Recent work has celebrated the political potential of 'counter-mapping', that is, mapping against dominant power structures, to further seemingly progressive goals. This article briefly reviews the counter-mapping literature, and compares four counter-mapping projects from Maasai areas in Tanzania to explore some potential pitfalls in such efforts. The cases, which involve community-based initiatives led by a church-based NGO, ecotourism companies, the Tanzanian National Parks Authority, and grassroots pastoralist rights advocacy groups, illustrate the broad range of activities grouped under the heading of counter-mapping. They also present a series of political dilemmas that are typical of many counter-mapping efforts: conflicts inherent in conservation efforts involving territorialization, privatization, integration and indigenization; problems associated with the theory and practice of 'community-level' political engagement; the need to combine mapping efforts with broader legal and political strategies; and critical questions involving the agency of 'external' actors such as conservation and development donors, the state and private business interests.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Clark University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Economic Geography.Abstract: An increasing ecological awareness and greater efforts on a global scale to reverse processes of environmental degradation give rise to new forms of social and economic conflict-a "politics of resource stabilization"-which political ecology theorists have yet to fully explore. Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) argue that the long-term payback period of capital-intensive and natural reclamation processes may potentially lead resource "managers" to adopt coercive labor mobilization tactics or seek out opportunities to capture inequitable subsidies in achieving stabilization goals. Both of these tendencies express themselves quite clearly in a lucrative horticultural production district on the North Bank of the River Gambia in West Africa.Two decades of drought, since the early 1970s, have prompted hundreds of women's groups in The Gambia to intensify fruit and vegetable production in low-lying communal garden projects. In an attempt at promoting environmental stabilization through tree planting, developers have encouraged male landholders to take advantage of the female labor power invested in the irrigation of garden plots by planting orchards on the same locations. Shade canopy closure eventually undermines gardeners' usufruct rights, restoring the plots to male control. The case thus serves as an illustration of the need to critically examine the political economy of stabilization initiatives. It also raises questions regarding a growing practice in Africa and elsewhere of planning voluntaristic environmental programs around the use of unpaid female labor resources.Rights over resources such as land or crops are inseparable from, indeed are isomorphic with, rights over people. (Watts 1992) Since the first critiques of human ecology were presented by political economists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, political ecology has focused on identifying root causes of environmental degradation. This involves removing blame from victims and exposing the underlying political economic forces leading to resource deterioration.' While this effort

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This article seeks to explain the resurgence of the ‘community’ scale as a central organising principle guiding contemporary environmental initiatives in Africa. It sets policies centred on the notion of community-based natural resource management in their regional political-economic context, demonstrating that fiscal constraints have forced environmental managers to rely more heavily on community efforts to accomplish environmental objectives. In effect, it argues that environmental managers confronted with increased expectations on the part of donors and their government superiors have seized the opportunity to devolve responsibility for environmental management to ‘the community’ as a means of expanding programmes while incurring minimal additional costs. The case study involves a German-funded community forestry project in the Gambia. In 1991, in order to speed up the implementation of ‘scientific’ management on state-controlled forest land, the Gambian-German Forestry Project, a branch of the national Forestry Department, began granting rural communities leasehold rights to community forestry reserves. In each instance, however, community representatives were required by contract to commit their constituencies to a rigorous set of management tasks. Participatory rhetoric notwithstanding, the project offered communities little more than graduated sovereignty over forests. Programme conditions ensured that project personnel would control the finest details of forest management, not despite, but because of, the evolution of tenure rights to the community.

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By definition, land reclamation programs render marginally productive land resources more valuable to a broader set of users. The question of who gets access to rejuvenated lands is often highly political, however. Environmental managers "reclaim" land resources by rehabilitating them, but they simultaneously reanimate struggles over property rights in the process, allowing specific groups of resource users to literally and figuratively "re-claim" the land. Relying on data gathered during fourteen months of field work between 1989 and 1995, this paper analyzes the openings created by environmental policy reforms introduced over the past two decades along The Gambia River Basin, and the tactics and strategies rural Gambians have developed to manipulate these policies for personal gain. Specifically, I demonstrate how women market gardeners pressed "secondary" usufruct rights to great advantage to ease the economic impact of persistent drought conditions for the better part of a decade, only to have male lineage heads and community leaders "re-claim" the resources in question through donor-generated agroforestry and soil and water management projects. This is thus a study of the responses different community groups have made to a shifting international development agenda centered on environmental goals. It is simultaneously an analysis of those environmental policies and practices and their impact on gendered patterns of resource access and control within a set of critical rural livelihood systems.

ResumeCes vingt dernieres annees, la prosperite des cultures maraicheres des femmes associee a un declin des cultures commerciales des hommes a restructure le "contrat conjugal" qui gouvernait les relations sociales au niveau du menage dans des centaines de communautes gambiennes. Durant la premiere phase de cette periode prospere, les hommes ont fait des jardins une metaphore conjugale; ces jardins, disaient-ils, dominaient tant la vie des femmes qu'ils en etaient devenus leurs "second maris." En revanche, les femmes cultivatrices ont accueilli dans leurs vies ces "second maris" comme des sources d' aide financiere, a defaut de 1' aide financiere de J'epoux. Les resultats de l'etude prouvent que les femmes maintenant negligent I font impasse aux obligations conjugales au profit de la culture maraichere alors que les hommes negligent regulierement de s'acquitter de leur engagements financiers. Une politique discursive a contribue a la creation d'une nouvelle autonomie soigneusement con{:ue pour les femmes qui implique ala fois des obligations et des libertes sociales considerables.

This article analyses geographical assumptions underlying the latest in a long history of environmental interventions in Africa, including: 1) the distinct political problems of managing natural resources under the divergent ecological conditions of dearth and diversity; 2) the attempt by planners to resolve spatial conflicts arising in connection with land-use zoning strategies (protected areas, buffer zones, wildlife corridors); 3) the changed political ecological relationships resulting from the commodification of natural resources; and 4) the politics of scale embedded in environmental planning efforts.