Paper short abstract:

Since the Ebola outbreak, the 'One Health' motto, and the more-than-human losses that it foretells, have reshaped health governance in West Africa. How is this scalar politics enacted, contested and recreated by vets and conservationists confronted to its fault lines –economic, epistemic, and moral?

Paper long abstract:

The 2013–2016 epidemic of Ebola heralded the era of 'One Health' in the West African governance of health. A tremendous amount of interest, resources, and expertise has since been invested in research on infectious diseases of animal origin, their surveillance and prevention. One narrative underlies the operation of One Health in the region, one that connects rainforest destruction and bushmeat consumption with risky contacts between humans and animals, and opportunities for pathogens to spill over. Ecosystem collapse, the extinction of wildlife, lethal pandemics - an imaginary of losses and their modelling feed concerns about so-called hotspots of biodiversity and infectious diseases. How is this scalar politics enacted, contested, and recreated in West Africa?

This paper builds on an ethnography of virus hunting on the forest frontier of Guinea and Liberia. Since the Ebola outbreak, certain humans and certain animals are entangled or disentangled by novel practices of future-making. Conservation programmes endeavour to reduce wildlife hunting; mining companies build corridors between forest patches; chimpanzee sanctuaries adopt biosecurity protections; veterinarians sample bats to predict future outbreaks. The discourse of the hotspot and the catastrophes it foretells undoubtedly yield authority and attract funding. In West Africa however, people and institutions working in One Health must navigate lack of evidence, accusations of opportunism, and the threat of retaliations against wildlife. The paper explores how other more-than-human temporalities – pasts of coexistence, presents of extraction, and futures of prosperity – interfere with One Health governance, and point to its epistemic and moral faults.