Paper short abstract:

We address the issue of the turmoil in the Sahel from a resource access, spatial and institutional change perspective, showing how in Niger, Ghana, Lake Chad Area land grabbing, mining and large scale infrastructure projects contribute to institutional change in the commons and conflicts.

Paper long abstract:

We address the issue of the turmoil in the Sahel from a resource access, spatial and institutional change perspective. Many of the problems in the Sahel might look like being related to demographic pressures and climate change only. However, a closer look into concrete cases shows that these are long-standing issues for which pastoralist and farming groups had developed coping strategies and institutions. These enabled the management of land and related common-pool resources (CPRs) such as pasture, fisheries and water in the area, in flexible ways. The actual turmoil is based, among other aspects, on problems of institutional change and new resource frontier contexts, as part of historical processes that undermined common property regimes by introducing state and private property leading to various forms of enclosures and instabilities. We present illustrative studies of landgrabs in Ghana, green grabbing in Northern Cameroon, mining and large-scale irrigation schemes in Niger and Lake Chad region. These cases show how pastoral groups and marginal farmer-fishing communities are losing access to CPRs, leading to problems of environmental degradation (lack of mobility, coordination of resource use and to pollution in mining and agro-industrial farming). The enclosures are often legitimated by negative discourses used by states and companies for labelling local communities. Such constellations lead to conflicts over resources as well as to local responses of resistance (ranging from weapons of the weak and legal strategies to open conflicts). Finally, these resource-related dynamics of conflict and resistance relate to the recent political instability in the Sahel.