Ecosystem services from Southern African woodlands and their future under global change

Miombo and mopane woodlands are the dominant land cover in southern Africa. Ecosystem services from these woodlands support the livelihoods of 100 M rural people and 50 M urban dwellers, and others beyond the region. Provisioning services contribute $9 ± 2 billion yr(−1) to rural livelihoods; 76$780 M. Woodlands support much of the region's agriculture through transfers of nutrients to fields and shifting cultivation. Woodlands store 18–24 PgC carbon, and harbour a unique and diverse flora and fauna that provides spiritual succour and attracts tourists. Longstanding processes that will impact service provision are the expansion of croplands (0.1 M km(2); 2000–2014), harvesting of woodfuels (93 M tonnes yr(−1)) and changing access arrangements. Novel, exogenous changes include large-scale land acquisitions (0.07 M km(2); 2000–2015), climate change and rising CO(2). The net ecological response to these changes is poorly constrained, as they act in different directions, and differentially on trees and grasses, leading to uncertainty in future service provision. Land-use change and socio-political dynamics are likely to be dominant forces of change in the short term, but important land-use dynamics remain unquantified. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Tropical grassy biomes: linking ecology, human use and conservation’

Pentecostalism, gerontocratic rule and democratization in Malawi: the changing position of the young in political culture

This chapter explores the relationship between the father-metaphor, gerontocratic power, democratization and religion in the context of changing political culture in Malawi. It argues that democratization in Malawi signalled a change in the nature of the dominant gerontocratic power relations associated with Chewa political traditions, and gave the young an opportunity to escape from their tightly circumscribed sociopolitical space in what for thirty years had been a highly supervised society. It further argues that religion, in particular 'born-again' (often Pentecostal) Christianity, played a significant role in changing the meaning of the crucial root paradigm of gerontocracy in Malawian political culture. The chapter shows that the position adopted by religious youth groups in the 1990s was the outcome of a 'struggle for youth' that Malawian society had faced since colonial times and in which religion played a significant role. In so doing, it deconstructs the so-called 'conservative nature' of Christian fundamentalism-cum- Pentecostalism.ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

Collective trauma processing: dissociation as a way of processing postwar traumatic stress in Guinea Bissau

Guidelines on psychosocial interventions in postconflict areas commonly mention that interventions should be based on local needs and be built on culture-specific expertise. This paper is based on a dissociative cult, the Kiyang-yang (KYY), in Guinea Bissau. In a previous article, we used a refined definition of the concept of idiom of distress to analyze the dissociative behavior displayed in KYY as a symbolic language addressing politically dangerous truths. This paper uses the concept of "collective trauma processing" to analyze how the idiom offered the local population a pathway to mitigate the consequences of protracted and widespread political violence. The paper first argues that the field of psychotraumatology lacks a comprehensive ecological theory on trauma. Moreover, within clinical psychology and psychiatry, little attention is paid to local cultural healing mechanisms addressing traumatic stress. This paper is an effort to study such mechanisms in their own right. To compare trauma processing mechanisms across the globe, we propose to analyze trauma processing mechanisms with the help of a comprehensive model discerning five ontological dimensions that are considered to be involved in suffering and are addressed in healing approaches. Our paper describes similarities and differences between psychological healing traditions and collective trauma processing within the West African context of Guinea Bissau. We will illustrate how the KYY movement uses the idiom of dissociation as both a collective expression of distress and as a vehicle to process social suffering and traumatic stress as a circular phenomenon