Drylands, frontiers, and the politics of change

Change is of all times, but it would appear that in the drylands of Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia/Inner Asia it is happening in an overwhelming manner. Climate change, growing political instability, and increasing enclosures of large expanses of land are some of the changes with far-reaching consequences for those who make their living in the drylands. This edited volume is about the changes that arise from the entanglement of global interests and narratives with the local struggles that have always existed in the drylands. In this chapter, the notion of ‘frontier’ is proposed as a metaphor to frame this entanglement and as a way to bring the different chapters in the volume together. Overviews of the chapters show that to understand the full politics of frontier processes, analytical approaches are necessary that take into account historical institutional changes and different forms of power relations

Explaining the emergence of land-use frontiers

Land use expansion is linked to major sustainability concerns including climate change, food security and biodiversity loss. This expansion is largely concentrated in so-called frontiers, defined here as places experiencing marked transformations due to rapid resource exploitation. Understanding the mechanisms shaping these frontiers is crucial for sustainability. Previous work focused mainly on explaining how active frontiers advance, in particular into tropical forests. Comparatively, our understanding of how frontiers emerge in territories considered marginal in terms of agricultural productivity and global market integration remains weak. We synthesize conceptual tools explaining resource and land-use frontiers, including theories of land rent and agglomeration economies, of frontiers as successive waves, spaces of territorialization, friction, and opportunities, anticipation and expectation. We then propose a new theory of frontier emergence, which identifies exogenous pushes, legacies of past waves, and actors anticipations as key mechanisms by which frontiers emerge. Processes of abnormal rent creation and capture and the built-up of agglomeration economies then constitute key mechanisms sustaining active frontiers. Finally, we discuss five implications for the governance of frontiers for sustainability. Our theory focuses on agriculture and deforestation frontiers in the tropics, but can be inspirational for other frontier processes including for extractive resources, such as minerals

Surplus to Extraction: Resettlement as a "make live" intervention in Mozambique

One of the direct consequences of the growing extractive industry in Mozambique is the displacement of people from their homes and lands. Building on the work of Tania Li (2010), we regard extractive projects as one of the key ways in which “surplus populations” are produced in Mozambique, as people lose access to their lands without being substantially incorporated into the job markets that extractive projects create. In this paper, we critically explore Li's framework of “make live” interventions and “let die” scenarios for conceptualising the consequences of being made surplus to extraction. We focus on involuntary resettlement processes in Mozambique as make live interventions (in intention). While Li describes make live interventions in terms of a choice made by governing actors, we see resettlement as a messy and conflict-ridden process that is often experienced as a let die scenario. We also reveal the heterogeneity of governing actors (primarily state and company) involved in make live interventions and the claims of dependency of populations affected by resettlement that such interventions produce. We draw from research material gathered during different resettlement processes and phases in extractive contexts in Cabo Delgado and Tete provinces in Mozambique

From Herding to Farming under Adaptation Interventions in Southern Kenya: A Critical Perspective

Improving water supply for irrigable farming and livestock purposes in communities in Africa is an increasingly popular approach for community-based adaptation interventions. A widespread intervention is the construction of agro-pastoral dams and irrigation schemes in traditionally pastoral communities that face a drying climate. Taking the Maji Moto Maasai community in southern Kenya as a case study, this article demonstrates that water access inequality can lead to a breakdown of pre-existing social capital and former pastoral cooperative structures within a community. When such interventions trigger new water uses, such as farming in former pastoral landscapes, there are no traditional customary institutional structures in place to manage the new water resource. The resulting easily corruptible local water management institutions are a main consolidator of water access inequalities for intervention beneficiaries, where socio-economic standing often determines benefits from interventions. Ultimately, technological adaptation interventions such as agro-pastoral dams may result in tensions and a high fragmentation of adaptive capacity within target communities

Surplus to Extraction: Resettlement as a "make live" intervention in Mozambique

One of the direct consequences of the growing extractive industry in Mozambique is the displacement of people from their homes and lands. Building on the work of Tania Li (2010), we regard extractive projects as one of the key ways in which “surplus populations” are produced in Mozambique, as people lose access to their lands without being substantially incorporated into the job markets that extractive projects create. In this paper, we critically explore Li's framework of “make live” interventions and “let die” scenarios for conceptualising the consequences of being made surplus to extraction. We focus on involuntary resettlement processes in Mozambique as make live interventions (in intention). While Li describes make live interventions in terms of a choice made by governing actors, we see resettlement as a messy and conflict-ridden process that is often experienced as a let die scenario. We also reveal the heterogeneity of governing actors (primarily state and company) involved in make live interventions and the claims of dependency of populations affected by resettlement that such interventions produce. We draw from research material gathered during different resettlement processes and phases in extractive contexts in Cabo Delgado and Tete provinces in Mozambique

Towards a Theory of Claim Making: Bridging Access and Property Theory

This article proposes a framework for studying and understanding how people make claims to land and other natural resources. We argue that a focus on claim-making practices of actors (individuals, groups, institutions, companies, the state), and the processes of appropriation, accessing and contestation that come along with it, best responds to Sikor and Lund’s call to examine “the grey zone” between access and property. We identify and discuss three practices of claim making: “grounding claims” is the practice of inscribing or altering the landscape with visible markers connoting ownership; “talking claims” is when speech is used strategically to make, justify and contest claims; and “representing claims” is when claims are represented on material objects (maps, title deeds) that are detached from the resource. We contribute to debates on enclosure, large-scale land acquisitions and resource grabbing by providing a lens of claim making through which these processes can be conceptualized.</p

Environmental crisis narratives in drylands

We all make use of narratives to make sense of the world, but some narratives are noticeably promoted more so than others and sustain certain policies rather than others. It is important to study these narratives, for while they are discursive in nature, their impact is material. Drylands, for example, are persistently presented as wastelands, legitimizing their capture and exploitation. ‘Winning’ narratives are intuitive, appeal to simple, causal, explanatory beliefs, and are clothed in neutral scientific language, spreading globally through policy travel. Crisis narratives invoking life-or-death decisions tend to trump other narratives. Narratives, however, are not written in stone but have life cycles—and after they rise, they may be challenged by counternarratives, merge and adapt, or fade and die. Three influential narratives illustrate the approach in this chapter: water wars, the Sustainable Development Goals, and energy transition. Calling out these narratives and their underlying ideologies can contribute to more ‘polyphonic’ policymaking

Institutional change, conflicts and responses in the Sahelian commons

We address the issue of the turmoil in the Sahel from a resource access, spatial and institutional change perspective. Many of the problems in the Sahel might look like being related to demographic pressures and climate change only. However, a closer look into concrete cases shows that these are long-standing issues for which pastoralist and farming groups had developed coping strategies and institutions. These enabled the management of land and related common-pool resources (CPRs) such as pasture, fisheries and water in the area, in flexible ways. The actual turmoil is based, among other aspects, on problems of institutional change and new resource frontier contexts, as part of historical processes that undermined common property regimes by introducing state and private property leading to various forms of enclosures and instabilities. We present illustrative studies of landgrabs in Ghana, green grabbing in Northern Cameroon, mining and large-scale irrigation schemes in Niger and Lake Chad region. These cases show how pastoral groups and marginal farmer-fishing communities are losing access to CPRs, leading to problems of environmental degradation (lack of mobility, coordination of resource use and to pollution in mining and agro-industrial farming). The enclosures are often legitimated by negative discourses used by states and companies for labelling local communities. Such constellations lead to conflicts over resources as well as to local responses of resistance (ranging from weapons of the weak and legal strategies to open conflicts). Finally, these resource-related dynamics of conflict and resistance relate to the recent political instability in the Sahel

Waves and legacies: the making of an investment frontier in Niassa, Mozambique

The literature on land-use frontiers has overwhelmingly focused on active frontiers of expansion. We focus on an emerging frontier. We studied the decisions, narratives, and practices of the actors driving land-use change in Niassa, Mozambique. Based on ethnographic research carried out between early 2017 and late 2018 among investors engaged in commercial agriculture and plantation forestry, we show how successive waves of actors with different backgrounds, motives, and business practices arrived in Niassa and attempted to establish farms or plantations yet repeatedly failed and left, or remained but continued to struggle. We show how even though waves come and go, they do leave sediments behind, legacies that over time add up to overcome the various constraints that investors face and gradually form the conditions for a frontier to emerge. We argue that the build-up of these legacies, particularly after the end of the civil war in 1992, has given rise to a new wave, which is qualitatively different from the previous ones in the sense that the actors did not arrive from elsewhere but were already present in Niassa. This wave thus emerges from within the region, building on the legacies of previous waves, indicating that over time endogenous processes may replace externally driven waves. We contribute to frontier theory by arguing that waves and legacies shape emerging frontiers through their dynamic interaction

Surplus to Extraction: Resettlement as a "make live" intervention in Mozambique

One of the direct consequences of the growing extractive industry in Mozambique is the displacement of people from their homes and lands. Building on the work of Tania Li (2010), we regard extractive projects as one of the key ways in which “surplus populations” are produced in Mozambique, as people lose access to their lands without being substantially incorporated into the job markets that extractive projects create. In this paper, we critically explore Li's framework of “make live” interventions and “let die” scenarios for conceptualising the consequences of being made surplus to extraction. We focus on involuntary resettlement processes in Mozambique as make live interventions (in intention). While Li describes make live interventions in terms of a choice made by governing actors, we see resettlement as a messy and conflict-ridden process that is often experienced as a let die scenario. We also reveal the heterogeneity of governing actors (primarily state and company) involved in make live interventions and the claims of dependency of populations affected by resettlement that such interventions produce. We draw from research material gathered during different resettlement processes and phases in extractive contexts in Cabo Delgado and Tete provinces in Mozambique