Revisiting Environmental and Natural Resource Questions in Sub-Saharan Africa

Book excerpt: Based on case studies in Southern Africa, West Africa and East Africa, this book revisits some of the dilemmas and paradoxes associated with the development, management and utilisation of environmental resources, as well as lacklustre official handling of climate change-related challenges, in Sub-Saharan Africa. On the subject of natural resource exploitation, in particular, the book revisits scholarly debates and specific practices around compensation, benefit- and burden-sharing, local participation and space-place dynamics. It highlights fundamental ambiguities in the ways the dominant discourses and policy responses have been framed and mobilised, and examines epistemic and ideational incongruences that have hobbled and sometimes negated the effectiveness of otherwise well-intentioned interventions. On climate change, the book revisits debates around the vulnerability-assets nexus with regard to mitigation and adaptation, as well as the intersection of climate information and livelihoods in agro-based settings. The contradictions, gaps and limitations of climate change policies and strategies in different regions are re-examined based on new data. In the last few years, the Environment and Natural Resources Working Group of the South African Sociological Association (SASA) has intensified efforts to go beyond the annual SASA Congresses and the production of journal articles, in making the research agendas of its members more visible to the global scholarly and policy community. This book is one result of such efforts. It calls for a constant questioning of orthodoxies and the promotion of ethnographically sensitive and epistemologically nuanced scholarly and policy approaches to developmental challenges in Africa, especially in relation to environmental resources and environmental change.