A
Conference of the Royal Geographical Society (with the
The Sahel - 25 years after the
great drought. Assessing Progress - Setting a New Agenda
The
conference took place on Wednesday 13th May 1998
Royal Geographical Society, 1 Kensington Gore,
Proceedings were published as a special issue of Global Environmental Change, detailed below.
A
one-day conference convened by Andrew
Warren (Department of Geography, UCL awarren@ucl.ac.uk) and Simon
Batterbury (SAGES, Univ of Melbourne, www.simonbatterbury.net)
CONFERENCE REPORT by Simon Batterbury
With kind support from the Department for International Development (West and North Africa Department) the Drylands Programme at IIED ; the Developing Areas Research Group of the RGS-IBG and British Airways
It is time to reassess the nature and
direction of research into the African Sahel's
problems. This region is frequently viewed as a microcosm for the 'African
crisis', and indeed the
·
Two sets of
questions arise:
Firstly, in retrospect, have the most important issues been addressed by the
research and policy community? Have the links between research and practice
been too weak in the past?
· Secondly, in prospect, will new research methods and paradigms be more effective ? is it helpful to contest established views on development trajectories, environmental change, international aid transfers, and political models? should more attention be paid to institutions and policies, such as for land tenure, decentralisation, macro-policies, and community participation ? This meeting brought together prominent European and African experts from different research traditions to re-consider Sahelian research priorities.
An article setting out current trends in the Sahel of West Africa, and providing guidance on the themes of the conference, was published in the May 1998 issue of The Geographical magazine. Here is a longer version of the text by Simon Batterbury.
The conference papers are published in an issue of Global Environmental Change (2001) v11, no 1, 1-95, edited by Simon Batterbury and Andrew Warren.
|
Title |
Authors |
Pages |
|
The African Sahel 25 years after the great drought: assessing
progress and |
Simon Batterbury, Andrew Warren |
1 -- 8 |
|
Societies and nature in the |
Claude Raynaut |
9 -- 18 |
|
Climatic perspectives on Sahelian desiccation: 1973-1998 |
Mike Hulme |
19 -- 29 |
|
The Sahel
in |
Jean Marie Cour |
31 -- 47 |
|
Farmer adaptation, change
and `crisis' in the |
Michael J. Mortimore, William M. Adams |
49 -- 57 |
|
Resource limitations in Sahelian agriculture |
Henk Breman, J.J.Rob Groot, Herman van Keulen |
59 -- 68 |
|
|
Brigitte Thébaud, Simon Batterbury |
69 -- 78 |
|
Soil erosion in the West African Sahel: a review and an application of a "local political ecology" approach in South West Niger |
Andrew Warren, Simon Batterbury, Henny Osbahr |
79 -- 95 |
The speakers were:
Chair: Dr. Camilla Toulmin, Drylands Programme, International Institute for Environment and
Development,
Camilla Toulmin is (since
2003), Director of IIED a collaborative research and policy organisation.
An economist by training, she has worked mainly in the francophone West African
Sahel, on agricultural, pastoral, and tenure issues,
including several years spent in
KEYNOTE ADDRESS Is the
Dr Gaoussou Traoré:
Institut du Sahel,
Gaoussou Traoré works on agriculture and economic change at INSAH. He is involved in the ROSELT project (Reseau d'Observatoires de Surveillance Ecologique a Long Terme), which monitors short and long term changes in the interelations between ecological and socio-economical systems and land degradation, and the Regional Food Security Program in dryland West Africa. Email gaoussou@padres.insah.ml
The years of drought
Prof. Mike Hulme, Tyndall Centre for Climate
Change & School of Environmental Sciences,
Mike Hulme worked
at the Climatic Research Unit at UEA for many years, and now directs the
Tyndall Centre for Climate Change. He is a research climatologist specialising in global climate change, the validation of
climate models, African climate and desertification, and the development of
regional climate change scenario and impact models. His works include
Climates of The British Isles: present, past and future (with EM Barrow; Routledge 1997), Climate change and southern Africa: an
exploration of some potantial impacts and
implications for the SADC region (CRU/WWF, 1996), and The impacts of
climate change on Africa (with D Conway, PM Kelly, S Subak
and T Downing. SEI,
Social change and adaptation
Prof. Claude Raynaut, directeur
de recherche, CNRS (Equipe Sociétés, santé, développement -
Society, Health and Development Unit), Université de
Bordeaux II, France ESS, CNRS, Bordeaux
Claude Raynaut is
Director of the Society, Health and Development Unit at the Université
Victor Segalen Bordeaux 2. An anthropologist, he has
been working on the dynamic economies of the Maradi
region of
Resource Limitations in Sahelian
Agriculture
Drs. Rob Groot, AB-DLO (Research Institute for
Agrobiology and Soil Fertility), now part of
Rob Groot's work formerly focussed on soil fertility, agriculture and food security in semi-arid regions. He is the co-editor of Nitrogen Turnover in the Soil-Crop System; Modelling of Biological Transformations (Kluwer, 1991) among other works, and then became Director of External Affairs at AB-DLO. Email j.j.r.groot@ab.dlo.nl
Sahelian farmers and adaptation
(Prof.) Mike Mortimore, partner, Drylands
Research,
Mike Mortimore is
one of
Sahelian pastoral systems
Dr. Brigitte Thébaud, consultant,
Brigitte Thébaud is
a leading expert in pastoral societies, and has conducted extensive fieldwork
and completed many studies of pastoral groups in
The transition to a full market economy;
regional trends
Jean-Marie Cour, Club du
Sahel, OECD, Paris
Jean-Marie Cour,
originally trained in engineering, formerly worked at the former Club du Sahel, a group within the OECD
in
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