Leading rural land conflict as citizens and leaving it as denizens: Inside forest conservation politics in Burkina Faso

The forest frontier in the Global South: Climate change policies and the promise of development and equity

“…Diverging perceptions on adaptive capacity and its determinant expressed in modernity myths versus place-based adaptation Mobility, of people and their livestock conflicted with commodity needs and related ideas of an ‘agriculture rationelle’ assigned to colonial landscapes (e.g. cotton production in West Africa, cotonialisme (Roy 2012 ) and conflicts nowadays with post-colonial administrative boundaries, land-use rights, election cycles, tax years, and conceptualisations of what constitutes citizenship (Karambiri and Brockhaus 2019 ) Local actors portrayed mobility as an adaptive way of life to access various resources, while governmental representatives saw mobility as an impediment to development and adaptation Sedentarisation resonated with the modernity aspirations of young pastoralists as an attempt at emancipation from traditional systems Older generations of fishermen, farmers, and pastoralists alike longing for the long-lost rich lake system and expressed a sense of powerlessness or lack of control over the changes in the present (solastalgia) Dreams of a new future and a forlorn past are inspired by a techno-driven mega-project of ‘refilling the lake’ as solution to the experience of extreme outcomes of climate variability and change—being used and mentioned by politicians across levels as a promise, for electoral purposes, to mobilise funds for efforts to ‘bring back the lake’ Newly emerged forest resource (Prosopis) remains unmanaged and is used mainly by less privileged women Tensions in local aspirations bring out underlying assumptions and constraints to adapt to new conditions and climate variability in formal and informal institutions governing land and peoples’ relations 4—Climate change adaptation, mitigation, and development Institutional path dependencies hamper cross-level policy processes that support local needs despite federal and decentralised regimes Interplay between global, national, and local interests in shaping the forest frontier and resulting marginalisation of less powerful local interests Dominance in discourses across scales, with global and national mitigation discourses dominating at the expense of local adaptation Power asymmetries in information related to presence/absence of (and support of) capacity and access to information, with insufficient knowledge available on adaptation responses In Brazil and Indonesia, knowledge gaps were much more extensive for adaptation than mitigation and were unequally distributed across governance levels, with expertise on climate change adaptation primarily located on a national level, when it was most needed at local level Lack of local expertise translated into the inability of local governments to effectively demand attention for and effectively address local adaptation needs related to droughts, floods, and fires in both forest frontiers, but particularly in Indonesia In both Brazil and Indonesia, climate change action is primarily funded through bilateral aid, from Norway, Germany, and the UK, while multilateral aid from the World Bank and United Nations agencies is also key in Indonesia In the state of Mato Grosso, forest governance featured powerful economic livestock and soy agribusiness interests supported by national-level allies and local landowners’ associations. Contraposed were long standing but less well-resourced environmental conservation and climate change mitigation interests.…”

“…Mobility, of people and their livestock conflicted with commodity needs and related ideas of an ‘agriculture rationelle’ assigned to colonial landscapes (e.g. cotton production in West Africa, cotonialisme (Roy 2012 ) and conflicts nowadays with post-colonial administrative boundaries, land-use rights, election cycles, tax years, and conceptualisations of what constitutes citizenship (Karambiri and Brockhaus 2019 )…”

“…people and their livestock conflicted with commodity needs and related ideas of an 'agriculture rationelle' assigned to colonial landscapes (e.g. cotton production in West Africa, cotonialisme(Roy 2012) and conflicts nowadays with post-colonial administrative boundaries, land-use rights, election cycles, tax years, and conceptualisations of what constitutes citizenship(Karambiri and Brockhaus 2019) Local actors portrayed mobility as an adaptive way of life to access various resources, while governmental representatives saw mobility as an impediment to development and adaptation Sedentarisation resonated with the modernity aspirations of young pastoralists as an attempt at emancipation from traditional systems Older generations of fishermen, farmers, and pastoralists alike longing for the long-lost rich lake system and expressed a sense of powerlessness or lack of control over the changes in the present (solastalgia) Dreams of a new future and a forlorn past are inspired by a techno-driven megaproject of 'refilling the lake' as solution to the experience of extreme outcomes of climate variability and change-being used and mentioned by politicians across levels as a promise, for electoral purposes, to mobilise funds for efforts Indonesia, knowledge gaps were much more extensive for adaptation than mitigation and were unequally distributed across governance levels, with expertise on climate change adaptation primarily located on a national level, when it was most needed at local level Lack of local expertise translated into the inability of local governments to effectively demand attention for and effectively address local adaptation needs related to droughts, floods, and fires in both forest frontiers, but particularly in IndonesiaIn both Brazil and Indonesia, climate change action is primarily funded through bilateral aid, from Norway, Germany, and the UK, while multilateral aid from the World Bank and United Nations agencies is also key in Indonesia In the state of Mato Grosso, forest governance featured powerful economic livestock and soy agribusiness interests supported by national-level allies and local landowners' associations. Contraposed were long standing but less wellresourced environmental conservation and climate change mitigation interests.…”

When Policies Problematize the Local: Social-Environmental Justice and Forest Policies in Burkina Faso and Vietnam

“…At the local level, field data was collected from three villages surrounding the CAF Cassou in the center west region of Burkina Faso, and three villages surrounding Cat Tien National Park in central Vietnam. The data collection in Cassou was led by coauthor M. Karambiri as part of her PhD work in 2017 (see also Karambiri 2019Karambiri , 2020, and the data collection in Cat Tien region is led by co-author Pham T. T. as part of a project assessing PFES impacts and equity across Vietnam in 2019-2020. In both cases, mixed social science methods of focus group discussions segregated by gender, age and ethnicity at the village level, and semi-structured interviews at the household-, villageand regional-levels were conducted.…”

The power of choice: How institutional selection influences restoration success in Africa

“…Henceforth, the local people no longer perceived the local government as their representative but largely as the project's co-administrator (Karambiri 2015). Accordingly, they sanctioned the local government using various formal and informal mechanisms from legal action to sorcery (Karambiri and Brockhaus 2019). The project successfully restored the forest landscape and nine years later, in 2019, the restored forest persists.…”