1 The Vulnerable Continent?

On Friday, 13 June 2014, we anxiously awaited the arrival of the attendees of our author’s workshop on “Environmental Change and African Societies” in Essen, Germany. We had not heard from several participants who were coming from overseas; others called to report that they were stuck in various remote corners of western Germany, waiting for a bus to take them a bit closer to their destination. Even participants from relatively close to Essen struggled to reach the workshop venue, being forced to find a lift or other resourceful means of travel. A few days earlier, a major thunderstorm, a result of the cyclone Ela and the anticyclone Wolfgang, had begun to ravage through parts of western and central Germany, causing massive damage. The storm destroyed sections of railway line, uprooted trees, blocked major highways, and shattered cars. Tragically, six people lost their lives, and over sixty were injured.

Essen’s main train station was entirely cut off from the railway network for several days. We were left with no idea as to how our participants would reach the venue, if at all. Eventually, however, everybody made it, many after quite an odyssey. This was a nerve-racking yet fitting and insightful start for a conference on climate change in Africa. In current climate change discourse, vulnerability is mainly cast as a characteristic of the Global South, affecting societies that lack the infrastructure and financial means to cope adequately with extreme weather events, long-term changes in the environment, and the consequences thereof. Yet, having just experienced a thunderstorm that had paralysed large parts of Germany, we became very aware of how even one of the richest countries in the world was vulnerable to nature’s capriciousness.

Emmanuel Kreike, who also participated in the workshop, has previously taken issue with the Western trope of the ‘conquest of nature’. While high-income societies are commonly perceived to be characterised by technology, science, management, and elaborate infrastructure, all of which help to transform nature into culture, Africans are said to live with nature and (still) depend on it. However, none of our modern accomplishments has allowed industrial and postindustrial societies to leave nature in their wake. As Kreike points out, their entire infrastructures depend on one finite natural resource, hydrocarbons.¹ While we certainly do not wish to question the fact that societies across the African continent are suffering the negative consequences of climate change to an extent that may in many cases exceed its experienced effects on Western societies, our violent thunderstorm did remind us of the many tropes in climate change discourse on ‘developing’ nations that are often left unquestioned.²

The present volume is the fifth in the series Climate and Culture, which seeks to make a contribution to current debates on global climate change at the local or regional level and from the perspectives of the social sciences and the humanities. These disciplines entered the stage of climate change research as latecomers, carving out a space in a research field contoured by the natural sciences. In the past decade, however, an increasing number of studies on the social or cultural sides of climate change, including aspects of adaptation, vulnerability, and mitigation, as well as broader questions of human-environment relations, have emerged. A first catalyst of such research was the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, while a further steep increase in the number of social science publications on global environmental change has been recorded since 2005.³ The present volume is based on the premise that the ways in which communities will respond to the effects of climate change cannot be apprehended without addressing the various ‘climate cultures’ that have evolved historically around the world.⁴ The study of climate change as a social phenomenon must be carefully contextualised in relation to existing conceptions of nature and environmental history and to people’s experiences in response to environmental change.

The present volume is organised into four parts, analogous to the existing and forthcoming volumes in the series. The first section, “Ideas”, inquires into local perceptions of the environment. Rather than taking the social consequences of climate change as a given, we take a step back to ask how specific African communities conceptualise nature, whether and how they perceive changes therein, and, if they do, to what they attribute these changes. Climate change is commonly seen as a threat to the long-established ways in which groups of people interact with the environment and how they make sense of these interactions. Similarly, the two contributions in this section depict highly dynamic and tension-ridden situations; however, instead of defining these as a simple confrontation between ‘traditional’ knowledge and global climate change (see also below), de Wit and Kwashirai describe the perceptions that they trace on the ground as fluid and creative bricolages, assembled from various sources that include long-standing local cosmologies and current climate change discourses.

The section “Past” discusses historical cases of environmental change and state regulation. The chapters by Kreike and Fanstone help us to contextualise ongoing climate-related changes within longer historical trajectories of how different communities have dealt with disturbances in their use of environmental resources, including droughts and state-induced restrictions. In addition, many contributions in the other sections are also historically informed and examine contemporary problems in the light of diachronic developments. While popular climate change discourse often casts African communities as victims of global climate change, past experiences also reflect the existing knowledge and practical skill repertoires that have allowed various groups to counter environmental stress. Without implying that past responses to environmental change can be transposed to the present or future in a linear manner, this volume does make a strong plea for climate change research that is historically grounded, exploiting the rich body of research on African environmental history.

The section “Present” addresses decision-making and agenda-setting processes that relate to current representations and/or predicted effects of climate change. Østergaard Nielsen discusses individual adaptations to climate change by illustrating how the common coping strategies applied by Sahelian farmers in the face of interseasonal and interannual precipitation variability alter under the influence of a changing climate. Climate change is predicted to increase inequalities, including those based on gender, as Clancy’s contribution shows. Men and women are affected by climate change to different degrees and display different levels of vulnerability and resilience. This is, for one, conditioned by the unequal provision of economic, cultural, and social capital between genders. Moreover, perceptions of environmental change often vary between men and women. As adaptation is in many regards a collective process, unequal power relations and cultural conditions may further lower women’s ability to adapt. Central to adaptation is communication, which thus calls for an intersubjective understanding of climate change and its meanings for the respective community, as Jeffery highlights. Describing the conflicts between different actors in the Mauritian sustainable development programme “Maurice Ile Durable”, Jeffery shows how disparate interests as well as divergent interpretations of sustainability, development, and environment can result in such initiatives achieving reduced levels of efficacy and social inclusion. This demonstrates the need for effective communication on climate change, which is the main focus of the section’s third article. Therein, Eguavoen examines an African university as an arena of knowledge transfer and depicts multiple levels of climate change communication. While such communication occurs naturally in the lecturer-student relationship and through the desired transfer of knowledge from graduates to wider society, the difficult communication process between the university and its sole foreign donor exposes how imbalances within agenda-setting processes remain an important issue.

The section “Prospects” is concerned with contemporary African megatrends. The challenges of a changing climate impinge on a continent characterised by rapid economic and population growth and unprecedented levels of urbanisation, all corresponding with massive shifts in land use patterns. The interrelations between the causes and effects of climate change, its local and regional implications, the required adaptation and mitigation measures, and the above-cited megatrends are ambiguous. In his overarching chapter on “Africa in Transition”, Dietz identifies the opportunities as well as the risks that climate change brings with it, thereby contesting the “images of doom and gloom” that still dominate climate change writing on Africa. As he observes, multiple factors may “reinforce or counter the risks brought about by climate change” (see Chapter 9 of this volume). One example thereof is provided by McCann in his contribution on Blue Nile and Zambezi hydrologies. As he notes, Africa is currently experiencing a renewed wave of dam-building projects. On the one hand, this will contribute to a decoupling of the continent’s growing energy demands from its rising CO₂ emissions and provide African farmers with irrigation facilities to render them less dependent on natural precipitation. On the other hand, the construction of dams requires massive interventions into river hydrologies, which may already be adversely affected by changing rainfall patterns in their catchment areas. Besides adaptation, mitigation and resilience have played a major role in recent debates about Africa’s climate future. As the continent’s population and economy become increasingly urban, the question of climate resilience is also turning into more and more of an urban challenge. With reference to the example of Kumasi, Ghana, Nero et al. define the opportunities and constraints for sustaining and enhancing green cover in African cities, showing that this is to a large extent a bottom-up process driven by customary and private interests.

In line with the previous volumes in the Climate and Culture series, the structure of this volume implies that environmental change in Africa should be approached from a broad perspective. Although we cannot aim for a complete discussion in any sense, we do surmise that insights from a multitude of approaches and disciplines provide us with a more multifaceted understanding of the key issues at hand. By juxtaposing past cases of environmental change, adaptation, and contestation, we counter the presentist bias that has marked much of the ongoing climate change debate. In addition, the authors in this volume engage with climate change on different scales. Meso- and macro-scale analyses and prognoses (see, for instance, Dietz and McCann) are combined with interpretations that build on highly localised ethnographic data (see, for example, de Wit and Østergaard Nielsen).

2 Climate Change in Africa

In public discourse, Africa is often referred to as the continent that is most adversely affected by climate change while contributing the least to its causes. A range of detrimental environmental factors in conjunction with socio-economic stressors such as poverty, unstable political circumstances, or infrastructural constraints are seen to render many regions in Africa particularly vulnerable. Droughts and hunger catastrophes, as experienced in the 1980s in the Sahel and Ethiopia or in 2011/2012 in the Horn of Africa, have a long-lasting effect on global perceptions of the continent.

In general terms, African climates are primarily characterised by variable levels of moisture, predominantly rain, and less by varying temperatures as in Europe or North America. Most significant is the annual cycle of wet and dry seasons. While variations occur from year to year, as well as on a decadal time scale,⁵ annual weather patterns are usually predictable. With the onset of the rainy season, dried-out landscapes turn green within a very short period of time, while fields ripen for harvest in the dry season. With their Mediterranean climates, the Cape and the North African littoral form an exception to these patterns. From a long-term perspective, Africa’s climate has become drier and warmer, with desert zones in the Sahara expanding and the Central African forest zone shrinking. Some changes, like the increase in frequency and intensity of drought in the West African Sahel from 1951 to 2010, have already been attributed to anthropogenic climate change.⁶ Today, Africa is about 1.1°C warmer than it was in the world’s preindustrial era. The continent’s six warmest years of the 20th century all occurred in the final decade, with 1998 being the warmest.⁷ This trend has continued throughout the first two decades of the 21st century, with the years 2015 and 2016 being the warmest ever recorded in Africa (and worldwide).⁸

This is especially true for Africa. As James McCann has pointed out, most African communities have adapted to long-term changes, for instance through agricultural systems and livestock economies that were mobile enough to follow the path of moisture rather than by seeking to transform their environments. Throughout history, climate patterns, particularly the seasonality of rain, have affected food supply as well as the spread of disease, migration, the timing of military campaigns, political cycles, and religious practices.¹¹ In the future, climatic conditions in Africa, like elsewhere in the world, will undergo profound changes, some unprecedented in their extent and/or in the speed by which they take effect, which will place the range of local experience-based coping mechanisms under severe pressure. Furthermore, not all existing coping strategies can be successfully maintained in times of globalised markets and conflicts, mass urbanisation, population growth, and land use change.

In the proclaimed age of the Anthropocene, it is important to remember that African landscapes—despite often being cast as a last bastion of ‘original nature’—have long been anthropogenic. Historians and archaeologists have shown how the use of tools and technology, labour, draught animals, and fire have shaped landscapes on the continent for centuries. In the past two hundred years, however, the extent to which human activities have impacted the natural environment has increased significantly, primarily due to changing technology, demographics, and patterns of trade.¹² The question remains to what extent and at what pace human beings will continue to transform the natural environment in Africa and beyond. While Africa still accounts for the smallest portion of the world’s cumulative net CO₂ emissions,¹³ this may soon change considering the continent’s growing population, rising levels of economic development, rapid urbanisation, and corresponding shifts in its patterns of land use and resource consumption. For instance, energy consumption is predicted to increase dramatically, but Africa has the potential to leapfrog the traditional centralised utility model for energy provision and may base its future energy supply on renewables.¹⁴ Ambitious programmes, like the Africa Renewable Energy Initiative launched by the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment, have been formulated at a national and intergovernmental level to promote renewable energy sources.¹⁵ However, their regulatory frameworks often remain patchy and inconsistent. Additionally, as Dietz notes in this volume, recent oil and gas field discoveries, such as those along the coast of southeastern Africa or in the Gulf of Guinea, will tempt political leaders to meet the growing energy demand by utilising such resources instead of harnessing Africa’s vast potential for renewable energy. Ultimately, much will depend on political will.

As of yet, we still do not fully understand the physical drivers of many African climate systems.¹⁶ Most significantly, there are still massive deficiencies in current climate model simulations for the Central African convective region and the West African monsoon, which each influence the global climate as one of the world’s three major convective or monsoon systems respectively.¹⁷ Both regions demonstrate the complexity that arises from the reciprocal effects of a dominant climate system interacting with regional climate drivers and more distant processes. For example, West African precipitation is influenced significantly by teleconnection with global sea surface temperatures (ssts). enso and the changing ssts in the Gulf of Guinea, the Mediterranean, and even the Indian Ocean were also found to have a strong influence on the West African rain belt,¹⁸ but confidence in any projected change of specific ssts and related regional phenomena for the 21st century remains low.¹⁹

Many regions in Africa continue to be severely understudied, while we also face a lack of resources and expertise within Africa for addressing climate-related issues.²⁰ Moreover, the density and coverage of weather stations, which is much lower in Africa than in other parts of the world and falls beneath the standards recommended by the wmo, renders rather difficult the compilation of well-founded reports on historical, current, or likely future climates.²¹ Future climate modelling under these constraints produces contradictory scenarios and thus leads to a greater degree of uncertainty. Nonetheless, some trends and predictions can be identified that are at least of medium confidence. The “Fifth Assessment Report by the ipcc’s Working Group i” (wgiar5) concludes that it is very likely that the whole African continent will continue to warm during the 21st century. While temperature increases will occur within a 2°C range in most geographical areas and under most scenarios, the biases are much larger for some locations.²²

These broad-brush patterns, however, tell us very little about how the weather and changes therein are experienced by individuals in concrete situations. In many ways, it seems presumptuous to speak of ‘climate change in Africa’ in the first place given the continent’s vast dimensions. As Jane Carruthers has pointed out, Africa’s extreme diversity of climates, topographies, soil qualities, fauna, and flora defy generalisation.³² In line with previous research on human-environment relations, this volume thus does not seek to provide large syntheses, but rather focuses on particular cases in specific parts of Africa.

Together, the chapters in this volume offer a broad, and at times diverse, perspective on climate change. In its direct effects on the ground, climate change qua changing long-term weather patterns is not necessarily any different from more fleeting alterations in the weather, or even other forms of environmental change. For this reason, and in order to harness the “rich cultural knowledge” of people in different parts of Africa,³³ we regard it as neither necessary nor fruitful to limit ourselves to cases that are direct manifestations of climate change; instead, we focus on shifting human-environment relations more generally. Moreover, as far as we do engage with climate change as a subject of research, we need to be precise about what the concept means in a social science context. As has been argued in previous publications, climate change is not directly perceptible, and knowledge about its causes and consequences has to be mediated. It is an abstraction based on aggregated scientific data and only becomes socially relevant in distinct manifestations, such as changing rainfall patterns or extreme weather events. Local perceptions of the weather and unexpected changes therein must be related to scientific discourse in order for the latter to be seen as ‘climate change’.³⁴ Climate change can therefore not be taken as a given, but must be disaggregated. Some of the contributions in this volume thus take distinct manifestations of climate change—such as increasing interannual and interseasonal precipitation variability (Østergaard Nielsen), perceived extreme weather events (Clancy), or a growing likelihood of their occurrence (Nero et al.)—as a starting point to examine coping and mitigation strategies or to reveal to what degree, if any, conventional strategies are modified under climate change conditions. Others, by contrast, adopt a self-reflexive stance, interrogating some of the basic tropes in climate change discourse, like the nature-culture dichotomy (see Kreike), or reflecting critically on the epistemological and ontological implications of climate change in a social science context, as de Wit does in her deliberations on the absence of climate change discourse in her research field. Further chapters explore a broad array of human-environment relations and changes therein, including those that have been state-induced (see Fanstone).

In studying the adaptations and environmental perceptions of local residents in various settings on the African continent, the chapters in this volume adopt a bottom-up approach. Even if we dissect climate change in terms of actual occurrences on the ground, it is still difficult to assess what these represent for affected groups of people. Climate change is generally interpreted as a threat to African communities; nevertheless, as Nancy Jacobs has argued, changing environments are not inevitably perceived in a negative light. Discussing bush encroachment in Kuruman, South Africa, she illustrates how the local population did not interpret the increasing density of vegetation as a problem, but used the bush as fodder. Instead of assuming a tacit acceptance of an optimum ecological status quo that is thrown out of balance when it is changed, social scientists should pay close attention to the—often divergent—interpretations of and within affected communities (compare Clancy in this volume).³⁵ Similarly, de Wit (in this volume) highlights the importance of the specific interpretative context in which research takes place. Since climate variability is the norm, rather than an exception, in her study region in northern Tanzania, many residents find it difficult to connect with a notion of climate change that presupposes a stable climate as standard. For the Burkinabe informants in Østergaard Nielsen’s article, climate change is framed as the dissolution of ‘normal’ climate variability, thereby illustrating the inextricable manner in which climate change and variability are often interwoven.

3 Climate Change and Causality

The contributions in this volume make a case for not isolating climate or environmental change, but paying close attention to their embedded nature. Environmental factors always interact with several other variables that impact on people’s lives—including economic, political, and cultural ones—among which they are not necessarily the most dominant. Østergaard Nielsen (in this volume) has found that circular labour migration—a common and well-documented technique applied by Sahelian farmers to cope with interseasonal and interannual precipitation variability for decades—has become a more and more permanent feature of their lives in recent times. While persisting climate variability and the corresponding difficulties that this creates for farmers looking to resume their agricultural practices have been acknowledged as drivers of this trend, a variety of other factors have also been listed. These include push factors, such as social constraints in the respective villages of origin compared to the liberties offered by a more anonymous urban lifestyle, as well as pull factors, including increasing job opportunities in the capital, Ouagadougou. Rather than trying to identify sole factors for decision-making, Østergaard Nielsen asks how coping mechanisms are used individually or in combination with one another to manage the risks associated with changing environmental conditions. In a similar vein, Kreike argues that “the environment and climate are embedded in and fractured through social, economic, and political factors” (see Chapter 10 of this volume). The near “killer famine” that Kreike discusses in this volume was the result of a global climate event, a worldwide drought, that hit Southern Africa in the 1920s and 1930s as severely as it affected the usa by causing the Dust Bowl crisis. However, the famine was also the outcome of a worldwide economic crisis as well as regional political and demographic developments. Furthermore, the effects of the famine were not homogenous, but highly context-dependent, as reflected by the fact that some of Kreike’s informants remember the crisis as “the enriching famine”. Such cases warn us not to resurrect environmental determinism, but to raise the question of causality in an open-ended manner. Contributions in this volume thus treat the environment as a context that “contours” historical events, but “not as a discrete historical actor” in its own right.³⁶

Moreover, there can be wide discrepancies between the ways in which different groups of actors experience environmental changes. Climate change is a global phenomenon, but it manifests in very particular ways when analysed from a bottom-up perspective. As Demeritt argues, climate change may hold “little meaning for developing nations and the poor people in them struggling daily […] with more basic and immediate needs of sanitation, health, and hunger”.³⁷ Further discrepancies can be identified in relation to gender and age. As Clancy (in this volume) has found, there are differences in the ways in which women and men receive information about changing weather patterns and encounter the scientific concept of ‘climate change’. While in some cases men obtained their information primarily from radio broadcasts, women tended to gather information from official meetings, enabling them also to ask questions. Similar disparities in how information is received exist between the old and the young.

4 Knowledge and the Environment

Social aspects of environmental change primarily concern the generation and communication of knowledge, which is a key topic explored by several contributions in this volume. In interrogating different types of knowledge, this volume connects with a growing body of research that addresses historical and contemporary interactions between what have been termed ‘local’ or ‘indigenous’ and ‘Western’ or ‘scientific’ systems of knowledge. Anthropological and historical research on African human-environment relations has drawn out local cosmologies as well as cultural practices that, intentionally or unintentionally, have resulted in the protection of soils, forests, water, or wildlife. These show how African farmers, pastoralists, and fishermen developed a range of practices—including fallowing and the banning of fishing or hunting for specific time periods—that ensured that natural resources were not overused. In some cases, people consciously reflected on conservation and lobbied for the implementation of corresponding measures at government level.³⁸ Much of this research has underlined the preservationist ethics of such practices and cosmologies, as well as the ways in which African societies have seen humans as an integral part of nature rather than as occupying a separate sphere. One such example is provided by Jeffery in this volume. Curious about relevant environmental aspects that were rarely mentioned in her interviews on the Maurice Ile Durable sustainability programme, she identified an understanding common to all of her interviewees of the environment as “the totality of one’s environs, milieu, surroundings, or physical context, including the social, political, or cultural circumstances therein”. Her informants saw “nature and society as interconnected constituent parts of an anthropocentric lived environment” (see Chapter 7 of this volume).

Colonialism and capitalism, it has been argued, have upset these intertwined physical, cultural, and spiritual worlds by introducing a rigid Western nature-culture dichotomy.³⁹ As a result, parts of such research project a meta-narrative about how African traditional beliefs ensured a sound balance in human-environment relations that was later destroyed under external pressure. This degradation narrative, which highlights deforestation, soil erosion, and the loss of biodiversity, has itself been met with criticism. In particular, some scholars have taken issue with (and partly invalidated) the romanticised notion of a pre-colonial or pre-capitalist past when humans and nature coexisted in harmony.⁴⁰ Declensionist narratives were also prevalent in colonial discourses. As several historical studies have shown, colonial officials and experts often identified Africans as being culpable for the degradation of nature that they witnessed. By claiming that Africans’ supposedly irrational and wasteful land use—a prime example being overstocking—had destroyed the continent’s pristine nature, officials legitimised colonial intervention.⁴¹ After independence, similar discourses were often sustained by governments and international aid agencies alike. The notion of a human-induced decline of nature also resonates with current climate change discourse, although now Africans are cast as the victims of a global process rather than as its perpetrators. Whichever way the blame is shifted, both perspectives are too simplistic. In contrast, the present volume seeks to show how African societies interact with the environments that they inhabit in reciprocal ways and with outcomes that are contingent and multi-causal.

Furthermore, the category of indigenous knowledge itself has been subjected to serious critique. While the notion has become widely adopted among policymakers and activists in the field of development, among whom it enjoys considerable political appeal, scholars have cautioned against slipping into simple dichotomies. Gordon and Krech, among others, have warned that the concept of a sealed package of knowledge belonging to “an unchanging group of indigenes” is a “romantic projection of our modern imaginations to the past”.⁴² This applies equally to the term ‘local knowledge’, as even relatively localised bodies of knowledge are diffused and appropriated elsewhere.⁴³ Also, studies of ‘Western’ (colonial) science in Africa have provided ample evidence of how it relied heavily on and incorporated the knowledge of Africans.⁴⁴ Similarly, Weiser et al. describe the concept of “Adaptation to Climate Change” as a travelling idea that was “conceptually developed at an international level”, fed into national programmes and projects, and ideologically and socially negotiated at the local level, thereby undergoing “reinterpretation, modification and appropriation” to meet the different stakeholders’ experiences and interests.⁴⁵

Rather than pitting different categories of knowledge against each other, contributions in this volume therefore focus on their interactions. In several chapters, climate change or related notions like “sustainable development” (see Jeffery) appear as a “contact zone”,⁴⁶ in which different bodies of knowledge meet and are renegotiated. Arguing that research and policy need to “rely on a mutual understanding of numerous and diversely interpreted frameworks on climate change”, Eguavoen underlines the need for “translation work to be done between these different systems of knowledge as well as between different interest groups and across various sectors and scales” (see Chapter 8 of this volume).

5 Environmental Regulation and Power

Another major theme in this volume are the ways in which climate and environmental change play out politically at the local level. Studies on conservation policy—both historical and contemporary—have shown how environmental concerns, or the pretext thereof, motivated (colonial) state actors to intervene in the lives of African populations. In order to protect soils from erosion, numerous colonial states imposed restrictions on the ways in which local residents farmed their land and kept their livestock—including, for instance, the mandatory building of contour ridges or the compulsory culling of cattle—often provoking fierce resistance in the process.⁴⁷ Moreover, white settlers, government officials, and foreign experts cast themselves as stewards of nature, thus claiming authority over contested landscapes, such as game parks or nature reserves, and banning African communities therefrom.⁴⁸ Building on such literature, Fanstone (in this volume) discusses shamba agroforestry in Kenya, illustrating how the distribution of environmental resources was a key arena in which state-peasant relations were negotiated. Shamba allowed landless Kikuyu to farm in forests, while at the same time providing the British colonial authorities with a cost-effective form of plantation forestry. In this way, shamba represented both a means of colonial domination and a livelihood for impoverished farmers. The case of state food for work programmes in colonial Namibia, discussed by Kreike in this volume, reveals the similarly ambivalent dynamics of environmental politics. In response to a series of droughts and famines in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the colonial state devised several labour schemes—mainly dam construction projects and other programmes to improve water infrastructure—through which women, children, and older men could earn food. As Kreike shows, environmental distress enhanced the power of the state, which would step in to offer the assistance that local patronage networks had ceased to provide. Simultaneously, the colonial administration, lacking the staff to supervise food distribution, had to rely on local elites, whose authority among the population it thus bolstered. In both Kreike’s and Fanstone’s case studies, the power derived from the control of environmental resources was never monolithic, but was instead negotiated between the state and the inhabitants. Such dynamics have not been confined to the colonial era. As Kreike argues, post-colonial environmental discourses have displayed a similar tendency to attribute resource problems—such as famines or ‘overpopulation’—to specific aspects of African culture. Similarly, David Hughes has drawn analogies between the ways in which European colonisation reshaped rural politics in the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border zone and the ongoing efforts of states and investors to commodify African land under the banner of environmental protection and development.⁴⁹ De Wit (in this volume) offers a further telling example of how climate change can be instrumentalised by the state as a one-size-fits-all explanation for local problems, thereby obfuscating state responsibility. The Tanzanian government, she argues, employs climate change to naturalise and depoliticise problems of poverty that are primarily the result of state neglect and discrimination.

At the same time, such tensions should not be conceptualised in terms of a simple state-population dichotomy. By highlighting the agency of individuals, research on environmental policy has demonstrated how people do not merely succumb to state-expert discourses, but appropriate and challenge them. De Wit argues that climate change can also be utilised as a counter-discourse in this manner, for example in the context of her case study by constituting a means for local ngos to criticise the Tanzanian government and its top-down style of planning. More generally, scholars have shown that the designation of knowledge as ‘indigenous’ may also represent “an intervention in power relations”. During colonial indirect rule as much as in the context of modern development initiatives, which claim to be sensitive to local perspectives, claims to indigeneity have been able to add weight to local groups’ demands. At the same time, this should not obscure the vastly asymmetrical power relations in which claims to environmental knowledge and resources are upheld. Even development initiatives that are inspired by the perspectives of the marginalised have been shown to have been “more neoliberal than previous state-oriented strategies”.⁵⁰ Whether a critical or more optimistic reading of the environmental politics negotiated between states and their populations is adopted, we deem it important to contextualise current climate change discourse. It is imperative for scholars as much as for developers or international and state bodies to be aware of the ways in which narratives of degradation and decline have—for a century and more—been used, or even exploited, by state actors, settlers, businesses, and development experts alike to claim authority over vast spaces and resources, cast themselves as saviours, and intervene in people’s lives.

At the same time, the African continent has been associated with weak states and limited governmental power, which is as true for Africa’s past as it is for the contemporary age. Contemporary adaptation and mitigation strategies are often hampered by an inability to implement them due to systemic institutional malfunction and a lack of technical, managerial, and financial means on the part of state actors. Consequently, other bodies, such as ngos or community-based organisations (cbos), or private citizens are left to take the initiative. For example, by highlighting the roles of traditional leaders and individual landowners, Nero et al. (in this volume) show how de-facto bottom-up processes drive the creation and management of urban green spaces in Kumasi, Ghana.

6 African Exceptionality?

This volume is the fifth in a series covering different regions of the world. The question of whether there is anything specific to the geographic region known as Africa that would justify such a structure is a difficult one. In our understanding, the answer must be pragmatic. Our volume offers snapshots, all of which may share commonalities, but which together do not amount to a broad synthesis of this highly diverse continent. In climate change discourse, what sets ‘Africa’ apart from other world regions is its particularly high vulnerability. This resonates with debates in environmental historiography, which have tended to highlight the hostility of African environments. As one of the few historians who has adopted a Braudelian long-term perspective on environmental and demographic change, John Iliffe has famously referred to Africans as “the frontiersmen of mankind”, “who have colonized an especially hostile region of the world on behalf of the entire human race”.⁵¹ Africans, he claims, were confronted with an environment—“poor soils, fickle rainfall, abundant insects, and unique prevalence of disease”—that rendered human existence more difficult than in any other part of the globe.⁵² While subsequent research has not fundamentally disputed Iliffe’s analysis, there is a danger of essentialising African environments and societies and of reintroducing an alarmist-interventionist discourse. As Kreike argues in this volume, the perception of Africa as the continent most vulnerable to climate change is based on the cliché that African societies are highly dependent on their natural environments and not protected by a modern technological infrastructure in ways in which Western societies are (at least whenever the latter are not reminded of the contrary, as we have seen at the beginning of this introduction). There may be some justification in regarding Africa as ‘special’ for its difficult environment and relative lack of mitigating capacities, including technology, infrastructure, and financial power; however, what is most certainly unique about the continent in comparison to Europe is the extent to which outsiders—colonisers, foreign enterprises, international organisations—have defined Africa’s environmental problems and sought to regulate them.