Sub-theme 4. Commons between colonial legacies and the Anthropocene
Panel 4.5.
Rebuilding the commons instead of selling them. How research can help restore landscapes through understanding of the colonial legacy and the critique of the neo-colonial development complex
The Anthropocene, in simplified terms, is the geological epoch marked by the human actions that have driven ecological change on a global scale and are causing the decline of many species. And while it seems mainly up to the most elite institutions on the planet to look for solutions, these might appear just as simplified as the problems, especially under the urgency to act now.
If we look more closely however, the who, when and how become infinitely more complex.
This panel proposes to look at these complexities and efforts underway to combat various issues through the lens of current research on people, their institutions and land-use governance. While in this context, the commons have diminished greatly with western expansion during colonialization and the following establishment of globalized nation-states, the argument goes, that most local economies as well as ecologies would be more efficiently managed as a commons rather than through private and state property.
As, however, most of the commons and people have been displaced, rearranged, or fragmented in many ways, they no longer function as they should. It is nevertheless remarkable, how often the institutions surrounding the governance of commons and certain practices are still around and, in some places, even reinvented in order to incorporate newly introduced economies and ecologies. We ask, therefore, what the issues are that have led to impacts reducing biodiversity and fragmentation of landscapes and what strategies current efforts involve in reestablishing functioning systems that are supposed to be halting destruction and restoring loss.
1. Making and unmaking of forest landscapes with fire suppression in India
King’s College London, United Kingdom
Our study focuses on the practice of fire suppression and analyses how it has led to profound material, social and ontological consequences for forest landscapes and local communities. We examine this through a case study of fire management in British India from the mid-19th century to the early 19th century. We draw on historical work to contextualise the fires in the present. Some fire suppression interventions led to an immediate rupture in the ways of living of indigenous communities in the forest landscapes, while others involved slow violence and erasure of ecologies and world-making practices that continue to the present. By bringing focus to the historicity of landscapes, our study highlights the role of colonisation in the emergence of new fire regimes and increased risk of wildfires. This colonisation, when conceptualised as one involving knowledge politics, continues in the post-colonial state with the marginalisation of indigenous practices. The threat of wildfires in forest landscapes forms part of the afterlife of the empire. By locating fire suppression in its material and historical context, this article provides a much more critical entry point into understanding existing wildfires and highlights the common thread of plantation logic that runs through wildfires, climate change and land-use change. Against the background in which wildfires are used to evoke a politics of urgency, we highlight that the slow process of ontological marginalisation shows the unaddressed and overlooked historical injustice and erasure in the forest landscapes and pushes analysis beyond ecological loss in the Anthropocene.
2. Decolonizing property by fighting the grid? Comparative insights from Maasailand in Kenya: the Loita and Chuyulu hills’ dilemma
French Intitute for Research in Africa, Kenya
Tensions and epistemological conflicts inform the dilemma featuring processes of land subdivision in Kenyan southern rangelands. In Loita (Narok) and near the Chuyulu hills (Kajiado), on-going processes of land adjudication might eventually transform the current landscape of communal rangelands and community-managed natural resources into an individualised grid of fenced plots and forests. Their comparison sheds light on the complexity of decolonizing property. Their understanding nuances the discussion of what could appear a dichotomic confrontation between forces urging the privatisation of both the land and the natural resources, against the impelling push towards preserving the commons (fighting the grid). To what extend are these communities actually willing to maintain or re-establish communal land use systems? Even though the land tenure category and historical background of the two areas are quite different (respectively classified as trust land and group ranch), they seem traversed by similar dynamics and dilemmas. The two have in common to be endowed with critical natural resources, reservoir of biodiversity and water sources supporting surrounding ecosystems. Both have long “resisted” land subdivision and privatisation, which the Kenyan government has heavily promoted since the 1950s, along with an evolutionist paradigm that has recently been reinforced by neoliberal notions implying that the financialisation of property relations is a sine qua non condition of economic development. In recent years, both communities have opted to subdivision because of the external pressure cloaked in the ideologisation of the private property model, amidst pressing conservation-related investments, dramatic ecological changes, generational transformations and land politics.
3. Decolonisation of the Commons in Africa: Stocktaking in 2023
Van Vollenhoven Institute, Leiden Law School, Kenya
All but one of the 54 independent polities of Africa today have their origins in colonial state-making and within which denial that African lands were already owned properties was widespread. This especially affected communal resource lands. Needless to say, rural land and property rights remain unsettled, governments taking until the 1990s to begin to liberate sustained community-based customary tenure as lawful property and registrable as such by communities. Thirty years later two thirds of African states have variably decolonised the legal subordination customary tenure – at least in law if yet in on-the-ground delivery. From review of laws in force today, I conclude that rebellion against colonially inherited rural property norms has been widespread, largely successful, and difficult to reverse once committed to. Nevertheless, contestation and demand grow at the troubled interface of claimed state and community lands. This is sharpest in respect of the estimated 12% of African lands taken from communities, now classified as Terrestrial Protected Areas. Clearly decolonization of rural property relations remains unfinished business. I conclude that this is on the cusp of new phase which will introduce case-by-case restitution of state-captured ecosystems to communities. In 2023 this is limited to South Africa, to Namibia is a limited manner, and to Kenya being forced through judicial rulings to deliver restitution as no longer a socio-political necessity but also as a pressing ecological necessity in the struggling Anthropocene on man-made destruction of the environment.
4. (Neo-) feudal land governance: Research needed to undress the misreading of pure nature and misconceptions surrounding history, practice and more than human eco-culture.
University of Bern, Switzerland
A majority of todays protected areas in Kenya are built upon a legacy of colonial ranching, game-reserves and tourism. The shift into the independent nation-state in the 60ies and 70ies did little to redistribute land ownership but effects of the new political, social, and economic systems are felt to this day. Game-reserves turned into national parks, ranches were rebuilt as private conservancies and tourism became one of the largest growing industries. While the ‘African’ trope became more and more experienceable to the western world as globalization expanded, one thing hardly changed: the idea of the pristine wilderness.
This presentation aims to convey misconceptions on two fronts: On the one hand, various disciplines are dealing with clearing up the historical, colonial epistemologies surrounding nature, culture and development. On the other hand, what is framed within the capitalist, neoliberal conservation critique is overlooking the continuous imperial legacy that has undermined any true change in recognizing landscapes for what they are. Through mechanisms of language and discourse beliefs over landscapes, wildlife and cultures have remained in their core, selling the ‘modern human’ a false nature while upholding sovereign power over land, life, and spirit. Hereby, the commons are obfuscated behind a vale of pure wilderness and the commoners are therewith disowned materially, intellectually, and spiritually. Using my ongoing fieldwork in Northern Kenya as an example, we will explore how and by whom this is done and what we are missing beyond the propaganda.
