reluctant to fully devolve control over wildlife resources to the local communities.9 Nevertheless, it remains a popular and widely utilized wildlife gover nance approach, particularly in the global south.10 Namibia exemplifies the struggle to adopt effective wildlife gov ernance in that it has, throughout its colonial and post-colonial history, implemented some of the world's most notable national parks and CBC efforts. Its national parks are generally successful from a wildlife conser vation standpoint, but their formation was often part of a systematized effort to marginalize the country's Black population, and they provide little economic or institutional benefits to local populations.11 Namibia has aggressively pursued a formal CBC program, and some of the areas under that governance have obtained notable successes.12 Yet many have struggled to meet some or all of their conservation and development goals.13 In short, Namibia serves as a parable for many of the challenges faced by developing countries attempting to craft wildlife policy that bal ances the immediate needs of its rural - and generally poor - populations while sustainably managing their wildlife resources. This Article will introduce the theoretical foundation of the CBC approach. It will then use Namibia as a case study to both: (a) illustrate the sort of historical, political, and economic drivers that motivate the adoption of CBC across the global south, and (b) highlight the existence of potential structural weaknesses present in even the most lauded CBC programs. Finally, this Article will present some of the common theoreti cal and results-based criticisms of CBC and discuss broader lessons that can be drawn from the Namibian experience. The analyses in this Article draw from academic literature, Namibia's statutes and Constitution, and the Stefan Carpenter's original field research in four conservancies (CBC areas) located in Namibia's northwestern Kunene region.