Bolivian police intervention in the indigenous TIPNIS march Sept 2011 (pic: Dario Kenner)
The conservation enterprise is embedded in ideas of the environment
through which it promotes a vision of the world and the
relations between the non-human and human. The papers in this
forum analyse conservation from various vantage points to draw
the links between geopolitics and conservation. The authors use
three themes to demonstrate these links. The first theme draws on
the concept of environmentality to show the mobilization of ecological
rationalities and power towards the creation of protected
areas. The second pays attention to networks formed across the
distance, and how they influence the location and governance of
protected areas. The third focuses on the strategies the conservation
lobby uses to align local identities with global conservation
ideals and goals. Collectively, these themes highlight features of
conservation geopolitics.
Student surveying farmer in the Mount Kenya area (Pic: P. Bottazzi)
Food insecurity remains a major concern for numerous rural
households in Sub-Saharan Africa who rely on agriculture as their main source
of livelihood. The assessment of the links between food security and livelihoods is central for overcoming
widespread food insecurity. However, assessments of food security remain
challenging, due to its multi-dimensionality and the challenge of finding
indicators that are comparable and applicable to various contexts. This study
addresses this challenge by adapting a food security index (FSI) and use it to assess
the livelihood drivers of food security. The index captures the
multi-dimensionality of food security using the conventional food security
indicators. The assessed indicators include measures of “food consumption score”,
“household dietary diversity score”, “coping strategies index”, the “household
food insecurity access scale” and “months of adequate household food
provisioning”. The study covered 600 randomly selected households representative of three ecological areas
located closed to large scale agricultural investment of Mount Kenya region in
Kenya. Linear regression was used to identify livelihood factors significantly
influencing food security. Spearman’s rank-order correlation and student’s T-test
demonstrated a strong and significant correlation between the composite FSI
index and the each classical indicators of food security. Overall, 32% of the
households were food secure and 68% were food insecure. Households’ ownership
of productive hand tools, followed by off-farm income, consumption of own
produced food, type of agro-ecological zone farm income and number of main
crops infested by pests had a significant effect on household food security.
All these factors, expect number of main crops infested by pests, were found to
positively influence household food security. Household size, the size of
accessible land and households’ members’ participation to large agricultural
investments (as wage workers or sub-contract farmer) were not significantly influencing food security. Households of the
Mount Kenya region need alternative off-farm income sources combined with further
support to improve sustainable agriculture management with appropriate hand
tools.
Water tank received as incentive for forest conservation in Bolivian highlands (Pic: P. Bottazzi)
There is growing use of economic incentives such as Payments for
Ecosystem Services (PES) to encourage sustainable land management. An
important critique is that such approaches may unintentionally disrupt
environmental and social values, ‘crowding out’ pre-existing motivations
to conserve. Some scholars suggest that the use of in-kind payments and
norm-based framing, rather than financial transfers and a market
framing, can mitigate these risks. There are calls to use more robust
methods for impact evaluation in environmental policy. We use one of the
only Randomized Controlled Trials of a conservation incentive scheme to
evaluate its impact on self-stated environmental and social values and
beliefs. Data from before and after the intervention, from households in
villages randomly selected to receive the program or not, demonstrate
that the program increased prioritization of environmental values
(evidence of crowding-in as opposed to crowding out) and altered social
beliefs related to inequality and the role of government. The findings
demonstrate that this conservation program had a positive impact on
environmental values and increased the belief that government
involvement is appropriate. The scheme, with its use of in-kind payments
and reciprocity framing, offers lessons to those seeking to develop
effective schemes to incentivize positive environmental stewardship.
Heavy rains inundated neighborhoods in and just outside of Dakar, September 2013. Moustapha Diallo/IFRC
Flooding disasters in urban and suburban Dakar have been prioritised in various policy actions over the last two decades. Our research aimed to generate a historical overview of the progressive transformations of flood governance in Dakar. We found that flood governance policies have gone through three main phases, each representing a paradigm shift: the ‘emergency-relief’ phase, the ‘water-pull-out’ phase, and the ‘live-with-water’ phase. We argue that the second phase, which began in 2012, was supported by an engineering approach, where fresh water was literally pulled out using large-scale drainage infrastructure. This can be considered the ultimate stage of the conquest of urbanisation over nature. The resulting situation was a clear reduction in flood exposure, giving rise to smaller disasters. A new form of land competition also developed in the areas that were drained of water. These areas required the inclusion of local stakeholders into flood management processes. Although both the government and international partners have invested efforts in trying to coordinate flood management, the distribution of competences across several ministries and a lack of cooperation is provoking a “vertically divided authority”, leading to overlapping mandates and competition among state and non-state agencies. From 2014 onwards, what we called the ‘live-with-water’ phase supported the greater inclusion of local stakeholders and a change in articulation, which tried to consider water not as a threat but as a resource. The conclusion of this paper calls for the development of locally centred flood management bodies (including grass-root organisations and municipalities) as well as a more elaborate and complex articulation of the physical and institutional temporalities and scales of flood management.
A ‘beneficiary’ of the Watershed incentive program in Santa Cruz department highlands (Pic: P. Bottazzi, 2014)
Neoclassical economic interpretations of Payment for Environmental Services (PES), which assume that participants weigh up costs and benefits, are making room for more complex analyses. However, there is still little evidence of how PES programmes interact with existing motivations to conserve, the extent to which funded conservation is additional, and the likely permanence of changes. We categorized the outcome of contracts aiming to reduce cattle grazing in riparian forest (n = 428) and deforestation (n = 912) by Bolivian farmers in terms of whether they were unsuitable, non-compliant, non-additional, or additional (the holy grail of PES programmes) and explored the relationship between farmers’ reported motivations and the extent to which the conservation funded was additional. Up to 39% of contracts to exclude cattle, and 14% to prevent deforestation appear to be additional. Where participation is motivated by the instrumental values of nature (such as provision of clean water) contracts to exclude cattle from riparian forest are more likely to represent additional conservation. We suggest that the programme is partly acting as what we term ‘payment for environmental self-service’; i.e. the external incentives enable changes in behaviour motivated by farmers’ perceptions of environmental benefits they receive from the management changes incentivized.
In the last decade, sub-Saharan African countries
have taken various measures to plan for and adapt to floods in order to
reduce exposure and its impacts on human health, livelihoods, and
infrastructure. Measuring the effects of such initiatives on social
resilience is challenging as it requires to combine multiple variables
and indicators that embrace thematic, spatial, and temporal dimensions
inherent to the resilience thinking and concept. In this research, we
apply a subjective resilience indicator framework and a
before-after-control-intervention (BACI) evaluation to empirically
measure the impacts of the “Live with Water” (LWW) project on suburban
households in Dakar, Senegal. Our framework is based on an empirically
measurable resilience index that combines anticipatory, adaptive, and
absorptive capacity—considered as structural dimensions—with the concept
of transformative capacity—considered as a temporal reconfiguration of
the first three dimensions. Our finding let us estimate that the project
increased the absorptive and the anticipatory capacities by 10.6% and
4.6%, respectively. However, adaptive capacity remained unchanged. This
may be explained by the fact that the project was more successful in
building drainage and physical infrastructures, rather than improving
multi-level organizations and strategies to cope with existing flood
events. Decoupling implementation time between physical infrastructures
and longer term institutional and livelihood based support could both
improve projects’ results and their evaluations.
Agroindustrial biofuel investment in small villages of Sierra Leone (Pic: P. Bottazzi, 2013)
Large-scale agricultural investment (LSAI) involves complex trade-offs with regard to West African farmers’ livelihoods. Our research presents a robust impact evaluation of a biofuel investment in northern Sierra Leone. The LSAI case evaluated has been certified by the Roundtable of Sustainable Biomaterial and is noted for complying with several other international guidelines. A total of 882 households were surveyed in the treatment and control areas, and asked about their livelihood structures. Statistical results show that farmers in the LSAI area have reduced their agricultural area for food production, have lower yields, and need to spend more on external labour. By contrast, the LSAI-impacted villages present a clear increase in total monetary income, a perceived improvement in food and water security, and an increase in food consumption expenditure. However, the improvement in financial income was higher for landowners than for tenants, and access to wage labour was mainly given to men rather than women, suggesting that LSAI can potentially increase local inequalities. It is therefore not possible to speak about a linear impact in this case, but more of a transformation of livelihood structures toward a more wage-dependent system. The findings also support the idea that the enforcement of international guidelines on responsible investment is necessary to mitigate the negative consequences of LSAI on local livelihoods. Further efforts must also be made along these lines to create a security net, to prevent potentially harmful consequences in the case of operations shutting down.
Traditional Temne Chief in Sierra Leone land grabbing area (Pic: P. Bottazzi, 2013)
This study combines legal and anthropological approaches to investigate
how the establishment of a large-scale biofuel agro-industry is
reinterpreting and potentially transforming customary institutional
arrangements in rural Sierra Leone. The contractual relationships
established between land acquirers and local authorities can be seen as
an ‘institutional innovation’ that aims at interpreting and overcoming
the limits of the national land regime. However, by formalizing
customary land tenure structures through land registration, such
innovations are exacerbating pre-existing social inequalities. We
identified four categories of resulting conflicts: interlineage,
intervillage, interfamily and intergenerational conflicts. Taken
together, these conflicts question the current land-based sociopolitical
structures of rural Sierra Leone and could be drivers of societal
change.
Brasil-Bolivia border from space (Pic: ASTER/Terra/NASA )
The aim of this paper is to explore possible links between forest cover
change and characteristics of social-ecological systems at sub-national
scale based mainly on census data. We assessed relationships between
population density, poverty, ethnicity, accessibility and forest cover
change during the last decade for four regions of Bolivia and the Lao
PDR, combining a parcel-based with a cell-based approach. We found that
accessibility is a key driver of forest cover change, yet it has the
effect of intensifying other economic and policy-related underlying
drivers, like colonization policies, cash crop demand, but also policies
that lead to forest gain in one case. Poverty does not appear as a
driver of deforestation, but the co-occurrence of poverty and forest
loss driven by external investments appears critical in terms of
social-ecological development. Ethnicity was found to be a moderate
explanatory of forest cover change, but appears as a cluster of
converging socio-economic characteristics related with settlement
history and land resource access. The identification of such clusters
can help ordering communities into a typology of social-ecological
systems, and discussing their possible outcomes in light of a critical
view on forest transition theory, as well as the relevance and
predictive power of the variables assessed.
Organic cocoa producers at El Ceibo (Pic: El Ceibo)
Cocoa production in Alto Beni, Bolivia, is a major source of income and
is severely affected by climate change impacts and other stress factors.
Resilient farming systems are, thus, important for local families. This
study compares indicators for social–ecological resilience in 30
organic and 22 nonorganic cocoa farms of Alto Beni. Organic farms had a
higher tree and crop diversity, higher yields and incomes, more social
connectedness, and participated in more courses on cocoa cultivation.
Resilience was enhanced by local farmers’ organizations, providing
organic certification and supporting diversified agroforestry with
seedlings and extension, going beyond basic organic certification
requirements.
