By-standing memories of curious observations: Children's storied landscapes of ecological encounter.

Founded in contemporary concerns that children are increasingly disconnected from nature, this article explores how children re-imagine their memories of childhood experiences within the landscape of a National Park. The concept of ‘re-connecting’ children with ‘nature’ has recrystalised around conceptualisations of ‘slow ecopedagogy’ as a form of ecological conscientisation.Through creative mapping with children from the Brecon Beacons National Park, Wales, this article questions whether exposure to such environments predisposes young people to an environmental consciousness. Examining children’s creative representations of childhood memories from nonhuman encounters, and building on Philo’s discussion of ‘childhood reverie’, we develop the concept of by-standing memories to articulate how children re-story their own memories, the landscapes in which they take place and the nonhumans they include. Something of a ‘child panic’ currently surrounds the disconnect between children and ecology. While some are concerned by this ‘child panic’, which positions children as ‘by-standers’ to adult affairs, we argue that by-standing is critical for how children tell stories of their dwellings in, and curious observations of, place. The re-telling of childhood memories stretches the conceptualisation of slow ecopedagogy beyond the place of encounter, to the creative spaces of storying and re-telling, which are equally critical for memory itself

At the crux of development? Local knowledge, participation, empowerment and environmental education in Tanzania

Development appears to have gone through a paradigm shift, from top-down, state-led projects to bottom-up, participatory schemes which seek to take account of local knowledges. Tanzania is a country which, like many others in the ‘Global South’, faces a myriad of interlinked environmental and development problems, particularly as much of the population’s livelihood needs are deeply entwined with local environmental resources. Current environmental policies and conservation practise in Tanzania appear to reflect this new shift in development, and increasingly the Tanzanian state and a number of NGOs have aimed to increase the participation of local people in environmentally sustainable practices. Education about the environment, for both adults and young people, has become key to this approach in Tanzania since the 1990s. This thesis aims to explore the many practical and theoretical questions which remain about the suitability of participatory projects that utilise local knowledges, considering questions which are fundamentally at the heart of how development is and how it should be done, questions which are ultimately at the crux of development itself. Specifically, I aim to answer questions about how participants and communities can become ‘empowered’ through participatory initiatives, and to this end I investigate the important yet presently neglected role of young people. I further explore the nature of ‘local knowledge’, questioning its current use in development projects whilst seeking to re-conceptualise and re-orientate how ‘local knowledge’ is understood and employed. I utilise a qualitative and participatory methodology through three communities in Tanzania, each of which offers a contrasting picture of environmental issues throughout the country. I begin by exploring the current understandings of participation and local knowledges in development, and follow with an explanation of the methodological approach. The empirical chapters are then organised around three main themes: local knowledges, environmental education in Tanzania, and the role of participation in Tanzanian communities. The first of these chapters appraises the concept of ‘local knowledge’ critically by first comparing local and official discourses of the ‘environment’, assessing how far an attention to local knowledges has percolated into official environmental discourses in Tanzania. In light of local understandings of the environment encountered in these three communities, I consider how the current conceptual framework of local knowledge may be limiting our understanding of how these knowledges are constructed and communicated. The second empirical chapter examines environmental education projects in Tanzania, and from this I critically reflect on the role of NGOs and the state in local development. Through an analysis of environmental education, I consider how both local knowledge and participation agendas can be spatialised, in particular by understanding how formal and informal spaces of learning are constructed discursively in communities, and the implications this has for the outcomes of education projects. I go on to examine the notions of participation and community, exploring how participation and inclusion operate at different scales, including those beyond the local. I consider how the current conceptualisation of participation and community, derived from ‘Western’ ideals, can conflict with local understandings of responsibility, volunteerism, participation and community development. Through this, I question the ‘community’ as the necessary site of empowerment, and in particular here I draw attention to the role of young people and how their identities are reproduced at the community scale and beyond. Finally, I conclude by discussing the conceptual and practical application of local knowledge and participation in development in light of this critical appraisal. I consider the role of formal education more broadly in empowering young people, and I question the role of NGOs in the future of locally and nationally orientated development. I end with an examination of the ethics of the current development paradigm in light of the understandings of development uncovered by this study, many of which fundamentally challenge the way that participatory forms of development should be done

The student is not the fisherman: temporal displacement of young people's identities in Tanzania

This paper examines how young Tanzanians have their identities as environmental actors displaced into the future by local adults, teachers, educational institutions and teaching materials which seek to educate them about environmental sustainability and conservation. Whilst there has been considerable attention to young people’s agency in reproducing their own identities, I argue here that the temporal displacement of young identities operates through a network of interlinked structures which act on young people’s lives, including the identity work of young people themselves. Educational material produced by Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), and the discursive work of adults, both seek to position young people as having agency to act in and make decisions about the environment at an undetermined time in the future. Young people themselves can perform different identities within the space of the school and in the community or family, yet they may also understand their own identities as only having agency at a temporally distant point. The displacement of young identities has important implications for pedagogy which relates to environmental education, and for how the reproduction of young people’s identities is conceptualised

The dominant/marginal lives of young Tanzanians: Spaces of knowing at the intersection of Children's Geographies and Development Geographies.

Development Geography and Children’s Geographies have become distinct sub-disciplines in their own right, yet despite a number of cross-cutting concerns, the theoretical and practical insights of both have only more recently become explicitly shared. I use a case study of an environmental education project with young people in Tanzania to illustrate how a perspective that draws from both Children’s and Development Geographies can deliver significant challenges to both fields, yet also reveals important insights into the lives of young people in the global South. Young people in Tanzania hold distinct environmental knowledges compared to adults, learnt through projects and schools which are focused on ‘conservation’ of the natural environment. This raises challenges for critical Development Geographies, as young people appear to hold ‘dominant’ Western knowledges, yet they are also ‘marginal’ actors in society. For Children’s Geographies, this provokes questions about whether the knowledges of young people should be challenged. Local social hierarchies also govern spaces of knowledge expression. Young people can be more empowered to express their knowledge in the formal spaces of the school compared to the wider community, such that formal spaces may offer more empowering potential. This runs counter to the general thrust of Children’s and Development Geographies, often championing informal, local knowledges and spaces. There is a need to re-think education for young people in Tanzania in terms of its potential for their empowerment, but also to reconsider some of the fundamental assumptions about childhood and local community development which pervade both Children’s and Development Geographies

Local knowledge in development (geography)

The use of local knowledge in and for development is a relatively recent phenomenon, entering the realm of development theory and practice from the mid-1970s, yet it has become a key part of the rhetoric and practice of development agencies and academic research. The conceptual and historical background to local knowledge in development, including its roots of ‘Western’ engagement with ‘other’ or ‘indigenous’ knowledges, is key to understanding their more contemporary application in development practice. As local knowledge has entered the development orthodoxy, so a more critical approach has emerged, with particularly important contributions from Geographers, as to the use, application, and conceptual understanding of how knowledges are interpreted and adopted within development. This critique has highlighted the dynamic, political, and spatial nature of such knowledge, and problematises the notion that they are fundamentally ‘good’ for local development. For Geographers, and those working in development studies, there remain important questions about local knowledge, including how such knowledges are constituted by relationships and networks that go beyond the local, how such knowledges are ‘learnt’ and (re)produced in time and space, and how the knowledges of still marginalised actors in local communities can be taken account of

Witchcraft, spiritual worldviews and environmental management:rationality and assemblage

This paper interrogates the interrelationship between witchcraft, spiritual worldviews and environmental management. Drawing on diverse literatures from anthropology, conservation science and geography, this paper explores how witchcraft and spiritual worldviews have been rationalised in order to explain their continued significance, for society as a whole and for the conservation of natural resources and biodiversity specifically. Using an assemblage framework, this paper examines how the agencies of spirits and witches are entangled with other social and material entities, drawing on examples from three communities in Tanzania. It argues that thinking through assemblage allows the agentic capacities of spirits and witchcraft to be recognised, whilst also acknowledging their inseparability from other expressive and material components of assemblages, including social organisation and more-than-human actors. Finally, this paper turns to evidence for the deterritorialisation, or breaking apart, of these assemblages around spiritual worldviews and witchcraft, and considers their future role in local conservatio

Episodes of concealing: the invisibility of political ontologies in sacred forests

Indigenous research has demonstrated how Indigenous ontologies are political and how they have been articulated politically to express counter-narratives to modern understandings of human–nature relations. This article argues that current characterisations of political ontology, particularly in relation to environmental conservation, have yet to fully take account of African Indigenous spiritualities. Current thinking on Indigenous ontologies and decolonial scholarship, and their political manifestations, faces two problems: (1) they assume the visibility and availability of Indigenous ontologies to ‘doing politics’ and (2) presumptions are made about the comparability of place-based Indigenous ontologies and wider attempts to reform the state, and that the political goals of Indigenous people will straightforwardly align with those of the researcher. Drawing from research on sacred natural site protection among the Nyiha in Mbozi District, southwestern Tanzania, I examine how these problems might be addressed in a context where notions of Indigeneity are articulated quite differently to those predominantly evident in current writing on Indigeneity and decolonial scholarship. Nyiha ontologies, although already-political at the local scale, resist becoming ‘available’ to environmental politics at wider scales, making straightforward notions of solidarity problematic. Through a particular encounter with Christian groups attempting to spatially appropriate Nyiha sites, I explore the various ways in which ontologies are made politically available and visible and how the Nyiha analyse Christianity as colonial. Finally, I turn to how Nyiha ontologies and their sacred forest sites are replete with ‘episodes of concealing’ and variable invisibilities, which call into question how visible practices are utilised as ‘evidence-of-ontology’, or as part of a wider decolonial project

Technology-nonhuman-child assemblages: reconceptualising rural childhood roaming

This paper argues for reconceptualising how children use technology ‘outdoors’ as a technology-nonhuman-child assemblage, or roaming pathway. Founded in contemporary fears about children’s reduced opportunities to access nature and roam in rural environments, in part due to the ubiquitous presence of technology in their lives, we instead illustrate how the agencies of technologies and plants are folded into children’s outdoor roaming. Combining visual methods, video analysis and qualitative geovisualisation, and in collaboration with the Brecon Beacons National Park Authority, this paper exposes how assemblages are contingently brought into being through the actions of what technologies, plants and children do together. We demonstrate how the agentic capacities of non-humans and technologies are assembled through children’s imaginative interaction with them, and how these imaginative interactions make such agencies visible