The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment in Africa

Toyin Falola, Jessica Achberger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136683879
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Social Sciences

While Africa is too often regarded as lying on the periphery of the global political arena, this is not the case. African nations have played an important historical role in world affairs. It is with this understanding that the authors in this volume set out upon researching and writing their chapters, making an important collective contribution to our understanding of modern Africa. Taken as a whole, the chapters represent the range of research in African development, and fully tie this development to the global political economy. African nations play significant roles in world politics, both as nations influenced by the ebbs and flows of the global economy and by the international political system, but also as actors, directly influencing politics and economics. It is only through an understanding of both the history and present place of Africa in global affairs that we can begin to assess the way forward for future development.

Part I

Historical Roots of African Underdevelopment

1 Africa and the Making of the Global Environmental Narrative

Challenges and Opportunities for the Continent’s Development Initiatives

Martin S. Shanguhyia

This study analyzes the historical and contemporary perceptions and constructions of Africa within the global environmental narrative, particularly as concerns the debate on environmental crises. It further explores the extent to which the continent and its peoples have engaged the politics that pertain to these crises. The principal contention is that Africa has been central in the framing of global environmental issues, especially as concerns the politics of causes, consequences, and solutions to environmental problems that are perceived to bear global implications. The period of focus is the twentieth century into the present, a time of unprecedented globalization of modern environmental issues. During this period, environmental concerns have largely been a manifestation of broader political, military, economic, and social trajectories that shaped European and American societies during momentous times, including imperial expansion, colonization, the Great Depression, the two World Wars, the Cold War, and decolonization as well as increased use of technology and science after 1945.¹

By extension, these developments have been imperative in promoting Africa’s engagement with the global community. Africa’s natural environment, ranging from its physical geography to tangible resources such as land/soil, forests, water, and minerals have been at the core of determining economic and political initiatives at the state and international levels. Indeed, the assertion by James C. McCann in this regard—that Africa has never been ecologically isolated but that its physical environment has enabled a porous relationship allowing for centuries of the exchange of goods, ideas, and people with the international community—is instructive in this exposition.² Consequently a closer analysis will also reveal that local economic initiatives in Africa since the precolonial through colonial times have been linked to the continent’s environmental resources in an integrated global economy.³ Most recently, Africa has found itself positioned in the midst of a world where debates about globalization occupy the center stage, so much so that the quest for development on the continent has also been conceptualized with a “world systems” analysis.⁴ This attests to continued trends toward interdependence between the communities and nations of the world. More critical, however, is the way in which politics about the environment within and outside of Africa have played a fundamental role in reinforcing local/national development inside the globalization process and the positioning of Africa within that process.

An important trend in this period, especially after the 1980s, has been the growing worldwide realization of the massive impact occasioned by a pervasive human interaction with the natural environment. This, in turn, has elicited the need for global environmental governance so as to promote what has been termed “sustainable development” based on the world’s natural resources.⁵ Since colonial times, Africa and its people have not escaped contact with these developments, and the outcome of that contact within the environmental domain is largely the theme of this discussion. It is these seemingly western-initiated global currents that have helped shape Africa’s place in world environmental politics both as a subject and an object of discussion. This is particularly the case given that the above developments of the twentieth and early twenty-first century have served to increase the engagement with Africa by the international community, particularly western nations’ institutions and nongovernmental organizations, which have been instrumental in globalizing environmental issues.

In order to appreciate these international linkages between Africa and the global engagement of the environmental narrative, this study revisits interpretations that view modern environmental politics at the global level as being the outcome of the realization that natural resources are of a global nature. That is, this study resonates with analyses that create links between local/regional environmental concerns and the international environmental system in the bid to create an understanding of cause and effect in environmental dilemmas as well as solutions to such dilemmas.⁶ Such views have been boosted by notions that perceive the existence of a high degree of interdependence between nations of the world, thereby requiring international cooperation in resource use and management.⁷ It is this movement, mainly born in the West and embraced by the colonial and postcolonial states, that has sought to incorporate Africa and its peoples in environmental issues at the global level.

This discussion goes further to identify with studies that critique the presumed primacy of the global perspective in the configuration and prioritization of specific environmental problems as well as the management approaches to environmental resources and social and economic development sectors.⁸ Thus, while it is evident that the globalization of environmental issues has aided modern transnational networks—which continue to produce and sustain unequal power relations in the global arena—this process has also been seen to provide “junctures,” spaces, or opportunities for regions like Africa and its peoples to reconceptualize and contest seemingly universal global ideas or externally imposed initiatives about environmental practices.⁹ Processes of contestation have also not been without opportunities for accommodation and assertion of African interests and aspirations.

The basic argument in this discussion is threefold: first, Africa and its peoples have been portrayed in global environmental debates partly as culprits in fomenting some ecological crises but mostly as victims needing the “tools”—knowledge, financing, and technology—to deal with environmental problems. This narrative, created by state officialdom and aided by local and international stakeholders in African resources, has been sustained through space and time, from colonial through modern times, although with varying degrees of intensity. Second, the need to provide these tools so that Africa and its people can confront the perceived environmental problems has introduced new and expanded avenues for local and particularly international intervention into the continent in ways that exhibit both obvious and latent forms of external presence and domination. For Africa, this has come by way of an increasing presence of international (and national) interventions into the colonial and the postcolonial states. Third, having been reluctantly drawn into the global engagement with the environment, Africa has not remained passive but has staked out opportunities and navigated through the debate in ways deemed beneficial to its peoples. Therefore one of the critical questions raised here is this: How has Africa and its people contested or engaged the global ideas about the environment?

Multiple environmental regimes exist that can be used to identify the various ways in which Africa has engaged or been involved in the environmental issues at the global level. However, this analysis focuses mainly on land-related environmental problems, especially desertification and land degradation as well as climate change. These have featured prominently in global debates and have been persistently linked directly to the livelihoods and, therefore, the current and future survival of the majority of Africa’s population.

Africa’s Engagement with Colonial Environmental Concerns: Desertification/Land Degradation

Concerns about desertification and increasing cases of drought in Africa stretch back to ancient times but have been increasingly raised since colonial times. The Sahara, Sahel, and the sprawling plateau and grasslands of northeastern, eastern, central, and southern Africa have particularly raised concerns as far as desiccation and drought are concerned. This was especially the case in the French and British colonies in West Africa, where colonial officials from the 1930s onward raised the specter of the expansion of the Sahara southward. This expansion, experts and colonial officials feared, threatened to push the Sahelian conditions into the northern margins of the Ivory Coast, Gold Coast, and Nigeria, thereby threatening water and land resources in those areas.¹⁰ In the ensuing research and debate into the problem, European ecological experts focused on local African farming practices to identify the causes of desertification in the region. Overcultivation, overgrazing, deforestation, and grass fires set by African herders and farmers in West Africa’s Savanna were cited as facilitating the perceived desertification problem. In 1935, E. P. Stebbing, an influential ecologist who engaged with environmental issues in British colonies in India and Africa, was certain that the Kano region of northern Nigeria would be swallowed up by the Sahara in a “space of the next fifty years or less” and blamed the impending desolation as being caused “principally by man.” Stebbing attributed this degeneration to locally induced deforestation, intensive cultivation, and a “wasteful” industrial activity of iron-smelting that increased extraction of fuel wood from the standing vegetation.¹¹

It should be noted that western scientific knowledge was at the core of framing the causes and nature of these environmental threats at the time. The limit of that knowledge was illustrated in the conflict in opinion over the extent and actual causes of desertification in West Africa or if indeed desiccation was affecting the region. There was no consensus as to whether these parts of West Africa were actually arid. This was emphasized by Brynmor Jones, the British geologist attached to Nigeria who commented on the problem: “It is doubtful if the term ‘arid’ is applicable to any of the British colonies in West Africa, since even the driest part of them [around Lake Chad] receives a mean annual rainfall of 15 inches.”¹² While Stebbing attributed human causes to desertification, Brynmor inferred from the scanty historical evidence of climatic changes for that region that a series of droughts due to scarce rainfall led to any dry conditions.¹³

With both British and French ecological experts involved in identifying the causes, nature, and impact of desertification in colonial West Africa, the problem was viewed as one that transcended colonial borders, and its perception as an international problem was evident in the search for solutions. Consequently collaborative rather than “isolated” efforts were sought with a proposal to establish an international vegetation belt stretching from the Ivory Coast through northern Nigeria to the Lake Chad area. An Anglo-French commission was subsequently constituted in 1936 to investigate the state of desiccation in West Africa.¹⁴ The commission’s findings contradicted Stebbing’s gloomy depictions and predictions of the nature, causes, and effects of desertification in the area. Generally, in spite of such differences in opinion, views involving destructive African farmers and herders as causes of ecological decline were pervasive in the emergent official environmental narrative in colonial West Africa. Focus on local land practices was aided by the failure to establish a natural/climatic link to desertlike conditions in the savanna parts of West Africa, so much so that state intervention was urged in order to regulate the agricultural activities of the local African communities, such as shifting cultivation and grazing.¹⁵ Overall, French and British colonial administrations in West Africa were persuaded to denigrate African farming practices and then intervened in ways that esteemed western technical knowledge in the management of African ecologies. Such was the case even when practical experimentation with western technical planning for some projects failed to materialize in that region.¹⁶

While desertification dominated the environmental debate in West Africa in the 1930s, claims of land degradation defined colonial agricultural debates in British colonies in eastern and southern Africa. Before that period, Africa’s encounter with the western world at the close of the nineteenth century and especially at the onset of the twentieth had opened the way for the unprecedented extraction of the continent’s natural resources by the colonial powers following colonial conquest. This is not to overlook the human, economic, and environmental debacles occasioned by earlier centuries of contact between Africa and the international community that were well manifested in the transactions of the international slave trade.¹⁷ Yet with the onset of colonialism—particularly in times of economic uncertainty, such as those generated by the Depression years of the early 1930s as well as political conflicts as occasioned by the two World Wars—questions about access to and use of resources became priorities at the national and international agendas of the colonial powers. Africa’s role in sustaining these countries in times of economic u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Historical Roots of African Underdevelopment
• Part II: Africa in the New Global Economy
• Part III: Forging New International Connections
• Part IV: The Way Forward for Twenty-First-Century Development
• Contributors
• Index