Past Events
Workshop: How does environmental governance affect the poor? Global and local forces shaping poverty alleviation in Africa.
25 January 2007, Oxford Centre for the Environment
Recent research within poor African communities continues to reveal how both global and national environmental governance issues are conflicting with the reality of local resource use. This workshop aimed to stimulate debate about how environmental governance policies might better reflect local realities and sustainable natural resource use. These issues were raised through the presentation of researcher and practitioner experiences at the interface between environmental governance issues and the reality of life for Africa’s rural poor. The workshop was divided into three distinct sessions organised by scale, focussing on global processes, national level policy and local level livelihoods. At the global scale, presentations and associated discussion focussed on the extent to which pro-poor tourism and community based natural resource management (CBNRM) could help to alleviate poverty and encourage sustainable livelihoods in Africa. At the national and local levels, presentations focussed on case-study examples of the conflict between national level priorities commonly enforced through policy and sustainable rural livelihoods at local levels. Subsequent discussion focussed on ways in which these conflicts could be relieved by formulating policies more closely connected with local level realities. Several outcomes of relevance to policy makers, researchers and practitioners working at the environment-development interface in Africa were generated and were presented in a summary report.
Workshop Downloads
- Workshop Report
- Questioning livelihoods, ideologies & practices of environmentalism in Africa through an ethnographical comparative survey Study case of the adjacent populations of the Udzungwa Mountains National Park in Tanzania1
Presentations
- Bees for Development by Dr Nicola Bradbear
- Poverty-Conservation Linkages
- The Impact of Veterinary Cordon Fences on Pastoral Mobility and Opportunistic Livelihoods in Northern Botswana by Daniel McGahey
- Mitigating elephant impacts in Caprivi: the local impact of international conservation norms by Lorraine Moore
- Political Ecology of Forest Governance in Cameroon by Emmanuel O. Nuesiri
- Environmental governance, globalization and biodiversity in the Kalahari a focus on the dynamics of livelihood access and resilience within complex socio-ecological systems Susannah M. Sallu
- Sun, Sea, Sand & Development? Tourism & Pro-Poor Growth in Africa? by Jonathan Mitchell