|
|
Africa News afrol News
|
|
|
Africa News afrol News
|
|
afrol.com, 9 December - A new publication from the Nordic Africa Institute (NAI) looks at environmental management in Africa in a historic and contemporary perspective. The conclusions from authors, among them leading authorities as Reginald Cline-Cole, Melissa Leach and the editor, Richard A. Schroeder, lean towards a continuity of colonial management, depriving locals of their natural resources and creating more rural poverty. The book "Producing Nature and Poverty in Africa: Continuity and Change", edited by Richard A. Schroeder, is a collection of articles by some of the world's leading environmental and resource scientists, discussing historical approaches to environmental management and contemporary case studies from all over the continent. Although the aims and the involved parties may have changed over time, the results for the rural population affected by environmental management intervention mostly remain the same - a loss of control over resources. The report also documents a lack of historical knowledge in policy-making, often repeating schemes "tried over and over in the past with little success." Editor Schroeder, in his concluding chapter, introduces the topic by referring to the cases of the Maasai in Kenya in the 1970s and the oppressive set of state policies was adopted in Mali in the 1980s. In the mid-1970s, Maasai residents of southern Kenya were abruptly relocated from land that was subsequently enclosed within Amboseli National Park, one of the continent's most famed wildlife reserves. In response, the displaced groups began a systematic effort to kill many of Amboseli's most prized tourist attractions, including dozens of leopards, elephants, and rhinos. This program of extermination was undertaken not for sport or profit but as part of a desperate protest campaign designed to counter the growing threat tour operations posed to Maasai land rights. Its effect was to expose the coercive conservation policies of the Kenyan state and force a temporary negotiated settlement more favorable to Maasai interests. In the mid-1980s, an equally oppressive set of state policies was adopted in Mali. Under the regime of President Moussa Traore, Mali's forest service implemented a series of draconian restrictions on rural residents' use of forest products. With fines for minor infractions against the new rules exceeding the rural per capita income in many instances and foresters entitled to 25 percent of fine revenues, implementation of the new policies was aggressively and ruthlessly pursued. Thus it was that forestry agents were "reportedly burned alive and chased from the countryside" by rural residents when the Traore regime was overthrown in 1991. The upshot, once again, was a set of new policies that seemed to offer more hope to rural residents. - These episodes of political ecological conflict bracket a period of intense donor and state-led activity focused on the environment in Africa, Schroeder writes. "In both cases, policies explicitly geared toward securing important and potentially lucrative sources of state revenue provoked violent responses on the part of targeted rural groups. ... Thus, the case studies illustrate quite dramatically both the extent of state intervention in environmental management in Africa over the past two or three decades and the lengths to which Africans have gone to protect their interests against all manner of 'outside' aggression." The contributors to this publication by NAI were brought together for a conference in 1996 to discuss the political ecological ferment of the two decades bounded by the events in Mali and Kenya. Specifically, conferees were charged with the task of analyzing the effects of recent policy changes on what the conference prospectus called "the topography of wealth and poverty on the continent." The essays gathered in this collection offer two broad readings of these changes. Some contributors see events such as the slaughter of the Amboseli rhinos and the reprisals against Malian foresters as the natural and somewhat inevitable consequences of a long and sordid history of heavy-handed environmental management on the continent. In these articles, the emphasis is on the continuity of environmental intervention tracing back to the earliest stages of the colonial period, and the summary impression is that environmental policies have for decades done little to alleviate, and have at times contributed directly to the exacerbation of, poverty across the continent. Other contributors, by contrast, seem to be arguing implicitly that the events of the past two decades represent a significant departure from the past. They read the recent history of African natural resource management as an unprecedented escalation of environmental politics on the continent. And they have sought to analyze both the environmental interventions themselves and the specific responses different groups have made when they have felt their lives and livelihoods to be threatened. In these articles, the net effect of policy changes has been more varied with local groups and outside interests prevailing by turns in the struggle to control natural-resource-based livelihood systems and the profits they generate. James Fairhead and Melissa Leach have taken the lead in challenging what they refer to as environmental orthodoxies in their article. Specifically, they document how mistaken or otherwise inadequate theories of equilibrium, population, and deforestation have had an enduring influence on the actual practice of environmental management in West Africa. They demonstrate how foresters in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire have for decades misdiagnosed "problems" of forest change, exaggerated their scope, and prescribed inappropriate solutions. Roderick Neumann notes in his article the tendency to continue to structure analyses of local environmental practices against the backdrop of a discourse surrounding "good and bad natives". After a review of projects organized around the new principles of broader political participation and more equitable distribution of the economic benefits of conservation, Neumann is forced to conclude that "many of the projects sound alarmingly similar to the fortress-style approach to protected areas that they supposedly replace. Forced relocations, curtailment of resource access, abuses of power by conservation authorities, and increased government surveillance are reported more often than are successful integrations of local people into conservation management. ... In actuality, many buffer zones constitute a geographical expansion of state authority." Giles-Vernick's case study of the Sangha river basin in the Central African Republic also acknowledges that powerful interests in both the colonial and postcolonial periods have sought to shape access rights and control the movement of Mpiemu peoples. On the other hand, however, Giles-Vernick demonstrates that the colonial government and the dominant actor in the Sangha basin in the contemporary period, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), have had opposing prescriptions for the Mpiemu: the former wanted them to keep moving into the valley in order to create a labor reserve to service the colonial economy; the latter wanted them to move out in the interests of creating a "natural" park. Thus, both the colonial government and the WWF have sought to control Mpiemu movements but to very different ends. Giles-Vernick uses the history of Mpiemu residence patterns in the Sangha river basin to challenge the dual notions that "indigenous" groups are inherently sensitive in their use of the resource base while "migrants" inevitably act as environmental villains. In the broadest terms, Giles-Vernick's analysis begs the questions of who, precisely, is a migrant and who is a resident? What unit of analysis (historical, spatial) applies to these designations? Are all migrants, by definition, ecological threats? In more concrete, policy-related terms, who should be entitled to "local" benefits from park revenues when the residence history of a given group is short-lived or when that group has been involved in circular or interannual migration patterns? In "comanagement" scenarios, whose "traditional" patterns of resource use should be acknowledged and/or sanctioned? Whose claims to usufruct rights are most legitimate? One of the most important messages regarding the recent wave of environmental interventions in Africa the contributors to this publication have left us with is "that policy analysts and critics cannot afford to work in a historical vacuum," concludes Schroeder. "A historical perspective demonstrates that many contemporary approaches to food production and environmental stabilization problems have in fact been tried over and over in the past with little success. This suggests that either the assessment of the problems themselves is wrong or the proffered solutions have failed to adequately come to grips with the core environmental justice issues that fundamentally shape local practices." The report can be ordered online from the Nordic Africa Institute's publications web page http://www.nai.uu.se/webbshop/ShopGB (Title: "Producing Nature and Poverty in Africa: Continuity and Change" by Vigdis Broch-Due and Richard A. Schroeder (Eds.); ISBN 91-7106-452-4. 350 pages. Price: GBP 18.95, USD 29.95).
|
