An important underlying theme is that policy makers need to consider a livelihoods approach to sustainability and, in the process, learn from the means by which local populations have historically adapted, through employing a range of coping strategies, to the continual risks of rainfall variability and drought. Such adaptations (Hitchcock, Chapter 8) have included, for example, periodic labour intensification, livestock loan schemes and population mobility that the increased commercialization of the natural resource simply ignores or even actively negates. What is perhaps needed, and argued for in this book, is a more flexible policy employing a range of responses and approaches to wildlife, livestock and rangeland management.
In summary, Sporton and Thomas provide us with a rich mosaic of case studies and discourses around the complex politico-enviro-social matrix. Many international and national interventions have further damaged and marginalized the vulnerable rural poor in Kalahari Countries and have, nevertheless, still failed to address the problems of wildlife population collapse and environmental degradation that they have been aimed at addressing. Indeed, they may well have intensified these problems. The marginalized communities, most strongly exposed to poverty, need to be accorded more recognition and the means by which they themselves have coped over centuries with the environmental constraints in semiarid rangelands need to be incorporated into development thinking. In revealing this more comprehensive and nuanced view of the Kalahari, Sporton and Thomas have produced a thoughtful and thought-provoking volume that should certainly be purchased by researchers and policy generators concerned with development and the environment in semiarid rangelands as a whole.