Contribution short abstract

Using qualitative research and the Assemblage approach, we examine how community forest management was assembled in the 80s in Burkina Faso, the current/ future implications for the socioecological system. Shifting technical/market-based logic to recognize/empower local agency remains crucial.

Contribution long abstract

In the process of creating the Chantier d’Aménagement Forestier (CAF) or community-managed forests for fuelwood production in Burkina Faso in the 80s, actors, ideas and interests collided, new rules and practices were negotiated and/or re-aligned. Three decades later, the CAFs face ecological and socio-political turmoil that questions their existence. To unearth those dynamics, using qualitative research methods and the assemblage approach, we examine the assembling of the CAF, its working, and the implications for the resilience of the socio-ecological system. The results show that the CAF has delivered largely negative social and ecological outcomes. Despite the rhetoric of commoning and communes, the CAF was anchored in a market model with a clear focus on entrepreneurial collaboration, commodity productivity and market access. Moreover, the CAF leadership instrumentalised ‘legality’ while ignoring adaptive management, accountability, and power asymmetry (in knowledge and relations) in the everyday governance procedures. The CAF management was not flexible to innovate nor enable co-learning. Gradually, the original assemblage of the CAF was fragmented into many new assemblages centred on fuelwood and the forestland sale as a new commodity. These results suggest that what is required are: i) a shift from a technical and market-based logic to recognizing and empowering local people in the CAF model; and ii) bringing power dimension and critical thinking into the assemblage approach in community forest management.

Contribution short abstract

Drawing on analysis of data from ten (10) carbon offset registries, we map the uneven geographies of REDD+ type projects in West Africa. We found that private actors dominate carbon forestry projects, and more than half of the project proponents are based or headquartered outside Africa.

Contribution long abstract

Geographers have analyzed the politics of carbon offset projects, often focusing on individual projects or groups of projects across regions, with relatively little attention to regional dynamics. Drawing on analysis of data from ten (10) carbon offset registries, we map the uneven geographies of REDD+ type projects in the West African region, tracing and mapping project proponents and collaborators, offset buyers, project areas, and project timelines. We found that private actors dominate West African carbon forestry projects, and more than half of the project proponents are based or headquartered outside Africa. The majority of carbon offset buyers are based in Europe, where companies in the Engineering, Manufacturing, and Construction sectors top the list. In addition to the much-analyzed Global North-South and local-global spatialities underpinning REDD+, our study highlights the regional histories, politics, and socioecologies that also shape REDD+ dynamics in West Africa. We demonstrate that carbon forestry initiatives should be understood as space-making relations and processes that are reconstituting the West African region through the uneven distribution of influence and control over carbon, forests and land. We conclude that spatially explicit regional analyses of REDD+ are crucial for deepening our understanding of forest carbon politics as actors pursue net-zero agendas globally.

Contribution short abstract

Transboundary insecurity in W Park (Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger) intensifies tensions between conservation, community livelihoods and security. This study, grounded in political ecology, analyses how armed violence disrupts biodiversity protection and local resilience in Benin.

Contribution long abstract

Transboundary protected areas face persistent tensions between ecological preservation, the needs of local communities, and security challenges, particularly exacerbated by the presence of armed groups. Based on the political ecology approach, this research examines the impact of cross-border insecurity in W Park located between Benin, Burkina Faso, and Niger on biodiversity conservation and the livelihoods of neighboring communities. The study also analyzed the policies implemented to secure these areas and mitigate tensions. The methodology combines semi-structured interviews with local and institutional actors in the municipality of Karimama and documentary analysis of national and transboundary policies. The findings reveal that insecurity exacerbates socio-economic tensions, particularly through restrictions imposed on local populations and the constant fear they experience due to a rise in abductions and armed attacks. Although anthropogenic pressure on W Park appears to be decreasing, insecurity also hampers ecological monitoring and natural resource management. Armed attacks and the use of explosive devices compromise the protection of ecosystems. Moreover, cross-border divergences in interest among the three countries hinder the effectiveness of security strategies. The study highlights the need to rethink protected area management mechanisms by incorporating participatory and inclusive approaches that combine conservation, security, and social justice to enhance the resilience of ecosystems and neighboring communities in the face of growing challenges

Contribution short abstract

Côte d’Ivoire is facing massive deforestation, leading the current government to new commitments to protect and regenerate national forests. In line with the “green neoliberalism” moment, these forests are funded by major donors. It is in this context that reforestation projects have emerged.

Contribution long abstract

Côte d’Ivoire is facing massive deforestation, leading the current government to new commitments to protect and regenerate national forests. In line with the “green neoliberalism” moment, these forests are funded by major donors. It is in this context that reforestation projects have emerged. This article analyses one such project, the Green Wall Project, which symbolises one fact: despite the highly political nature of reforestation, many reforestation projects suffer from a lack of funding. It underlines the fact that ‘the forest’ is not always the subject of political attention, even in a context of increasing discourse on the need for a shift in favour of environmental protection. However, this does not invalidate the idea that forests are the product of politics (Peluso and Vandergeest, 2001). On the contrary, it shows that the choice of whether or not to finance and invest in a reforestation project is itself the result of a political choice. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions in the two regions of Worodougou, this chapter examines the extent to which forests are political spaces, how and for whom. It demonstrate that the forest becomes political in that it becomes a political challenge for the agricultural sector, particularly in a context of new import conditions for cash crops in Europe.

Contribution short abstract

At Mount Nimba in Liberia, high-quality iron ore and rare biodiversity attract miners and conservationists. Market-driven projects turn land into commodities, marginalize traditional uses, and portray local practices as threats to manage. Power is exerted through access to capital and expertise.

Contribution long abstract

The northernmost reach of the Upper Guinean Forests of West Africa stretches along the Mount Nimba range, where the borders of Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, and Guinea converge. A center of rare biodiversity, the mountain also holds some of the highest-grade iron ore in the world. Minerals and endemic species have attracted the attention of multinational companies and conservation groups since the 1950s. In recent years, conservation and mining have aligned their means and ends by appropriating the surface and underground in financialization schemes that depend on the commodification of nature through ever-tightening collaborations that evoke the logic of care. Local communities participate in and are affected by this revaluation of their customary land, which reframes their rights and usage as threats. This chapter employs a political ecology framework, informed by archival and ethnographic research, to examine how particular configurations of capital, expertise, and governance have exerted power over the landscape and manufactured value by fragmenting the forest into extractable resources and substitutable biodiversity. Power in this landscape is asymmetrical, shaped by access to capital and expertise, and conveyed through technocratic discourse about what constitutes legitimate use.

Contribution short abstract

My contribution focuses on how carbon forestry turns West African forests into climate capital, linking colonial and contemporary resource regimes. It shows how racial logics shape market-based climate management, reproducing inequalities under the guise of decarbonization.

Contribution long abstract

My chapter contribution to the edited volume The Political Ecologies of Forests in West Africa delineates how the transformation of West African forests into climate capital is mediated through carbon forestry. By crafting a post-colonial political ecology perspective, it traces the continuum of resource-use ethic between colonial forestry—anchored in the commodification of timber—and carbon forestry—premised on the monetization of carbon units. It shows how both relate to the history of environmentalism, and particularly the late nineteenth-century recognition of environmental degradation as a corollary of Civilization. Reflecting on forestry and development policies from the late 1920s onwards, the chapter identifies the persistence of an epistemologically inflected relationality between racial difference and inefficient/deficient environmental utilization in today’s market-based climate management. It explicates how the valorization of forests as carbon sinks is predicated on a historically conditioned and speculatively demarcated racialized sense of crisis and mobilized as a mechanism for generating climate finance, constituting another iteration in the long history of dependent development. In the absence of alternative climate finance, forests become instruments of decarbonization that secure Northern mitigation through Southern appropriation while reproducing structural inequalities. Exposing these patterns, the chapter highlights the missing link between decarbonization and decolonization, showing how development imperatives centering climate finance perpetuate historical patterns of dispossession and racialization.

Contribution short abstract

Starting from a critique of the commons approach, I explore the re-appropriation of customary norms for fisheries and forestry management by Niominka women and young people in the Saloum delta in Senegal.

Contribution long abstract

This article explores how climate change adaptation can be re-envisioned through the ontological and decolonial turning points, using the Niominka communities of the Saloum Delta in Senegal as an empirical lens. While global environmental governance—structured by multilateral conventions and national legal frameworks—tends to standardize adaptation policies, local societies continue to mobilize relational ontologies and customary norms that shape their interactions with the commons. The Niominka case illustrates how pre-colonial modes of regulating shared resources contain culturally embedded principles of sustainability, deeply rooted in a cosmology that blurs the boundaries between humans, non-humans, and the environment. However, these endogenous practices now coexist with, and are often overshadowed by, state-driven instruments inspired by liberal environmental governance. This overlap generates hybridization, tensions, and conflicts of representation. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Dionewar, the paper examines how these frictions manifest in community-based management of socio-ecological systems under climate stress. It argues that effective adaptation cannot be achieved without recognizing the validity of local epistemes and without addressing the structural hierarchies that render them invisible. In the Anthropocene era—marked by both planetary uncertainty and the persistence of neoliberal ideology—the Niominka experience illuminates the need to rethink adaptation as a plural, situated, and contested process. Three unresolved issues emerge: the marginalization of endogenous knowledge, its fragile transmission across generations, and the geopolitics embedded in global climate action. Together, they call for a deeper reconsideration of adaptation beyond technocratic approaches and toward relational, culturally grounded pathways.

Contribution short abstract

The presentation discusses the recent international and state support for 'indigenous, traditional, community-based environmental stewardship' in forest conservation in Senegal, and how perspectives from West Africa contributes to debates on 'cultural' diversity and history in political ecology.

Contribution long abstract

International recognition of indigenous, traditional and community-based custodianship of 'nature' has been gaining increased significance in global biodiversity conservation regime, especially in achieving its territorial ambitions to cover 30% of the planet with protected and 'other effectively conserved' areas by 2030. In forest landscapes of West Africa, the mapping, formalization and registration of Indigenous and community conserved/conservation areas (ICCAs) is being promoted and supported by multiplicity of international donors (including, IUCN, UNEP, GEF/UNDP) and transnational rights-based conservation advocacy organizations. The presentation discusses contentious politics of state recognition of ICCAs as Autochthonous and Community Heritage Conservation areas (APACs) in Senegal, and the dynamics underpinning the territorialization of APACs in forested frontier region of Kedougou, an epicentre of multiple and overlapping forms of extractivism. Through the case study of APACs proposed by the Bedik and Bassari associations in Community Forest Reserves and UNESCO Heritage Sites, the contribution illustrates how neoliberal repertoires of decentralized forest governance and 'Francophone' neocolonial repertoires of cultural difference intersect through global efforts to include, count and account for contributions of ‘minority ethnicities' in conservation in Senegal and in West Africa.

Contribution short abstract

This contribution analyses how the breakdown of the social contract around forest protection in Senegal, between forest agents and local communities, has generated community disengagement, abrupt competition over resources and acts of sabotage and smuggling.

Contribution long abstract

Compliant with Senegal’s decentralisation policy, frontline communities are often tasked with the operational responsibilities, including forest surveillance – what is usually known as “responsabilisation” in French. While this surveillance work is theoretically benevolent, the watchmen receive symbolic financial incentives. However, local communities’ responsabilisation in forest surveillance reveals a breakdown of the social contract on which forest governance rests and contestation of the legitimacy of public forest agents, by both forest watchmen, local authorities and most villagers. This chapter demonstrates how the breakdown of the social contract and the popular explanations for this breakdown have not only generated community disengagement and abrupt competition over resources but also led to acts of sabotage and smuggling as well as a blame game among the parties. It aims at describing these acts as a “return to the state of nature” which compromises forest ecosystem protection and conservation. Drawing on data from ethnographic fieldwork and experience of offering technical assistance, over the last twelve years, to various civil society organizations and international agencies intervening in Senegal’s forest sector, I analyze the highly mediatized illegal rosewood harvesting at the border between Senegal and the Gambia and charcoal production respectively in Kolda and Tambacounda regions.

Contribution short abstract

This presentation discusses an ecocritical analysis of oriki, a form of Yoruba praise poetry, as a repository of environmental epistemologies. Understanding Indigenous epistemologies of forest stewardship is essential for rectifying colonial legacies and the future of African forests.

Contribution long abstract

Environmental degradation on the African continent is inextricably linked to European colonialism and its piercing and persistent legacies. This presentation builds upon the work of postcolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Ngugi wa Thiong’o by arguing that, in addition to cultural and social subjugation, the erosion of environmental epistemologies and ontologies has enabled the continued political and economic domination of Africa. In Nigerian environmental history, the cosmological transformation of forests was integral to facilitating the colonial project. The conversion of forest land into plantations or the conversion of Yoruba sacred groves into European churches has not only had lasting social, economic, and political consequences, but is predicated on the continued marginalization of indigenous knowledge systems.

Responding to the growing push to consider indigenous perspectives on conservation, this presentation identifies a set of environmental epistemologies as articulated in Yoruba oral praise poetry, known as oriki. Yoruba culture presents a valuable case for the study of environmental epistemologies because Yoruba cosmology embodies a profound reverence for and interconnectedness with the natural world. An ecocritical analysis of key oriki genres illustrates dynamics of interspecies kinship and care, thus providing the basis for resistance and responses to ecological precarity. Representations of the sanctity of forests and discussions of ancestral ties between certain species and lineages can serve as a counternarrative to dominant justifications of environmental exploitation, answering the question of how we can harness the liberatory potential of indigenous ideas and activate them in the name of justice and conservation.

Contribution short abstract

This paper analyzes the architecture of Ghana’s REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) process from 2008 to 2013 to demonstrate how a seemingly multi-stakeholder collaborative engagement framework can ultimately reinforce longstanding power asymmetries.

Contribution long abstract

The growing emphasis on multi-stakeholder engagements in environmental governance is widely celebrated for promoting inclusion and participatory decision-making. This paper analyzes the architecture of Ghana’s REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) process from 2008 to 2013 to demonstrate how a seemingly multi-stakeholder collaborative engagement framework can ultimately reinforce longstanding power asymmetries. Drawing on documentary analysis and in-depth interviews with 27 stakeholders involved in REDD+ consultations and policy formulation, the paper identifies three key mechanisms through which participatory processes were constrained in the making of REDD+: (i) the Forestry Commission’s retention of decision-making authority; (ii) the instrumentalization and marginalization of civil society actors, even when formally included; and (iii) rushed, performative consultations that limited genuine input. The paper draws attention to the fact that as global climate finance mechanisms are domesticated within national political structures, the discourse of participation can be co-opted to consolidate power rather than redistribute it. The paper, therefore, concludes by calling for institutional reforms that democratize environmental governance—reforms that must shift power, enhance accountability, and center the lived experiences and knowledge systems of marginalized actors. These insights hold broader relevance for forest governance and climate policy in West Africa, where participatory approaches must confront, not conceal, structural inequalities

Contribution short abstract

As energy poverty worsens across Africa, and demand for charcoal grows, concerns about how to sustainably manage forests are re-emergent. Drawing upon 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Upper West Ghana, I use a feminist political ecology framing to center the felt experience.

Contribution long abstract

As energy poverty worsens across Africa, and demand for charcoal grows, concerns about how to sustainably manage forests are re-emergent. This chapter engages with extant political ecology take on this resource struggle, but pivots into the stories yet told. Drawing upon 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Upper West Region, a key site of charcoal production in Ghana, I use a feminist political ecology framing to center the felt experience. Instead of staying in the overstory of the politics shaping the problem or detailing the story of a commodity, I reveal an understory of how the people left to meet the demand for a commodity think, act, and feel as subjects to an environmental governance operating at both a global and local scale. This approach elevates the realities of a rural life in relationship to forested spaces and illuminates the dynamism therein. Charcoal does not produce any one feeling or affective state. These complex subjectivities, in turn, point to deeper structural wounds that need to guide conversations on how to shape conservation measures fostering forest and human wellbeing.

Contribution short abstract

Socio-ecological synthesis of the Upper Guinean Forests of West Africa: painful histories, contested tenure, and crisis framings meet extractive–conservation agendas; sacred groves and African Dark Earths reveal resilient, locally governed pathways that could be replicated for just forest futures.

Contribution long abstract

My roundtable contribution would draw on an invited multi-author review of the Upper Guinean Forests of West Africa (UGFWA), commissioned by the Annual Review of Environment and Resources. Spanning six countries, the UGFWA is a globally significant biodiversity hotspot with high levels of endemism, yet as a region remains comparatively under-studied. For decades, the UGFWA’s ecological history was obscured by faulty statistics and narratives that downplayed human stewardship. Our socio-ecological synthesis charts the UGFWA’s historical and contemporary forest dynamics, while foregrounding structural drivers of degradation and locally-led ‘bright spots’ which offer credible foundations for more just forest futures. A key debate we surface is how crisis framings legitimise policy arrangements in which conservation and extraction are pursued simultaneously, often at the expense of local tenure and decision-making. Colonial-era scientific forestry cast local land use as both unproductive and destructive, justifying exclusionary control over valuable resources. Today, poverty-centred deforestation narratives overlook these legacies and structural wounds, thereby normalising the convergence of conservation and extraction in climate-capital policies.

Crucially, the review does not reduce the UGFWA to crisis. Despite commodity expansion and climate stress, we highlight resilience and locally-led innovation. Sacred groves and customary land and tree tenure exemplify centuries-old biodiversity governance. While African Dark Earths and place-based agro-ecologies demonstrate enduring biodiversity conservation that can inform land and soil restoration; food security; and emergent socio-bioeconomy strategies, even amid neoliberal pressures and ongoing coloniality. I will use these insights to invite discussion on just, locally mandated, and politically feasible West African forest futures.