Producing nature and poverty in Africa

Abstract

Development donors have supported thousands of environmental initiatives in Africa over the past quarter century. The contributors to this provocative new collection of essays assess these projects and conclude that environmental programmes constitute one of the major forms of foreign and state intervention in contemporary African affairs. Drawing on case study material from eight countries, the authors demonstrate clearly that environmental programmes themselves often have direct and far-reaching consequences for the distribution of wealth and poverty on the continent. Individual essays in the collection theorise specific forms of environmental intervention; the degree of historical discontinuity that exists between contemporary and past environmental policies and practices; the effect environmental programmes have had on localised systems of knowledge and value regimes; the strategies of accumulation that have been spun out of heavy donor and state investment in environmental programmes; and the numerous social, cultural and political-economic dislocations these initiatives have produced in African environments all across the continent.

<p>CONTENTS: Producing Nature and Poverty in Africa: An Introduction / Vigdis Broch-Due -- A Proper Cultivation of Peoples: The Colonial Reconfiguration of Pastoral Tribes and Places in Kenya / Vigdis Broch-Due -- Conservation in the Sahel: Policies and People in Mali, 1900-1998 / Tor A. Benjaminsen -- Knowledge Claims, Landscape, and the Fuelwood-Degradation Nexus in Dryland Nigeria / Reginald Cline-Cole -- Placemaking, Pastoralism, and Poverty in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania / Nina Johnsen -- Reproducing Locality: A Critical Exploration of the Relationship between Natural Science, Social Science, and Policy in West African Ecological Problems / James Fairhead and Melissa Leach -- The Other Side of "Nature": Expanding Tourism, Changing Landscapes, and Problems of Privacy in Urban Zanzibar / Kjersti Larsen -- Primitive Ideas: Protected Area Buffer Zones and the Politics of Land in Africa / Roderick P. Neumann -- Eroded Consensus: Donors and the Dilemmas of Degradation in Kondoa, Central Tanzania / Wilhelm Östberg -- "Re-Claiming" Land in the Gambia: Gendered Property Rights and Environmental Intervention / Richard A. Schroeder -- Rethinking Migration and Indigeneity in the Sangha River Basin of Equatorial Africa / Tamara Giles-Vernick -- Fueling War: A Political-Ecology of Poverty and Deforestation in Sudan / Cindi Katz -- Producing Nature and Poverty in Africa: Continuity and Change / Richard A. Schroeder</p>