The African Green Wall and The Human Factor
‘It is not drought that causes bare ground, it is bare ground that causes drought’. Add “discuss” and you have a good undergraduate essay question. But not an easy one.?Deema Assaf, Jordanian architect turned urban forester, takes the axiom as foundation of her work[1].?Some such idea is surely essential to the belief system and motivation of anyone who sets out to combat the effects of climate change in arid lands – such as, for example - to ‘hold back the advance’ of the Sahara Desert; The African Great Green Wall programme[2].?But to green bare ground requires human agency.?Equations in nature should be complemented with social equations.?In this, strong moral convictions must contend with uncertain information and shaky understandings. ?To this piece I bring an idea advanced by someone on BBC Radio 4 the other day, with observations from a field visit 30+ years ago, that were revisited in a conference paper some 20 years ago [slow maturing thought it seems][3]. ??The Radio 4 thought went something like this; ‘an environmental project will only be enacted if the people concerned can see value in its plan and purpose’.?
My personal exposure to the Sahel was in 1990 as the leader of a two-person team contracted to review a small UK funded project in Darfur’[4].?The project had been serving its primary purpose.?Set up in response to 1980s drought and famine in the region, its key responsibility was to monitor the price of food grains and wild grass seeds in local markets – rising sales of the latter being a strong signal of impending famine[5]. ?In 1990 the ecological, social and governance fragility of the Darfur region in Western Sudan was already apparent.?Armed rebel bands from Chad were disturbing the peace in the province, making travel difficult, but when we had been able to make excursions from El Fasher, we found evidence that locally organised conservation could be effective.?A few years later there was a complete breakdown of governance and Darfur became the scene of a major humanitarian disaster, the epicentre of one of the world’s worst outbreaks of civil conflict[6].?
Look at a map presentation or listen to the media and it is easy to get the impression that tackling bare ground in places like the Sahel, [the broad belt of land that spans the continent of Africa, below the equally broad spread of the Sahara Desert,] can only being addressed on a macro scale.?The African Union, working in conjunction with The UN Convention to Combat Desertification, has been attempting precisely that, with a plan for an 8000 km “green wall” that would span the continent, traversing the domains of 22 countries[7].?Initiated in 2007, The Great Green Wall was initially conceived by its ‘top down’ planners as a several-kilometre-wide linear forest that would act as a physical barrier to what some take to be the progressive Southward movement of the Sahara[8].??
Such was the plan, but once implementation got underway the interests of the various communities who lived in the Sahelian zone had to be factored in, and the green wall notion was sensibly modified to become not just about trees but about improving land capacity and sustainable livelihoods[9]. ?Various agencies joined the endeavour, with country-based projects that are framed within the programme[10]. ??Even so, the grand idea has been proving difficult to implement. ?Conflict between pastoralists and sedentary farmers is a mentioned difficulty[11]. ??Once people have been let into the process, the means of achievement of the ‘greening’ goal [to put it ‘log-frame’ terms] must accommodate the interests and motives of the various human actors involved.?There is no neutrality, only inclusion or exclusion with outcomes of either participation or conflict. ?How to get inclusion is the question that faced, and still faces, both national and international actors.
The workshop to which I was invited in 2007 was about practical political responses to the ongoing conflict in Darfur.?How to restore effective government and governance after years of war, when the national government had fuelled the conflict by taking sides and many parties had access to guns; this was the theme.?On rediscovering a copy of the 1990 Scoones / Curtis report, I felt then that two of its findings were relevant to that restoration theme.?They are of equal relevance to Great Green Wall implementation. ?
1. Local control of land use management is possible – evident in effectively managed water harvesting, tree cutting within fields limited to branch trimming or pollarding[12], and a forest set aside as an agreed exclusion zone. Each of these was evidence of a ‘common good’ achieved through local, ‘traditional’ or other non-governmental leadership and local decision making and enforcement arrangements, surviving – because it works for them - without constitutional recognition or enforcement by government agents.?
2.?Where there are many, potentially rival, interests [as between nomads and settled agriculturalists] and limited policing capability [firearms being widely available], state authority can best be exercised as honest broker between disputed interest groups.?In 1990 we had paid a courtesy call upon the Provincial Governor, who took time out from one such inter-tribal moot, where he was trying to resolve a blood feud, to see us.?If resolved the government tax system would be used to fine the agreed offender and pay compensation to the offended.??
The African Great Green Wall notion could be good for people, planet, and ecology within Africa.??The notion could feature as an agreed ‘super-goal’ in innumerable transactions between the people who must make a living and have their being in the zone.?Some elements had been achieved in the past when, I have been informed, a farmer would invite a nomadic herdsman to bring his camels to feed on crop residues and manure the field[13]. ?The timing and routes through farmland for the seasonal movement of migrating flocks or herds had also been agreed.?Climatic variations in a warming planet will increase the need for all parties to keep their interests under review and be active in reshaping their relationships and agreements.?Good governance in such a context is not about the imposition of formal government as such but about an ongoing peace process.?There is plenty for government [plus UN, etc.,] to do to preside over such a process and enable new settlements to emerge.?But this has not happened. One trouble is that oil revenues came into the scene to turn politics and conflict, into a game about ‘slices of a national cake’.?And gunfire rumbles on to this very day[14].
[1] Rawan Baybars?‘Rewilding; Jordan once had dense forests. It can again’. The Guardian. 10 March 2023.
[3] ‘Environment, feasible governance and the political economy of Darfur’, paper presented at The Political Science Association conference on Making Politics Practical, IDD, Birmingham University, 26th January 2007.
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[4] Donald Curtis and Ian Scoones, ‘Strengthening Natural Resource Planning Capability in Darfur’ ODA [DFID] / MASDAR July 1990.
[5] Early warning being a missing ingredient in national and international responses. [D Curtis, M Hubbard and A Shepherd (1988) Preventing Famine, Policies and Prospects for Africa. Routledge
[6] Wikipedia on Conflict in Darfur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Darfur
[7] https://www.treeaid.org/blogs-updates/great-green-wall/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI1YeBoNXb_QIVztPtCh3AnQRJEAAYASAAEgLO3_D_BwE
[8] This reference and the following make different assumptions about whether the Sahara Desert is expanding. https://www.climatechangenews.com/2019/02/01/great-green-wall-can-stop-desert-tracks/ [expanding]
[9] https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/great-green-wall/??[desert not expanding, largely stable]
[10] https://www.weforest.org/programme/great-green-wall/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIkcKFkdjb_QIViJ7tCh3UrQVXEAAYAiAAEgIUO_D_BwE
[11] https://news.mongabay.com/2021/11/conflict-and-climate-change-are-big-barriers-for-africas-great-green-wall/
[12] To leave trees standing within fields in arid land settings has since become ‘expert’ advice.
[13] An old practice, once leading to inter-tribal or ethnic bonds. [One informant, a Sudanese PhD student asserted that this could entail exchange of children as tokens of goodwill].
"GOLDEN APHRODITE" is the title of my debut mythological fantasy novel.
1 年All your work, all the government's work, all the buy-in, and, on April 15, 2023, two generals in Sudan opt for war... Big sigh here.
Feminist, gender advisor, long time development researcher, teacher and practitioner, consultant
1 年Thanks for the thoughts Donald. This is a huge topic to tackle in a short piece embracing as it does international donors and top down recipes, multiple countries all with different governance and competence, numerous groups from nomads to farmers, different relationships to land, water, forests and so much more. Add in many complex conflicts and new ones in many key countries But you raise some useful principles and examples of small scale cooperation, interesting approaches etc . Only people involved can actually change their behaviour and they do and will if they see value in doing so as you say. The solutions will be numerous and not necessarily coherent but a plan will never be imposed from outside. Why do we need supergoals anyway? International agencies and governments have proved pretty ineffective in the tasks they should do - keeping peace, building alliances, negotiating agreements, supporting local initiatives , protection. The challenges of climate change, migration, conflict, drought, inequality are mega in this region. What the multiple communities most need is probably support as they struggle to meet their many diverse challenges. And to be heard.