Short Abstract

Who decides what is right or wrong for Africa’s environments? This panel explores how moral claims gain authority, justify environmental interventions, and allocate rights, resources, and responsibilities, asking whose values prevail, whose claims are marginalised, and whose futures become possible.

Long Abstract

As climate imperatives increasingly shape public agendas, governments, development agencies, conservation organisations, investors, scientists, activists, and local communities advance claims about environmental use and futures. This panel explores power relations shaping human–environment relations in Africa through Didier Fassin’s reformulation of ‘moral economy’ and Tim Ingold’s dwelling perspective.

Drawing on Fassin, we examine how environmental values, sentiments, and obligations are produced and circulated, acquire authority, and become embedded in institutions and practices, while others are marginalised, discredited, or rendered illegible.

Following Ingold, we understand dwelling as an ongoing practical and perceptual engagement with the world, through which landscapes take shape. We explore how moral claims emerge from different ways of inhabiting environments and how their authority enables or constrains modes of dwelling.

How is moral authority established through scientific expertise, legal recognition, funding, and moral discourses about land and belonging? We examine how claims justify environmental interventions and become translated into rules and decisions allocating rights, resources, and responsibilities. What happens when institutionally authorised values encounter obligations and attachments grounded in local dwelling practices?

We invite papers addressing conservation, communal property rights, pastoral mobility, development, climate adaptation, and decarbonisation, focusing on:

-Epistemic struggles over environmental knowledge and its role in authorising moral claims.

-Socio-cultural and material transformations of landscapes and dwelling practices.

-Political processes through which moral authority is established, institutionalised, and contested.

Together, we examine competing moral economies whose authority is reworked through struggles over who can legitimately govern and transform landscapes, and whose environmental futures gain recognition.

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