USD $87.00
Search Results
Abstract
In Africa, as elsewhere in the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has multiple impacts on quotidian life. At the same time, it influences the way people think about the future. The crisis gives rise to a feeling of uncertainty, while casting doubt on future orientations based on forecasts and planning. COVID-19 reinvigorates the question how African futures are imagined and shaped in relation to the world at large. Against this backdrop, the paper suggests three areas where future-oriented African studies should be revised in response to the current crisis, that is how to incorporate uncertainty, how to decolonize understandings of African futures, and how to translate these considerations into research practice.
In:
African Futures
Territory, Border and Infrastructure in Africa
The edited collection Spatial Practices: Territory, Border and Infrastructure in Africa presents research findings from the German Research Council’s Priority Programme 1448 “Adaptation and Change in Africa” (2011-2018). At the heart of the volume are important new spatial practices that have emerged after the end of the Cold War in the fields of conflict, climate change, migration and urban development, to name but a few, and their ordering effects with regard to social relations. These findings bear particular relevance for the co-production of territorialities and sovereignties, for borders and migrations, as well as infrastructures and orders.
Contributors are: Sabine Baumgart, Andrea Behrends, Marc Boeckler, Martin Doevenspeck, Ulf Engel, Claudia Gebauer, Karsten Giese, Katharina Heitz Tokpa, Shahadat Hossain, Anna Hüncke, Gabriel Klaeger, Kelly Si Miao Liang, Andreas Mehler, Felix Müller, Detlef Müller-Mahn, Wolfgang Scholz, Sophie Schramm, Jannik Schritt, Michael Stasik, Florian Weisser, Julia Willers, and Franzisca Zanker.
Contributors are: Sabine Baumgart, Andrea Behrends, Marc Boeckler, Martin Doevenspeck, Ulf Engel, Claudia Gebauer, Karsten Giese, Katharina Heitz Tokpa, Shahadat Hossain, Anna Hüncke, Gabriel Klaeger, Kelly Si Miao Liang, Andreas Mehler, Felix Müller, Detlef Müller-Mahn, Wolfgang Scholz, Sophie Schramm, Jannik Schritt, Michael Stasik, Florian Weisser, Julia Willers, and Franzisca Zanker.
Territory, Border and Infrastructure in Africa
The edited collection Spatial Practices: Territory, Border and Infrastructure in Africa presents research findings from the German Research Council’s Priority Programme 1448 “Adaptation and Change in Africa” (2011-2018). At the heart of the volume are important new spatial practices that have emerged after the end of the Cold War in the fields of conflict, climate change, migration and urban development, to name but a few, and their ordering effects with regard to social relations. These findings bear particular relevance for the co-production of territorialities and sovereignties, for borders and migrations, as well as infrastructures and orders.
Contributors are: Sabine Baumgart, Andrea Behrends, Marc Boeckler, Martin Doevenspeck, Ulf Engel, Claudia Gebauer, Karsten Giese, Katharina Heitz Tokpa, Shahadat Hossain, Anna Hüncke, Gabriel Klaeger, Kelly Si Miao Liang, Andreas Mehler, Felix Müller, Detlef Müller-Mahn, Wolfgang Scholz, Sophie Schramm, Jannik Schritt, Michael Stasik, Florian Weisser, Julia Willers, and Franzisca Zanker.
Contributors are: Sabine Baumgart, Andrea Behrends, Marc Boeckler, Martin Doevenspeck, Ulf Engel, Claudia Gebauer, Karsten Giese, Katharina Heitz Tokpa, Shahadat Hossain, Anna Hüncke, Gabriel Klaeger, Kelly Si Miao Liang, Andreas Mehler, Felix Müller, Detlef Müller-Mahn, Wolfgang Scholz, Sophie Schramm, Jannik Schritt, Michael Stasik, Florian Weisser, Julia Willers, and Franzisca Zanker.
Abstract
Lake Naivasha is a vibrant agro-industrial hub specialised in the production of cut flowers for the European market. The industry’s highly sophisticated specialisation goes along with close economic connections between the production site in Kenya, and trade centres, supermarkets and consumers in Europe. These economic connections between local and global scales underwent profound changes in recent years, which in turn had far-reaching consequences for the transformation of the sensitive social-ecological system of the Lake Naivasha area. The paper addresses the question of how local processes of transformation resonate with the specific embeddedness of the flower industry in cross-scalar relations. It investigates these relations from an economic-geography perspective, i.e., through the conceptual lens of value chains, production networks and marketisation. These cross-scalar connections are considered as “vertical”, whereas the relations within the social-ecological system are considered as “horizontal”. Building upon these concepts, the paper highlights the intersection of horizontal and vertical relations by arguing that the flower industry and social-ecological transformation in the Lake Naivasha area are increasingly influenced by vertical entanglements, i.e., changing market relations and a growing awareness on the part of European consumers of the conditions under which the flowers are produced. The paper concludes that the various aspects of marketisation and the emergence of a new market order are major drivers of change in the flower industry and its impact on the social ecology of the Lake Naivasha area.