Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role religious and spiritual beliefs play in the politics of the environment in Eastern Uganda. The findings unsettle the historical development dualism that separates material and spiritual realities, showing instead how they intrinsically include one another.

Paper long abstract:

Much of the literature on environment and development focuses on beliefs and knowledge about the issue in question (e.g. beliefs and knowledge about climate change, about forests, about wildlife). What is given less attention are different worldview beliefs that are not ostensibly about the environment but nonetheless inform and legitimise the social relations, practices, interpretations, and norms that mediate human-environment relations. In this paper, I focus in particular on the role that religion (including so-called ‘African traditional religion’) plays in the ways that land, wetlands, and water are managed and accessed in two villages in Eastern Uganda. The paper is based on research that employed participant diaries and stories to elicit learning about people’s different worldview beliefs and their relationship to environmental injustices. The findings unsettle the historical development dualism that separates material and spiritual realities, based on the now patently false supposition that modernising development projects will lead to secular societies. In the case of land, wetlands, and water, dominant development models ignore religious beliefs and neutralise often highly political situations through techno-managerial narratives of evolutionary land rights, natural environments, and community management. This paper discusses how the tensions and conflicts that imbue human-environment relations manifest and are mediated in part through a religious or spiritual idiom. In doing so, it moves beyond the narrow, instrumentalising approach that mainstream development, and much development studies literature, has taken over the past decade to incorporate religion into development.