From Ecophany to Burnout? An Anthropologist’s Reflections on Two Years of Participating in Council-Citizen Climate Governance in Eastbourne

In July 2019, Eastbourne Borough Council declared a climate emergency and committed to making Eastbourne carbon neutral by 2030. In order to achieve this, citizens together with Council created a unique model of council-citizen collaborative climate governance, the Eastbourne Eco Action Network (EAN). EAN’s main strategy has been the setting up of targeted working groups, each bringing together Councillors, engaged citizens and providers, and each tackling a specific area of climate action through a combination of infrastructure, institutional and behavioural changes. As an environmental anthropologist living in Eastbourne, I was involved in this process right from the beginning, having had my own ‘ecophany’—the realisation that the climate emergency required urgent action—in February 2019. Two years and one pandemic later, in this paper I reflect on the overall experiences and challenges of EAN’s and Eastbourne Borough Council’s work towards town-wide carbon neutrality to date, discussing possible factors (structural and other) determining varying successes and failures. At the same time, this paper provides an auto-ethnographic account of what ‘engaged anthropology’ means in practice, mapping out the real contributions anthropologists can and should make in local climate action, but also reflecting on challenges encountered along the wa

Selling out for sustainability? Neoliberal governance, agency and professional careers in the sustainable palm oil sector

In response to high-profile activist campaigns raising public awareness of the destructive effects of large-scale oil palm plantations on tropical rainforests, wildlife and local communities, the palm oil sector has put considerable effort and resources into ensuring "sustainable", "deforestation-free" palm oil production (and thereby countering negative publicity) over the last 15 years or so. The corporate sustainability drive – with the palm oil sector significantly leading other tropical commodities – has involved the direct employment of many professionals with backgrounds in conservation, anthropology or activism by the private palm oil sector. Based on long term participant observation as well as interviews with "sustainability professionals" about their career choices, this article shows that there is more nuance, agency and positive change than the existing political ecology literature attributes to the sustainable palm oil drive. It also shows how neoliberal governance structures and individual professional careers and values intersect and mutually reinforce each other. This dual, seemingly paradoxical analysis is informed by and situated in the wider context that the sustainability professionals we interviewed and we ourselves, as academics, share: growing academic precarity, the climate and ecological emergency, and the challenges and questions posed by both

Good governance, corruption, and forest protection: critical insights from environmental anthropology

This chapter provides an overview of three key ways in which anthropology provides critical insights into the good governance agenda in forest protection: through critiques of common-pool resource theory, through the anthropology of corruption, and through historical ecology perspectives

“No research on a dead planet”: preserving the socio-ecological conditions for academia

Despite thousands of higher education institutions (HEIs) having issued Climate Emergency declarations, most academics continue to operate according to ‘business-as-usual’. However, such passivity increases the risk of climate impacts so severe as to threaten the persistence of organized society, and thus HEIs themselves. This paper explores why a maladaptive cognitive-practice gap persists and asks what steps could be taken by members of HEIs to activate the academy. Drawing on insights from climate psychology and sociology, we argue that a process of ‘socially organized denial’ currently exists within universities, leading academics to experience a state of ‘double reality’ that inhibits feelings of accountability and agency, and this is self-reenforcing through the production of ‘pluralistic ignorance.’ We further argue that these processes serve to uphold the cultural hegemony of ‘business-as-usual’ and that this is worsened by the increasing neo-liberalization of modern universities. Escaping these dynamics will require deliberate efforts to break taboos, through frank conversations about what responding to a climate emergency means for universities’ – and individual academics’ – core values and goals

‘Was Benin a forest kingdom? Reconstructing landscapes in Southern Nigeria’

15 papers originally given at a 2009 conference in Sheffield. There is a wide covereage both in terms of chronology and themes, ranges from the Pleistocene of Dogon country in Mali, to discussion of the development of archaeolgy and museums in present day Angola and Benin. Other topics include metallurgy, agriculture and stone industries as well as settlement studies

Review of K. Homewood (ed.) ‘Rural Resources and Local Livelihoods in Africa’

book revie

The chief, the youth and the plantation: communal politics in southern Nigeria

In August 2006 the chief of Udo, a small town in Edo State, Nigeria, was deposed and the town taken over by the ‘youth’. This event presents the classic fall of a ‘big man’ who had lost support, but also involved long-standing chieftaincy rivalries, electoral competition in the run up to the 2007 elections, and conflict over a nearby oil palm and rubber plantation. Through an examination of Udo’s crisis, this paper engages with three key questions concerning contemporary communal politics in southern Nigeria: the manifestations of patrimonial power and resistance to it ; the meaning and role of ‘youth’ ; and the impact of expatriate capital

‘Scott, James’, and ‘Botkin, Daniel’

‘Scott, James’, and ‘Botkin, Daniel’ entries in The Encyclopedia of Environment and Societ

Things fall apart ? : a political ecology of 20th century forest management in EDO state, southern Nigeria

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Review of ‘All Our Yesterdays: Memories of a forester in Nigeria, 1950–1962 and An Earthly Paradise: Memories of a forester in the Bechuanaland Protectorate/ Botswana, 1963– 1968’, by P. W. T. Henry

A surprisingly large number of colonial foresters once stationed in Nigeria have written prolifically about their experiences and observations in Africa. Perhaps best known are the memoirs of the colourful Richard St Barbe Baker, founder of the early environmentalist movement Men of the Trees, which include such vivid (if perhaps not entirely reliable) accounts of the Kikuyu-speaking people in Kenya and the Edo in Nigeria that they merited a preface by Bronislaw Malinowski. Philip Allison published in the Journal of African History, whilst the journals Farm and Forest and in particular The Nigerian Field – founded in 1930 to encourage ‘interest in the flora and fauna of Nigeria’ and still going strong today – contain countless articles by foresters, such as R. H. Hide's piece on Bini botanical knowledge, R. W. J. Keay's work on the Sobo Plains and Old Oyo, and J. F. Redhead's