Cultural and Political Ecology Newsletter

PLECserv is a free electronic list managed by Harold Brookfield and Helen Parsons of the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University (ANU), and of the United Nations University (UNU) Project on People, Land Management and Ecosystem Conservation (UNU/PLEC). Its objective is to inform the scientific and professional community concerned with rural development and conservation in smallholder farming regions of the developing world, by calling attention to recent publications, new research methodology, and developments in agrobiodiversity, in the study of farmer innovation and farmers? technical knowledge, and in development practice and thinking generally. Although UNU and ANU sponsor the list, the content of the messages sent out reflects only the views of the authors of the original research and the list managers. They are not the official views of UNU or ANU as institutions. We will send out about two messages per month. Each message includes a summary in about 400-600 words of some recent research or other document, with information on how to obtain the document and/or contact its author. We do not post announcements about meetings, job opportunities, or institutional issues. We try to maintain a balance with regard to topic and geographical region covered. This is not a discussion list. It is a channel to help keep you informed about research relevant to work among the small farmers in the developing world. Interesting dialogues may develop between list members and the authors of the documents discussed, but we do not post these dialogues. We wish to get your feedback about the list serve itself, and your suggestions with regard to documents that we should promote. Please send them to the listmanagers (Harold Brookfield at hbrook@coombs.anu.edu.au and Helen Parsons at hpar@coombs.anu.edu.au). Anyone wishing to subscribe to the list who receives this message within an e-mail should send an email to liang@hq.unu.edu containing the message: SUBSCRIBE PLECserv.. If this message comes as an attachment, please go the subscription page. If you would like to terminate your subscription, either send an e-mail to liang@hq.unu.edu. containing the message: UNSUBSCRIBE PLECserv, or go to the un-subscription page.
For further information on the UNU/PLEC project, please visit the project home page at http://www.unu.edu/env/plec/. All issues of the project periodical, PLEC News and Views (half-yearly since 1993), can be accessed through this
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Jobs/scholarships

Members' (or those who should be..) News

Tom Bassett (Illinois) has been promoted to Professor of Geography.

Kirsten Dow (associate professor, University of South Carolina) is on secondment to the Stockholm Environmental Institute in Sweden for 2002-4 to work on SEI's Poverty and Vulnerability research project.

Prof. Michael Williams, University of Oxford, retired at the end of September 2002.

Paul Kerkhof. 2000. Local forest management in the Sahel: towards a new social contract. London: SOS Sahel International, UK. 83 pp., maps, diagrams, photos, annexes, references. ISBN: 1 901459 28 4.

Reviewed by Daniel Klooster and Shrinidhi Ambinakudige. Department of Geography, Florida State University, Tallahassee.

This short and clearly-written book provides a broad overview of forest management in the Sahel and it makes a compelling argument for the need to promote greater community participation in forest use and management. The strongest case studies in this comparative analysis of forest management projects are from Mali, Sudan and Niger, with additional data from Chad and Burkina Faso.

This book consists of seven chapters, two annexes, a glossary, and a map showing the general locations of the nine forestry projects mentioned in the text. First, the authors describe the current practice of community forest management in fairly rich anecdotal detail, describing the varying Sahelian practices of forest ownership and usufruct rights, forest protection practices by local people, rules for protecting forest resources, enforcement, informal management plans, and organizational arrangements. Second, they sketch the region’s colonial and early national history of centralized and oppressive forest bureaucracies, which routinely blamed local people for forest degradation and have seriously eroded the ability of communities to manage their forest resources. Third, they address the inadequate ecological conceptualizations behind the conventional forest management practices imported from Europe and they clarify the overwhelming importance of multi-year climate fluctuations in driving vegetation change. Fourth, they assess the importance of forests in household livelihoods, concluding that income from forest-based activities is nearly always secondary to agriculture and livestock. Finally, they discuss the current political context of decentralization and the ambiguous spaces for community participation. Glossary, currency and local measurement conversion rates, and abbreviations are provided in the beginning of the report and make it easier to read. The book avoids an academic citation style, but does provide a short list of selected references. Overall, the report is a very useful introduction to local forest management in the Sahelian region.

It is also an interesting contribution to the burgeoning community forestry literature more generally. Many of the report’s observations and arguments are exact parallels of developments in this literature elsewhere: Centralized forest management inherited from the colonial period continues under national governments; forest services blame irresponsible rural people for degrading forest ecosystem without just cause; harassment of local people by ineffective and underpaid forest guards undermines the role of local people in conserving forests; forestry bureaucrats fail to understand local needs and local living patterns and are blind to potential conservation/development synergies; the best chance for reversing patterns of forest degradation lies in reversing practices of alienating forests from the people who live in them. In addition, annexes contribute information on several techniques for participatory forest monitoring that could be useful for other experiments in community forestry.

More importantly, Kerkhof points out the need for community forestry policies to take better consideration of the role of nonresident people with competing, legitimate, claims to forest landscapes. The forest management experiences surveyed create conflicts with nomadic pastoralists who periodically graze their livestock in the forests and fields of permanent villages. Unfortunately, pastoralist’s usufruct rights on the common lands are often ignored because their dependency is only seasonal. Similarly, most of the common property literature focuses on rights and rule-making among the residents of settlements, too often ignoring interactions with nomadic pastoralists. When there are two communities depending on the same common lands, however, ignoring ones’ rights may result in mis-managed land resources and rural violence.  This is an important contribution to the literature on community forestry.

Kerkhof’s report is a good effort by an NGO -- SOS Sahel, funded by the Department for International Development (DfID), UK --  to evaluate its own activities. Although the report demonstrates an uncommon awareness of the historical evolution of their approach to forest management, it makes little attempt to evaluate the NGO’s own role in that evolution. Similarly, the role of local, national and international politics in the projects described is not always clear. Like most community forestry literature, the report provides little empirical data demonstrating the effectiveness of community forestry in forest conservation.  Instead, Kerkoff implies that wood and other forest products do not generate enough value to compete with agriculture and livestock. This observation would appear to undermine the incentive structures expected to lead communities to conserve forest lands, but this theme is not developed. Nevertheless, the report makes a good case defending the capacity of local communities to manage their own forests, and it identifies a plethora of practices they already use in this task. Future efforts to improve Sahelian forest management must strengthen this local capacity, instead of undermining it like the centralized approaches of the past. This is an important message, and considering the current processes of decentralization underway in many parts of the region, it is highly opportune.

Janice Harper. 2002. Endangered Species: Health, Illness and Death Among Madagascar's People of the Forest. Carolina Academic Press. 273 pp. ISBN 0-89089-238-5  $30.00 (Contents and introduction)

Reviewed by Mike Skladany, Aquaculture Project, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Minneapolis, MN.USA.

In Endangered Species: Health, Illness and Death Among Madagascar's People of the Forest, medical anthropologist Janice Harper (University of Houston) applies a political ecology of health to the lives and deaths of villagers living under the aegis of the Ranomafana National Park Project in southeast Madagascar (1). Throughout this richly textured ethnographic account, Harper raises a number of compelling questions, pursues meaning, provides interpretative analysis and provokes us in a manner that draws a sharp critical focus on some of the most compelling professional and personal dilemmas encountered by all internationally-oriented social scientists, development specialists, environmental and human rights activists.

Written in a fluid narrative style, Endangered Species tells a story. This story's appeal rests on the author's ability to situate the village of  "Ranotsara" within a larger environmental, political, economic and historical setting - captured in her advance of a political ecology of health framework in Chapter 1. In Chapters 2-6, Harper draws multifaceted connections between the local environment, rice farming, health, and illness. From these social relations, she situates the villager's history, lineage, class, gender, age, land, labor, occupational stratification and the perpetuation of inequality within the colonial and more recently the globalization projects. Noteworthy in this regard is that Endangered Species crosses the terrain of limited disciplinary boundaries and geographical area specialties in a highly readable interdisciplinary and prescient manner.

The overarching backdrop of the text and its most measured criticisms are directed at a USAID biodiversity conservation project. Established in 1990, the Ranomafana National Park Project, similar to other conservation projects throughout the world, seeks to preserve non-human biodiversity by providing Western economic development incentives to 26 "pilot" project villages in and about the rainforest reserve. Ranotsara is one such village. Expatriate advisors perceived a need to halt destructive "slash and burn" rice production practices and replace this environmentally harmful to the rainforest and non-human species biodiversity with irrigated rice production and other modern income generating activities including access to health care. The project rationalizes an ascribing of fixed "ethnic" identities derived from a notion of "culture" based in agricultural modes of production. The "Tanala" are swidden (tavy) rice growers and are operationalized in project thinking as "traditional" and less amenable to modern developmental change. In contrast, the "Betsileo" are viewed as more willing to adapt to the new global biodiversity conservation regime. As Harper puts it "associating cultural practices with agricultural systems, the project conflated culture with ethnicity" (p.230). She exposes this rigid authoritative construct by illustrating that ethnic identity is fluid, circumstantial, constructed and situated within broad historical, social, economic and political currents.

The effect of these reified ethnic-cultural divisions coupled with project dictates enforces pronounced social inequality, unequal access to land and unequal access to forest and pharmaceutical medicinal resources. In stark terms, Harper describes a number of futile attempts at healing common illnesses in Ranotsara. Over Chapters 7-8, she documents village level efforts at healing that reveals a split and multiple interpretations between and among villager's use of indigenous and western medicinal knowledge and health. Most riveting are experiences of an extraordinary high number of deaths - preventable deaths if access to better health care and medicines including western pharmaceuticals as promised by the Project were available (2). Throughout the text, expatriate park administrators are portrayed in terms of the Other, "others who seek not to harm, but to help, and in so 'helping' they have intensified the unequal divisions of land and labor that have enabled some to rise, and others to fall" (p. 3).

In Chapter 9, the culmination of Harper's presence and her study of health and the environment clashed with that of expatriate project administraors and led her to being put under surveillance, inquiries, and summoned to a meeting-cum-interrogation with expatriate park administrators that resulted in her forced leaving the village (3). More broadly, Harper's concluding arguments counter notions that forest conservation development policies leads to modern economic benefits. In pointed contrast, she agues that "because the project viewed environmental change as something that is fundamentally wrong and its social impacts uniformly experienced, it was unable to explore the ways in which local residents used their environments to maintain their health and standard of living, and ?. how the social structure in which residents lived differentially influenced how they would use the local environment. " (p.230). Harper also argues that ethnicity is not a fixed and unchanging entity as assumed by project policy, "but is instead more closely associated with one's lineage, education and social status, as well as access to land and labor. Moreover, policies which presume that health and environmental perceptions have ethnic origins are potentially harmful" (p. 215). Lastly, by "removing history" from conservation projects and forcing modernization onto villagers, "the history of southeastern forests of Madagascar as sites of resistance and rebellion has been replaced by a history of primatology and soil erosion" (p. 234).

In conclusion, Endangered Species is a compelling and highly provocative read. There is no doubt that this volume will engage internationally-oriented anthropologists, sociologists, conservation biologists, development specialists, environmentalists, human rights activists and investigative journalists. Endangered Species clearly deserves a broad audience and would serve any number of advanced undergraduate and graduate formats pertaining to African studies, development, political ecology/economy, race and ethnicity, social stratification, environmental etudies, and medical anthropology/sociology. Overall, one has to acknowledge the author's tenacity in delivering this text. At the same time, the final word here remains an open-ended question. Endangered Species deserves to be read, thought about, debated, and especially acted upon. This reviewer anticipates a concerted and forthright response from those accountable --- and that includes all of us who enter into, and struggle with these profoundly human endeavors and affairs.

Endnotes

(1) This project has been the focus of a number of studies. See for example Hanson 1997; Peters D., 1994; Peters W., 1999.
(2) Harper accounts for 15 deaths amounting to almost 10 percent of the total village population during her one-year stay.
(3) Another social scientist experienced a similar series of events prior to those encountered by the author.
(4) See Stills (2002: 123-154).

References

Hanson, Paul. 1997. "The Politics of Need Interpretation in Madagascar's Ranomafana National Park. Ph.D Dissertation, Department of Folklore and Folklife. University of Pennsylvania.
Peters, D. 1994. "Social Impact Assessment of the Ranomafana National Park Project of Madagascar. Paper presented at the International Association of Impact Assessment Conference in Quebec City, Canada, 14-17 July 1994.
Peters, W.J. 1999. "Transforming the Integrated Conservation and Development Project (ICDP) Approach: Observations from the Ranomafana
National Park, Madagascar. Agriculture and Human Values. 16(1): 65-74.
Stills, Alexander. 2002. "Saving Species in Madagascar," In The Future of the Past. New York: Farrar Strauss. Pp. 123-154.

New Books:

Martinez-Alier, Joan . 2002. The Environmentalism of the Poor - a Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation. Chichester: Edward Elgar. 1843764865 £25.00/$   related report

Bassett, Thomas J. & Crummey, Donald (Eds.) 2003 African savannas: global narratives & local knowledge of environmental change in Africa. Oxford: James Currey Publishers. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann. 085255429X HB, 0852554249 £45.00/£16.95

This is an interdisciplinary collection on the major savannah regions which stretch across Africa. It shows how African farmers and herders modify landscapes in subtle and unexpected ways, and outlines the importance of local knowledge for understanding environmental change.1.Thomas J. Bassett and Donald Crummey. African savannas - contested images, contested realities - environment & society in African savannas,  2.  Martin Williams changing land use & environmental fluctuations in the African savanna, . 3. Thomas J. Bassett, Zueli Koli Bi & Tiona Ouattara Fire in the savanna - environmental change & land tenure reform in northern Cote d'Ivoire,  4.Leslie Gray. Investing in soil quality - farmer responses to land scarcity in southwestern Burkina Faso,  5. Donald Crummey & Alex Winter-Nelson Farmer tree planting in Wallo, 1937-97, 6 Mahir Saul, Jean-Marie Ouadba & Quetian Bognounou.The wild vegetation cover of western Burkina Faso - colonial policy & post-colonial developments . 7. Peter D. Little. Rethinking interdisciplinary paradigms & the political ecology of pastoralism in East Africa. 8. Jean Boutrais. Pastoralism & highland savannas - grassfields (Cameroon) & Ngorongoro (Tanzania),   

This page maintained by Simon Batterbury. Notes, comments, suggestions may be posted to: batterbu@u.arizona.edu