Made in bureaucracy: The geographies and politics of a territory yet to land

Territories often serve functions beyond their immediate spatial boundaries, yet their production increasingly takes place in distant, disembodied sites—offices and administrative institutions. This article investigates the creation of a UNESCO Geopark in Namibia, analysing how bureaucratic processes oscillate between territorial abstraction and administrative territorialisation. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2025 (including interviews, archival research, and site observations), it explores the gap between institutional visions of territory and its grounded, socio-spatial realities. Rather than seeing territorial indeterminacy as a mere administrative delay, the article argues that it constitutes a strategic mode of territorial production. By cultivating spatial and temporal vagueness, actors make territories compatible with extraterritorial norms and institutional agendas. Bureaucracy, far from merely organising space, reconfigures it—producing legible, governable, and institutionally recognisable geographies for distant authorities.