Reginald Cline-Cole

Knowledge Claims and Landscape: Alternative Views of the Fuelwood—Degradation Nexus in Northern Nigeria

The existence of competing or contradictory orthodoxies in Nigerian forestry is a long recognised, if little explored research problem. Far from being the product of a monolithic culture, regional forestry, or, more inclusively agrosilvipastoral landscapes and fuelscapes, are social products which have been described as often construed in a plurality of ways and invested with diverse if not antithetical meanings by different individuals and social groups. They represent sites of contestation and cooperation for human agents and state agencies engaged in constructing, maintaining and modifying woodfuel and other forestry-related discourses. The author juxtaposes several such contests, their meanings, and the discourses of which they are a part. He does so with particular reference to perceived linkages between fuelwood use and production, on the one hand, and vegetation and degradation and other environmental change, on the other. The geographical focus is dryland Nigeria, in particular its regional forestry spaces and landscapes. In the conceptual framework empirical theorisation is combined with discourse and landscape analyses. The author concludes that the juxtaposition of forestry discourses, which he attempts, creates spaces for different landscape visions to be seen as virtual realities, which are shaped and sustained by social forces and (technologies of) representation.

Promoting (anti‐)social forestry in northern Nigeria?

Across Nigeria, there exists a need for a comprehensive inventory of natural resources, including forestry resources, and for the identification and promotion of ecologically sound development practice. This is of particular relevance in the drylands of the extreme north which depend overwhelmingly on biomass energy, and where the dominant form of land use change is the expansion of agriculture into woodland, shrubland and grassland. Here, vast expanses of land are reportedly affected by processes of degradation culminating in ‘desertification’. In order to facilitate both the formulation of an energy policy and the design of a long‐term strategy which accorded proper priority to environmental protection and conservation within this agro‐ecological region, Silviconsult Ltd., an international consultancy firm, was contracted to conduct a detailed study of its fuelwood demand and supply situation. This article assesses those aspects of Silviconsults policy, programme and project recommendations which are based on the widespread current preference within natural resources management (NRM) circles for increasing interaction between the State, private sector and local communities. In particular, it focuses on recommended initiatives which are premised on the existence or creation of an enabling legal/tenure/ institutional framework founded on notions of, decentralised, or participatory, forestry resource management. The main aim is to emphasise that in their failure to problematise notions such as ‘community, and participation’, these recommendations contribute (possibly inadvertently) to safeguarding the hegemony of dominant forestry discourses and practices, even while they employ a language evocative of reformist intent and suffused with more than a hint of subversiveness.

ICTs, ‘virtual colonisation’ & political economy

The potential consequences of the nature and dynamics of the increasing use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for the political economy of Africa deserve considerably more critical attention than they have thus far received. True, there exists a growing body of literature on, for example, the potential of ICTs for democratising political participation and policy formulation; redressing longstanding North-South, regional, rural-urban and gender imbalances; and redefining the parameters of development thinking and practice. Not surprisingly, recent policy attention has tended to focus almost exclusively on why a ‘wired’Africa is an absolute and urgent necessity in the current information age; and on how African countries can formulate e-strategies, among other things, to facilitate their incorporation in the socalled global information society. However, much (but by no means all) of this literature has been celebratory, even, on occasion, proselitysing, particularly in its insistence that ICTs represent ‘a key resource that should be maximised by ... African nations in order to achieve competitiveness in the current dynamic world order’ (Shibanda and Musisi-Edebe, 2000:228). In contrast, relatively little sustained attention has been paid to the potential (highly differentiated) impact of ICTs on social relations, even though, as Daly (2000) has observed with reference to the extension of the internet to developing countries with low levels of connectivity, ‘the Mathew principle’ will prevail and ‘those who have most will be given still more’. And yet, ICTs, as an integral part of broader processes of informationalisation and globalisation, have major implications for the choices facing political and economic strategists across Africa in the age of the information society.

Blazing a trail while lazing around: knowledge processes and wood-fuel paradoxes?

Using autobiographical experience with reference to wood-fuel research in two locations in West Africa, this article illustrates how knowledge processes influence what can be produced as knowledge; how such knowledge is actually produced; and what is eventually produced as knowledge. However, although it explores the various roles that knowledge plays in the social relations at particular historical moments in the personal and professional development of a single individual, the questions that this subjective experience raises are of wider import: whose knowledge matters? How do certain knowledges get suppressed or denied, while others are privileged? In turn, this raises additional questions concerning the ways in which research and practice are mediated through local research, policy, and development prisms. In a general sense, the article is about the way in which wood-fuel philosophies, methodologies, and practices are constructed, modified, and maintained in existence as knowledge; and a reminder that such knowledge processes cannot truly be understood in isolation, but need to be situated within complex, diversified contexts of individual agendas, and group strategies, as well as in multiple sites of production.

It is (always) the political economy, stupid!

In the midst of a continuing economic crisis, the centres of global capitalism remain preoccupied with much that is predictable, if somewhat depressingly familiar: economies in crisis; unsustainable levels of national indebtedness; high and/or growing levels of unemployment; failures of the state; dangers of big government; austerity measures and programmes; popular protests, and so on. Readers of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) would be forgiven for thinking that this was Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, rather than Europe in 2010. Reflecting on the spread of neoliberalism, Susan George has observed how:

On filling voids

In January this year, Donald Trump reportedly described various South American, Caribbean and (apparently all) African countries as ‘shitholes’ (or, according to some, ‘shithouses’) during a meeting on immigration with senators in the White House (Gambino 2018) – eliciting widespread, often ‘forceful’, protest, including from individual African countries, the African Union (AU) and United Nations (Gerits 2018; Smith and Rawlinson 2018). Why indeed should (or does) America welcome immigrants who were, according to the president, presumably manifestly ill-prepared, by virtue of their origins, to contribute meaningfully to the task of Making America Great Again? Whether or not this represents, as the AU claimed, racism, xenophobia, prejudice and bigotry (Finnegan 2018), or indeed whether Trump already ‘had form’ in this area, as Wolffe (2018) forcefully argues, is academic. But an equally significant indicator of Trump-era US–Africa relations was provided by the fact that, after a whole year, the administration had still not outlined a clear Africa policy nor filled vacant senior diplomatic postings in both the US State Department and embassies on the continent (Schneidman and Temin 2018). For us at the Review of African Political Economy, however, the significance of this particular episode of POTUS Reigns lies elsewhere – in its affirmation of the need for ROAPE to continue to provide ‘radical analyses of trends, issues and social processes’ in Africa, both in the pages of the journal and, increasingly, across diverse spaces of mobilisation and sites of resistance, including social media (see roape.net). This last is of more than passing significance. Twitter is, after all, Trump’s favoured means of communication, the one he resorted to with his denials and obfuscation when news of his alleged remarks broke. Indeed, even as it trended on Twitter, the comment was also being widely ridiculed, debated and contested in the blogosphere (Nair 2018) and online news sites, forcing Trump to send placatory letters to African leaders restating US commitment to their continent (Wadhams 2018) as the row threatened to overshadow Rex Tillerson’s planned first official visit to Africa as US Secretary of State (Schemm 2018). Asked by the African press in Addis Ababa for his reaction to the president’s remarks during the visit two months later, Tillerson declined to comment, as did his host Moussa Faki, AU Commission Chairperson, who declared the matter closed, with both men opting rather to highlight ‘areas of cooperation’ which had proved ‘useful to both parties’; instead, lingering disagreement over China’s current and future role in Africa provided the rare discordant note to these public proceedings (Wadhams 2018). On the eve of his departure for Africa, and in the process of identifying priorities of US Africa policy, as well as for his five-country visit, Tillerson had contrasted ‘the U.S. approach of “incentivizing good governance”’ with China’s, ‘which encourages dependency, using opaque contracts, predatory loan practices and corrupt deals that mire nations in debt and undercut their sovereignty’ (Ching 2018). However, his attempt to return to the subject in Addis Ababa by advising African countries ‘to carefully consider the terms of [Chinese] investments’, apparently elicited the response from Faki that, not only are Africans ‘mature enough to engage in partnerships of their own volition’, but that ‘[t]here is no monopoly, we have multifaceted, multifarious relations with [different] parts of the world’ (Wadhams 2018).

On political economies of governance and resistance to (mis)rule

This issue of ROAPE appears at a time when, among Africanists and internationalists, three preoccupations struggle for prominence: first, (plans and preparation for and reactions to) elections in several African countries; second, unfolding ‘complex emergencies’ in east, west and southern Africa; and, finally, the new and unfolding ‘complex realities’ of the UK Brexit vote and the start of a Trump presidency. Recent developments in the Gambia provide an example of how these different issues, and associated debates, can intersect. Thus, while incumbents John Dramani Mahama (Ghana) and the Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh both initially conceded defeat in December 2016 presidential elections to their respective opponents, Jammeh would later retract his concession, plunging the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) region into a political crisis lasting several weeks into the new year (Smith 2017). Jammeh’s eventual departure into exile in Equatorial Guinea on 21 January 2017, partly under threat of forcible removal by ECOWAS forces to make way for his elected successor, marked a seeming resolution to this potential ‘complex emergency’ (Maclean 2017). But the episode continues to stimulate reflection and debate – including much popular satirical commentary on social media. At the same time, there have been the inevitable and varied references to Trump and Brexit – most commonly whether and how a Trump administration might react to the Gambia crisis and its immediate aftermath (development funds were promised following the inauguration of President-Elect Adama Barrow), and whether its America First policy, in signalling a withdrawal from America’s traditional global leadership role, might serve to embolden future Jammehs. But, frequently, too, what a swift return to the Commonwealth might yield in the form of a potentially enhanced status with a post-Brexit United Kingdom, which President Barrow reportedly described on Sky Television as ‘our number one partner in terms of trade, in terms of democracy, in terms of good governance’ (Crawford 2017). And, finally, what Gambia’s notification to quit the International Criminal Court in October and declared commitment to human rights and belief in public accountability mean for relations with the EU. The latter strongly and publicly supported Barrow’s accession to the presidency; and has promptly released development funds previously withheld as a result of governance concerns under the Jammeh regime. The EU has also promised further significant support for the country’s emerging political and economic recovery programme (Ceesay 2017; Maclean and Jammeh 2017). These promises require in turn that the new regime ‘delivers on its promises’, while adhering to the principles and objectives set out in the Cotonou Agreement (Anders 2017; Darboe 2017a). Clearly, while it is too early for conclusions of any kind about Gambia’s recent experience to be drawn, there is understandable interest in identifying wider lessons from the specifics of the case (Anders 2017; Cheeseman 2017; Hultin 2017). Somewhat helpfully, President Barrow frames the immediate (and specific) challenges that his country faces in governance and in development-related terms, which resonate well beyond the country’s borders:

On ROAPE , historical (dis)continuities and textual activism

This issue of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE), Issue 141, is a general one consisting of seven research articles and a further two briefings. Taken together, these cover a variety of topics. They deal with studies set in widely separated geographical locations and combine macro-/continental-scale thematic analyses with more local-scale case studies. The selection reflects ongoing interest among the journal’s contributors in the long-running (and recently intensified) processes of incorporation via capitalist globalisation of the continent’s material, intellectual, symbolic and other ‘property’ (see, for example, the recent forum on Brand Aid/Brand Africa in ROAPE Issue 131, Richey and Ponte 2012). Two themes link this diverse set of offerings. The first is the theme of continuity-inchange, notably in relation to state–society relations. Two-thirds of the articles explicitly address this theme of ‘the past in the present’ (the sub-title of Mark Duffield and Vernon Hewitt’s [2009] book which has been reviewed in ROAPE comes to mind here). A second unifying ‘thread’ derives, in part, from ROAPE’s abiding interest in the political economy of – and struggles against – inequality, oppression and exploitation, on the one hand; and focus on the nature of the state and power in the context of capitalist globalisation, on the other. The predominance of questions of resource struggles, livelihoods and ongoing capitalist expansion in Issue 141, then, reflect the response(s) of likeminded contributors to ROAPE’s intellectual and political project. In this way, the interlinked processes of publishing, and being published in and by, ROAPE become a collective and/or mutually reinforcing activism in support of the journal’s ideological commitments and intellectual preferences (cf. Mohan and Campbell 1998). Take Ian Taylor’s exploration of state capitalism and the oil sector in sub-Saharan Africa. He argues strenuously that in the wake of the global financial crisis, and even though ‘neoliberalism remains the global hegemonic project . . . , the global economy has seen a partial revival of the state’s role in the economy.’ The attraction of the latter lies, Taylor suggests, in the (ultimately limited or circumscribed) challenge it offers to a central tenet of several decades of neoliberalism, that there is no alternative (TINA) (Cline-Cole and Harrison 2010) – even if its goal appears to be less the transformation of class relations and more the rectification of a malfunctioning market, albeit for the benefit of society rather than private capital. It is, then, the nature, emergence and (prospective) evolution of state capitalism or, more accurately, as Taylor is careful to specify, varieties of state capitalism as part of a changing ‘global development landscape’ which constitute his main focus. Significantly, Taylor cautions against any misplaced celebration of the ‘actual end of neoliberalism’, noting that ‘the state capitalist emerging economies are structurally integrated into the ongoing world order under the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism’; and, somewhat disappointingly if not entirely surprisingly, ‘do not represent a different or alternative order, other than one where these arrivistes are incorporated as notional equals’. Thus, while mineral-rich states which have adopted state capitalism have benefited from accelerated rates of capital accumulation, the paper notes, the benefits of such windfall earnings have not been extended to the poor, who remain marginalised and

Identifying and exploiting cracks in capitalism's edifice

While acknowledging the existence of diverse pressures which force people to reproduce capitalism daily, John Holloway argues that ‘there is no pre-existing capitalism, there is only the capitalism we make today, or do not make’ (2010, p. 254). He then challenges readers of his book, Crack capitalism, to look for and exploit weaknesses in the edifice, to create or exacerbate cracks ‘that defy the apparently unstoppable advance of capital’, and which may take any suitable and effective form of individual and group protest, opposition or rebellion (ibid., p. 8). The overall aim, he suggests, is to galvanise ordinary people to experiment with pro-active ways to stop ‘making’ or ‘creating’ capitalism instead of merely re-acting to ‘a pre-existing capitalism that dictates that we must act in certain ways’ (ibid., p. 254). Holloway himself is realistic about the limits to this vision (noting that refusing to contribute to the reproduction of capital is inherently contradictory); but is hopeful that people will take responsibility, reappropriate their lives and, in concert with a myriad others, set the agenda to break with the logic of capitalism and start creating a different world. It is a thesis which deserves a full and fair hearing, one which is probably best reserved for a detailed book review. In the interim, and in the wake of widespread ongoing global anti-capitalist protests, there is little doubt that, in an era in which ‘capital is in its deepest crisis for many years’ (ibid., p. 250), it addresses themes which resonate in varied ways with the preoccupations of this journal, as well as of its contributors and subscribers. Indeed, the papers making up this issue can be considered as serendipitous responses to Holloway’s encouragement to document examples of both pre-emptive and reactive challenges to capitalism. In particular, the papers have the advantage of documenting case studies as a ‘practical–theoretical activity’, an iterative process, which advances an understanding of the workings of capital, on the one hand, and the manifold challenges to capitalism’s worst excesses, on the other. The opening two papers deal, in very different ways, with the impact of state policy, specifically neoliberalism, on peasant society and livelihood. In their study of staple grain consumption patterns, Ousman Gajigo and Abdoulaye Saine remind us of the unfounded assumptions used to justify agricultural market liberalisation in the Gambia. Given a political economic context in which, as they make clear, the fortunes of rice (the national – but mostly imported – staple) and groundnuts (the main export crop) are closely intertwined, earnings from groundnut exports had historically funded rice imports and its purchase/consumption by farm families. Thus, privatising parastatals catering to the needs of groundnut producers without also addressing the structural impediments which state intervention was partly meant to address in the first place ran a very real risk of disrupting production and trade, and, consequently, reducing farmer earnings and disposable rural household income. And, since ‘any serious disruption to either groundnut production or marketing [was] likely to have an adverse effect on farmer ability to afford imported rice’, this left farmers with little option ‘but to turn to locally grown cereal to ensure food security’.

Against One-dimensional Africa

The financial crisis has wounded Africa. But Africans’ vision for the future has remained resilient: They seek energy, infrastructure, agricultural development, regional integration linked to global trade and markets, and a dynamic private sector. . . . For states coming out of conflicts, the challenge is ‘securing development’ – through a reinforcing mix of peace and order, governance, economy, and legitimacy. (http://allafrica.com/stories/200909010510.html)