Making land-use change and markets: the global-local entanglement of producing rice in Bagré, Burkina Faso

Abstract

Since the 1970s the government of Burkina Faso together with international donor organizations has pushed for increasing national rice production to cope with the country's food import dependency. This paper traces this development and illustrates that rice production in Burkina Faso is the outcome of interrelated global and local processes. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Burkina Faso the paper sketches the historical, legal and socioeconomic conditions, challenges and practices behind the increasing rice production. Focusing on the Bagré Growth Pole Project, we describe how particular configurations of local, national and global connections and disconnections around the creation of a Burkinabe rice market are brought into being. A major point of the paper is to illustrate that combining systemic and processual theoretical perspectives is highly illuminating in this respect. Concretely, the paper achieves this by bringing into dialogue the telecoupling literature concerned with the globalization of land-use change and the geographies of marketization literature focusing on market-making practices. This allows understanding the rice market described as an ongoing and grounded process within a global systemic configuration. ARTICLE HISTORY

Large Differences in Livelihood Responses and Outcomes to Increased Conservation Enforcement in a Protected Area

“…This calls attention to how macro-scale processes are mediated to shape livelihood dilemmas at the frontiers of PAs. On the market side, this includes how price signals and production conditions are established by external traders and local middle-men (Friis & Nielsen, 2017) and the multilevel processes through which commodity markets materialise (Hauer & Nielsen, 2020). On the conservation side, PA interventions are manifestations of interactions in multiple arenas that lead to a particular design based on the discursive practices of distant actors and donor preferences (Boillat et al, 2018;Persson & Mertz, 2019).…”

Future-making in Burkina Faso: ordering and materializing temporal relations in the Bagré Growth Pole Project

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“…These orientations make the future empirically graspable. Studies of the future and how the future is envisioned, enacted and brought into being have focused on, for example, anticipation (Anderson, 2010;Cross, 2014;Greiner, 2016;Geenen, 2018), expectation (Ferguson, 1999;Beckert, 2013Beckert, , 2016Kornienko, 2014;Ringel, 2018) and hope (Braun, 2005;Anderson and Fenton, 2008;Jansen, 2014;Hauer et al, 2018). While this paper is inspired by these discussions on temporality and futurity, its point of departure is more empirical and arose directly from fieldwork situations such as the one described above.…”

When, where, and how can land governance overcome path dependency? A trajectory of land governance change

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