Simon Batterbury

Transnational Livelihoods and Landscapes: Political Ecologies of Globalization

This paper introduces a collection of articles on ‘Transnational livelihoods and landscapes’. We outline the analytical value of grounding political ecologies of globalization in notions of livelihood, scale, place and network. This requires an understanding of the linkages between rural people to global processes. We argue that the exploitation of these linkages can, under certain circumstances, result in new options and markets for rural people in marginal regions, even though many rural societies also confront serious political, environmental and economic challenges that likewise derive from globalization.

Sahel pastoralists: opportunism, struggle, conflict and negotiation. A case study from eastern Niger

Abstract The livelihoods and life chances of pastoral communities in the West African Sahel are linked to: the complexity of the activities they must engage in to insure access to resources; to the nature of conflicts and co-operation between ethnic groups; to the inconsistent role of the state in assisting or constraining pastoral livelihoods; and to the negative discourse surrounding pastoralism that still circulates in some government and development policy circles. The paper reviews pastoral livelihoods systems in eastern Niger to illustrate changing modes of access to water and pasture, culminating in present-day tensions and conflict between pastoral groups. State development efforts to provide secure watering points for pastoral herds have initiated social conflicts and violence, rather than creating security. No viable solution has yet been found to control the use of public wells and boreholes. Enabling frameworks for negotiation and conflict resolution must be developed locally, and centrally enforced in this, and many other regions of uncertain climatic change and overlapping systems of resource exploitation.

The African Sahel 25 years after the great drought: assessing progress and moving towards new agendas and approaches

Abstract This paper introduces a special issue of Global Environmental Change: Human dimensions on the Sahel of West Africa. It reviews the seminar to which the papers were presented, and brings together some conclusions. Despite the quarter century of research into the West African Sahel that followed the great droughts of the 1970s, there are still strong disagreements about how to achieve more prosperous, yet sustainable livelihood systems in the region. There are conflicts between those who believe in indigenous capacities to maintain rural livelihoods, those who believe that various forms of external support are necessary, and those wedded to a vision of a Sahel directed by regional urban growth. Under economic and cultural globalisation, the future of this region is, at best, unclear. The papers in this collection do agree that Sahelian environments are diverse, and that Sahelian people cultivate and exploit diversity and flexibility. They also suggest that there are no quick-fix development solutions, except to build upon this historical diversity with renewed purpose.

Environmental histories, access to resources and landscape change: an introduction

This paper forms the introduction to a special issue of this journal entitled ‘Environmental Histories, Access to Resources and Landscape Change’, that poses challenges to the ways in which the multiple dimensions of resource degradation are understood, analyzed and acted upon in developing countries. The paper outlines a framework for understanding the complexity of land degradation processes, their impacts, and offers insights into their remediation. The framework builds on the work of regional political ecologists. It involves a widened conception of resource degradation; an explicit awareness of layered scales of analysis in both time and space; an emphasis on the mechanisms structuring and determining patterns of access to a range of resources that influence the use of the natural environment; an engagement with environmental history; and a sensitivity to the relevance and application of research effort. Copyright

Landscapes of Diversity: A Local Political Ecology of Livelihood Diversification in South-Western Niger:

The landscapes created by livelihood diversification in rural Africa result from human activity, from biophysical processes, and from their interrelations. The paper explores these interrelationships through analysis of ‘productive bricolage’ -the ways in which rural people in one of Africa’s most disadvantaged countries have constructed a livelihood system that is a response to local constraints and opportunities, and to broader patterns of income-generating possibilities. Zarma farmers in south-west Niger inhabit a region where the political economy has helped fuel economic migration and a partial withdrawal from agriculture, and has significantly altered social relationships and labour patterns in and between households. Zarma responses to these conditions include income diversification, and these activities are expressed in their fields and their farms, as well as in their economic and locational choices. Attempts to build bridges between the concerns of a geographically aware ‘local political ecology’, concerned with these patterns of livelihood dynamics and resource use, and the new cultural geography of landscape must continue to pay attention to material practices enacted through human agency. Social and environmental change is a fluid, non-linear, and dynamic process in drylands that are marginal to the globalized economic system.

Soil erosion in the west African Sahel: a review and an application of a "local political ecology" approach in south west Niger

Abstract A review of soil erosion research in the West African Sahel finds that there are insufficient data on which to base policy. This is largely because of the difficulties of measuring erosion and the other components of “soil life”, and because of the highly spatially and temporarily variable natural and social environment of the Sahel. However, a “local political ecology” of soil erosion and new methodologies offer some hope of overcoming these problems. Nonetheless, a major knowledge gap will remain, about how rates of erosion are accommodated and appraised within very variable social and economic conditions. An example from recent field work in Niger shows that erosion is correlated with factors such as male migration, suggesting, in this case, that households with access to non-farm income adopt a risk-avoidance strategy in which soil erosion is accelerated incidentally. It is concluded that there needs to be more research into the relations between erosion and socio-economic factors, and clearer thinking about the meaning of sustainability as it refers to soil erosion in the Sahel.

Of Texts and Practices: Empowerment and Organisational Cultures in World Bank-funded Rural Development Programmes

Abstract The World Banks recent concern for ‘empowerment’ grows out of longer standing discussions of participation, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society. While commitments to empowerment enter World Bank texts with relative ease, their practice within Bank-funded projects is far more contingent, and the meanings they assume become much more diverse. This paper considers the relationship between such texts and the development practices which emerge, using an analysis of the ‘organisational cultures’ of the Bank and the many organisations on which it depends in the implementation of its rural development programmes. The paper presents a framework for analysing these organisational cultures in terms of (a) the broader contexts in which organisations and their staff are embedded; (b) the everyday practices within organisations; (c) the power relations within and among organisations; and (d) the meanings that come to dominate organisational practice. A case study of a development programme in Bangladesh is used to illustrate the ways in which cultural interactions between a variety of organisations – the World Bank, government agencies, NGOs, organisations of the poor, social enterprises – mediate the ways in which textual commitments to empowerment are translated into a range of diverse practices.

Using and shaping the land: a long-term perspective

This paper forms the introduction to a special issue of Land Use Policy based upon a selection of papers presented at the “Using and Shaping the Land” symposium that took place at the conference “Nature, Society and History: Long-Term Dynamics of Social Metabolism” in autumn 1999 in Vienna. This introductory paper offers a framework and an analysis of the following questions: What is the relationship between land use and social metabolism — i.e., socio-economic material and energy flows? How may specific environmental transformations be apprehended, and what have been the dynamics of change over the long haul? Lastly, how does land-use and land-cover change, as identified in the papers, relate to global change? The paper offers an ecumenical view of land-use change, and points towards a broader framework for analysis.

Sustainability and Sahelian soils: evidence from Niger

It is difficult to produce systems for judging sustainability, despite general enthusiasm for the concept. Here we evaluate the ‘capitals’ formulation for sustainability, which attempts to bring together the social and the environmental dimensions of the issue, and which has gained wide currency. We concentrate our attention on the ‘natural capital’ element in this framework, which has apparently been seen as its least problematical component. We use data on soil erosion from a Sahelian agricultural community in Niger. Despite apparently high rates of erosion, we find it difficult to decide whether the system is sustainable (using the capitals or any other framework). It is even dubious whether sustainability is an urgent concern. We caution against imposing yet another poorly formulated set of concepts on this and similar systems.

Planners or performers? Reflections on indigenous dryland farming in northern Burkina Faso

Indigenous agricultural practices in semiarid West Africa must be seen as dynamic operations that serve different ends. These ends are not only agricultural, but symbolic. By highlighting how farmers in the Central Plateau region of Burkina Faso organize their farming strategies, the “agriculture as performance” arguments developed by Richards (1987, 1993) can be both challenged and extended from the humid forest zone of West Africa. Farmers, it can be argued, are also keen “planners;” in order to meet their goals they invest considerable effort in overcoming ecological constraints, and also spend time forging links with various institutions working for agricultural development. Technologies and ideas from multiple sources—including those from some innovative development institutions — are incorporated in agricultural planning and practices in different ways, by different farmers, and for different reasons. The prospect of locally initiated and managed agricultural change emerging on the Central Plateau will be dependent upon this dialogue between farmer innovation, local organizations, and development projects.Agricultural systems are, in many cases, consciously “constructed” through sustained investment in the land and in natural resource management. Dryland management efforts need to recognize the strategic and planned nature of these activities, if they are to work with farmers who are actively building and improving their own livelihood systems.