The Environmental Crunch In Africa

This book discusses the problems and challenges of environmental–ecological conditions in Africa, amidst the current craze of economic growth and ‘development’. Africa’s significant economic dynamics and growth trajectories are marked by neglect of the environment, reinforcing ecological crises. Unless environmental–ecological and population growth problems are addressed as an integral part of developmental strategies and growth models, the crises will accelerate and lead to huge costs in later years. Chapters examine multiple emerging tension points all across the continent, including the potential benefits and harm of growing urban-based ecotourism, the trajectory of labour-saving technologies and the problems facing agro-pastoralism. Although environmental management and sustainability features of African rural societies should not be idealized, functional 'traditional' economies, interests and management practices are often bypassed, seen by state elites as inefficient and inhibiting 'growth'. In many regions the seeds are now sown for lasting environmental crises that will affect local societies that have rarely been given opportunity to claim accountability from the state regimes and donors driving these changes.

Articoli / Articles Jon Abbink, On “Good Governance”: Towards Reconciling State and Vernacular Views in Southwest Ethiopia Erika Grasso, Mapping a “Far Away” Town: Ethnic Boundaries and Everyday Life in Marsabit (Northern Kenya) Rosanna Tramutoli, A Sociolinguistic Description of Gíing’áwêakshòoda: A Register of Respect Among Barbaig Speakers in Tanzania Alice Bellagamba and Marco Gardini, What is a “Slave”? Neo-Abolitionism and the Shifting Meanings of Slavery in Two African Contexts (Highlands of Madagascar, Southern Senegal) Joanna Lewis, Dynasties and Decolonization: Chieftaincy, Politics and the Use of History at the Victoria Falls, from the Precolonial to the Post-independence Period Tom McCaskie, Alcohol and the Travails of Asantehene Osei Yaw Autori / Contributors

This book demonstrates how humans can become sensitized to, and intervene in, environmental degradation by writing, reading, analyzing, and teaching poetry. It offers both theoretical and practice-based essays, providing a diversity of approaches and voices that will be useful in the classroom and beyond. The chapters in this edited collection explore how poetry can make readers climate-ready and climate-responsive through creativity, empathy, and empowerment. The book encompasses work from or about Oceania, Africa, Europe, North America, Asia, and Antarctica, integrating poetry into discussions of specific local and global issues, including the value of Indigenous responses to climate change; the dynamics of climate migration; the shifting boundaries between the human and more-than-human world; the ecopoetics of the prison-industrial complex; and the ongoing environmental effects of colonialism, racism, and sexism. With numerous examples of how poetry reading, teaching, and learning can enhance or modify mindsets, the book focuses on offering creative, practical approaches and tools that educators can implement into their teaching and equipping them with the theoretical knowledge to support these. This volume will appeal to educational professionals engaged in teaching environmental, sustainability, and development topics, particularly from a humanities-led perspective.

Rangeland, forests and riverine landscapes of pastoral communities in Eastern Africa are increasingly under threat. Abetted by states who think that outsiders can better use the lands than the people who have lived there for centuries, outside commercial interests have displaced indigenous dwellers from pastoral territories. This volume presents case studies from Eastern Africa, based on long-term field research, that vividly illustrate the struggles and strategies of those who face dispossession and also discredit ideological false modernist tropes like ‘backwardness’ and ‘primitiveness’.

Everyday practices of state building interrogates the question about how to reinstate movement to our conceptualisation of state formation in Africa at a time in which the continent witnesses profound social and political transformations inscribed in increasingly globalised and localised dynamics. The book revisits key theories of the state adopting a detailed empirical approach that studies how state power operates in the everyday. It locates the mutual constitution of state and society in the wide set of scalar processes that articulate how state power structures social life and, simultaneously, creates the conditions of possibility for new openings and social formations. Drawing on five qualitative fieldworks in Ethiopia between 2006 and 2018, the book identify some important challenges that the ruling Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has encountered in institutionalising power through the developmental state, an ambitious model of state-mediated economic liberalisation intended to fulfil the broader re-organisation of the Ethiopian state along Ethnic Federalism since 1991. The case studies discuss how policies of resettlement, decentralisation, agriculture commercialisation, entrepreneurship, and industrialisation, inscribed dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in both rural and urban areas. Against these profound transformations beneficiaries casted new meanings to land, place, and work along struggles to secure reproduction. Interrogating the notions of scale and performativity, the book revisits dominant approaches that in African studies read state formation along centre-periphery relations, and ascribe cultural interpretations to the work of state power in the everyday, ultimately contributing to important discussions about authoritarianism and ethnonationalism in contemporary Ethiopia. Oxford Studies in African Politics and International Relations is a series for scholars and students working on African politics and International Relations and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on contemporary developments in African political science, political economy, and International Relations, such as electoral politics, democratization, decentralization, the political impact of natural resources, the dynamics and consequences of conflict, and the nature of the continent's engagement with the East and West. Comparative and mixed methods work is particularly encouraged. Case studies are welcomed but should demonstrate the broader theoretical and empirical implications of the study and its wider relevance to contemporary debates. The series focuses on sub-Saharan Africa, although proposals that explain how the region engages with North Africa and other parts of the world are of interest. Series Editors: Nic Cheeseman, Professor of Democracy and International Development, University of Birmingham; Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, Professor of the International Politics of Africa, University of Oxford; Peace Medie, Senior Lecturer, School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies, University of Bristol.

Republic of Madagascar: Selected Issues

Food insecurity dramatically increased in Madagascar over the last 10 years, hampering human development. Using most recent data and surveys conducted by UN Agencies and local authorities, this paper analyzes the root causes of food insecurity in Madagascar related to demographic vulnerabilities, multidimensional poverty, lack of education, as well as structural weaknesses in the food value chain and the lack of basic infrastructure, such as irrigation and transportation, that hamper agricultural activity development. Moreover, Madagascar is exposed to a large variety of climate shocks that climate change will likely exacerbate. This paper formulates country specific macroeconomic and operational policy recommendations in collaboration with the World Food Program to reduce food insecurity, which include i) measures to improve the emergency response and preparedness, ii) policies to address structural food insecurity, by improving the food chain and addressing challenges posed by climate shocks, and iii) measures to improve Green PFM and climate related public investment management to invest in long-term resilience and mobilize external financing.