cc: m.hulme@uea.ac.uk, batterbu@spot.Colorado.EDU date: Fri, 5 Jun 1998 15:04:07 -0600 (MDT) from: Batterbury Simon subject: Sahel comments to: andrew , Judy Longbottom , camilla.toulmin@iied.org, mikemortimore@compuserve.com, a.h.scott@sussex.ac.uk I have received the following intriguing set of comments from Gerti and Han at Leiden about the Sahel meeting. I agree with a lot of what was said and I apologize for not including the Bank in our discussions and guestlist (although I did try). I have highlighted a couple of points where they might be incorrect. And of course IIED is working on the land tenure issue right now, as Mike M is doing on the agriculture point. I am still deep in trying to write up the meeting and will try and accommodate some of this. Any response needed from Mike (Hulme) on the climate issue? They are trying to push for future research areas, and see climate as important as a major issue where we need to more work. Simon B *************** Sahel conference remarks - by Han van Dijk Gerti Hesseling Leiden - African Studies Centre The first day of the conference a kind of state of the art overview was given of past and current research on the Sahel. It gave a broad overview of high level and local level perspectives, and of agro-ecological to socio-economic approaches. However, what was missing in this overview was a very important stakeholder in research and development, the World Bank. The world Bank is very efficient in picking all kind of new trends and buzz words, developed in the research community, flavouring them with World Bank jargon, and baking new concepts into a new World Bank neo-classical economic cake. In fact the World Bank is more important for setting the research agenda than any of us present at the conference. In the first place World Bank concepts are dominantly normative instead of analytical, e.g. sustainability, equilibrium, carrying capacity, social structure, food security. These concepts indicate norms and describe reality as far as it deviates from the norms. The problem is that we cannot even think of ever reaching a situation in which life in the Sahel is adequately described by these norms. So, they are not useful for an analytical perspective, and even not from a policy point of view, i.e. if policy is meant to solve problems instead of encapsulating and perpetuating them. There is thus an urgent need to develop concepts with which we will be able to describe more adequately the extremely dynamic situation in semi-arid zones. The lessons learnt from the new range land ecology need to be translated into social science concepts, economic concepts, legal concepts. We should not focus on static indicators, but process indicators, which enable to analyse the drivers behind the dynamics of the Sahel. One of these process indicators we have not addressed is culture and the dynamics of ethnicity and inter-ethnic relations What is lacking then at present is a consistent and complete picture of how climate instability relates to all kinds of societal process at micro and meso-level. If we want to generate information that is useful for a more adequate reaction on calamities we need to focus on the interactions between nature and society from the perspective of instability, e.g. on: The relation between climatic instability and resource management; The reactions of regional economies to rainfall fluctuations; Climate instability, resource conflicts and administrative decentralisation; Changes in social relations with respect to social care and food entitlements; etc. Looking back at 25 years of research on the Sahel we have not done very well in this respect. We still lack insight into the fluctuations of food and livestock markets, though we have enormous piles of data. There is still an enormous lack of knowledge on decision-making of farmers and herdsmen in relation to the complex realities that they have to face. Our micro-economic models are getting better everyday, but we need also a large number of empirical research under real-life (thus unstable) conditions), done by very devoted observers. We have no idea of the role of micro-variability of soils, topography, and rainfall in agricultural production. [note from SB - they are incorrect here]. How to develop a new agronomic paradigm and a new kind of statistics to study these extremely complicated man-environment interactions. We have far too little studies on how people adapt rules of land tenure and regulate access to pastures under conditions of resource scarcity and how these local-level adaptations of rules and procedures interact with policy initiatives and state law. In particular we know too little about how people structure negotiations and what procedures they have developed for the transfer of rights of access to resources. Is security of tenure the only answer or do we need to focus on more dynamic arrangements of resource tenure? In view of pending (or non-pending) climate change it might be worthwhile to devote attention to migration of farmers and herdsmen and the factors which govern their decision-making. In particular we know very little about rural-rural migration, because these people escape all censuses and seem to disappear in the bush. [note from SB - they are incorrect here too!]. The urban question has been addressed many times in a quite positive perspective. This is fully justified if we look at the urban centres and the rural growth centres and if you focus on the entrepreneurial class, which thrives with political liberalisation. However, if we look at the polarisation between the northern and southern part of the Sahel, the picture is less positive. Market integration stops at the fourteenth parallel, let's say the frontier of the climatic Sahel, where no cash-crops can be grown and. Bad luck for the +12 million people living north of this line. There are indications that relatively speaking these areas are getting poorer. Literacy rates and child mortality rate are not improving here. Donor attention for these areas is declining. Rather they gamble on high-potential areas further south to go for fast success, to satisfy public opinion in the North. Political tension in these areas is on the increase again, and civil unrest may arise again. Within cities there is also a polarisation between the big mass of angry young men and women and the entrepreneurial class. Even in democratic countries like Mali corruption is on the increase again, and mismanagement of public resources continues. How are we going to integrate all these young people into the economy, so that they can lead a decent life? At present young people are postponing marriage and remain dependent on elders because there are no possibilities to get settled as their parents once were. This will inevitably lead to tensions and discontent, not only against the elders, who block their careers, but also against those in power. So three points have to be made The dominance of normative prescripts, born out of World Bank ideology encapsulating normative science; The need for better and more process indicators for the analysis of the relation between climatic instability and social and economic dynamics; Attention on polarisation as a threat to social and political instability in the long run ************** Simon Batterbury visiting lecturer Department of Geography Campus Box 260 University of Colorado, Boulder CO 80309-0260 USA tel. 303 492 5388 fax. 303 492 7501 email batterbu@spot.colorado.edu Web http://www.colorado.edu/geography/people/faculty.html