African Savannas: Global Narratives and Local Knowledge of Environmental Change

African Studies Review, Dec 2004 by van Beusekom, Monica M

Thomas J. Bassett and Donald Crummey, eds. African Savannas: Global Narratives and Local Knowledge of Environmental Change. Oxford: James Currey/Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2003. xvii 270 pp. Photographs. Figures. Tables. Bibliography. Index. $27.95. Paper.

African Savannas is the result of a five-year collaborative project between researchers at the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and researchers in Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, and Mozambique. Drawing on the perspectives of both scientific and social scientific disciplines, the project investigated environmental change in the savanna, an ecological zone covering about half of the continent. Following in the steps of recent scholarly work on African environments, the resulting research challenges the pervasive image of environmental degradation and devastation. The authors, however, have no interest in painting a rosy picture of environmental change in the twentieth century; stress and the struggles surrounding modifications in land usage are central to each of the cases examined, as is the knowledge of African herders and farmers and their management of the environment. The essays cover such key issues as the use of fire (Bassett, Bi, and Ouattara on northern Côte d'Ivoire), investment in soil quality (Gray on southwestern Burkina Faso), and tree planting (Crummey and Winter-Nelson on Wällo, Ethiopia, and Saul, Ouadba and Bognounou on western Burkina Faso). Each combines a historical perspective with careful analysis of more recent changes and considers the multiple factors affecting land usage: commercialization, migration, and government policies regarding land titling, hunting, or conservation, to name but a few.

Bassett and Crummey's excellent introduction offers an overview of current themes in studies of environmental change: the trend away from an equilibrium to a nonequilibrium model of environmental change; challenges to the master narratives of deforestation and desertification; and the increasing emphasis on nuanced studies of how farmers and herders understand, shape, and manage the landscape. A fuller understanding of environmental change, Bassett and Crummey argue, will only emerge if scholars adopt a wide variety of scientific and social-scientific methodologies that are able to assess landscape change from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives.

Distorted master narratives and poor environmental policy have resulted in part from inadequate information. The frequent lack of solid empirical data makes interdisciplinary methodologies all the more important. But as Little argues in a chapter on pastoralism in East Africa, interdisciplinarity can be hard to achieve. Examining the case of a research and development project in Marsabit, Kenya, he makes the useful distinction between research projects in which experts from different disciplines work side-by-side and those in which the socioeconomic and biophysical expertise is truly integrated-from the setting of the research agenda through to the interpretation of the data.

True interdisciplinarity is central to the political ecological analysis that Bassett, Crummey, and the other contributors to this volume seek. Each of the essays draws connections between the social, the political, and landscape change. But as Saul, Ouadba, and Bognounou note in their examination of wild vegetation cover in western Burkina Faso, human-environment relations are "contradictory and inconclusive" and marked by "unforeseeable twists and turns" (121). The strength of this collection is precisely the many intriguing twists and turns that these essays reveal. Land tenure, for example, is a recurrent issue that highlights the important interactions between the political and ecological but not always in predictable ways. If the master narratives of ecological change in Africa have often decried communal holdings as the source of degradation, these essays show that land titling or more permanent land rights are not necessarily a prerequisite for improved land management. Crummey and Winter-Nelson demonstrate that in Wallo, Ethiopia, different tenure regimes under Haile Selassie and the Derg did not deter "farmers from planting trees and making other investments in their land" (119). In southwestern Burkina Faso, Gray argues, "land rights and investment develop simultaneously; farmers invest in soil quality as part of active strategies to secure control of land" (74). As Bassett, Bi, and Ouattara point out for Côte d'Ivoire, policymakers often see land reform as "the panacea for a host of rural development and environmental problems" (69). But a careful consideration of these problems could reveal that they are in fact not problems at all, or that their origins are considerably more complex and therefore their solutions require a more careful consideration of existing farming and herding practices and concerns.

Students of African environmental change will find in this book richly detailed local studies that engage with broad debates about the African environment past and present. The volume is amply illustrated with photographs, maps, and other figures and the bibliography is an excellent resource for those seeking to identify key recent scholarship.