The Language of Disco Arse

The importance of language is never more evident than when you misspell a word or put a space where there should be none. If you were drawn to this article expecting a musicology of African Disco, I’m afraid that you will be disappointed because this is an analysis of the DISCOURSE of Forest Landscape Restoration.

I am fascinated by discourse. A good discourse analysis is akin to the moment in the 1999 Sci-Fi movie The Matrix when Neo starts to see the stream of bits and bytes that create his computer constructed reality. Discourse analysis gives us a peak into our socially constructed reality. Discourse analyses are interesting for one reason: the way that a particular problem is understood and explained, determines the political response and solutions provided to that problem. Who gets to decide the framing of that problem therefore wields significant power.

Jason Kottke posted an interesting piece about how the language that we have been “conditioned to use about slavery … obscures reality”. For example, the word ‘plantation’ has a problematic history, yet it still also has romantic connotation for many - this immediately disappears when we refer to plantations as labor camps or death camps. Similarly, ‘slave owners’ (= enslavers) had ‘mistresses’ (= rape victims) who they ‘traded for’ (= human trafficking) after going through the ‘Middle Passage’ (= genocide). Kottke’s post is at this link.

This is an extreme example of the power of language which makes it rather tricky to transition back to the comparatively boring topic of Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR). Even more so because, as I mentioned in a previous post, the words that make up FLR are themselves still contested. I will focus for now on two areas of FLR discourse: the economics of FLR and keeping track of degrad/restor-ation. I will take a brief look at how these two framings have conditioned us how to think about landscape degradation and restoration?

We live in a world where the pathology of economic growth often obscures reality. There have been numerous books written about the problems with using GDP as a measure of a country’s success. It is no surprise then that land degradation is also framed in terms of financial losses. A study by the Economics of Land Degradation (ELD) Initiative in 2015 argued that the combined impact of land degradation to economic and biodiversity loss, and subsequent ecosystem collapse and food insecurity, amounts to global annual losses of USD 10.6 trillion. A more recent study in 2019, produced by Credit Suisse, WWF and McKinsey & Company, proposed that USD 300 billion is needed annually for biodiversity conservation, sustainable agricultural practices and ecosystem protection from climate change to protect us from ecological collapse.

These exorbitant (almost ridiculous) figures are intended to create a crisis narrative that supports a particular discourse. In this case, the discourse implies that governments alone CANNOT pay for land restoration and only private investors can. In the context of land and water resources, however, crisis narratives have historically been used by international organizations to claim the right to stewardship over those natural resources. We see some of this ‘right to stewardship’ language in the influential ‘Planetary Boundaries’ paper published by Johan Rockstr?m with 27 esteemed colleagues.

I was fascinated by the Planetary Boundaries concept and thought it was a useful way to measure the state of the world’s health. However, I had my Neo moment when geographer Melissa Leach explained how this represented a particular ‘regime of truth’ that calls for a ‘global referee’ who can assign blame and responsibility, create institutions to assert power and control, and further produce knowledges that continue a narrative of global emergency and an even greater necessity for centralized control. What could go wrong?

This leads to the second narrative that has conditioned us in thinking about land degradation in particular ways, specifically the need to know where is degraded and where is restored. If the Planetary Boundaries concept is our referee’s instrument for tracking violators, then the Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) indicators is its proposed equivalent for land restoration. LDN refers to a set of indicators that measure global net zero degradation and appear in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The trick is that this approach requires a way to measure things globally, regardless of the type of landscape and irrespective of national boundaries. There are only a few variables and datasets that cover all terrestrial environments. The need for a global measuring stick led scientists to compromise on three indicators: landcover and land use change (LUC), soil organic carbon (SOC) and net primary productivity (NPP).

This set of indicators led to other challenges because SOC is a slow changing variable while NPP has large seasonal swings representing dry and wet seasons. These variables are also coupled: LUC influences NPP and over time also SOC. With this set of imperfect variables that change at different temporal scales and are measured at different spatial scales (10m for NPP and 250m for LUC), can we measure degradation/restoration at all? Moreover, even if these datasets are freely available, most countries in the global south do not have the technology or capacity to do their own tracking and are therefore dependent on a few northern institutions to know whether they are in violation.

There has been much debate on LDN and a few scientific teams have tried to operationalize the concept. Without correcting for seasonal variations driven by rainfall, NPP will easily be the driving variable. Note also that we cannot currently measure NPP using remote sensing and therefore rely on a proxy indicator that measures “greenness”*. Side by side, maps of degradation derived from all three LDN indicators, and one of just NPP look nearly identical. Do we expect Kenyan policy-makers to use this 'regime of truth' for planning restoration?

One of these represents is a combination of all three LDN indicators while the other is only NPP. Can you figure out which is which? (Data: Trends.Earth)

My argument is that institutions like LDN are born out of certain discourses that determine what solutions are proposed. Moreover, those with power (and data) get to make these decisions. Philip Stott and Sean Sullivan, two political ecologists, remind us that we do discourse analysis out of a concern with ‘tracing the genealogy of narratives concerning “the environment”, with identifying power relationships supported by such narratives, and with asserting the consequences of hegemony over, and within, these narratives for economic and social development, and particularly for constraining possibilities for self-determination’ (2002).

I met or worked with some of the people involved in the development of the LDN concept. I also participated in a debate on the three indicators several years ago. It is highly unlikely that any of these scientists wants to constrain local communities in their fight for greater agency and self-determination. The question then remains: if there is no intent to do so, is it still possible that economic crisis narratives and global tracking systems that rely on advanced technologies that only few control, do lead to dispossessing marginalized communities of their natural resources such as land and water?

* The proxy variable for Net Primary Productivity is the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) also knows as the "greenness index" because it is related to the amount of chlorophyll in leafy vegetation.