Beyond Territory and Scarcity: Exploring Conflict over Natural Resource Management (review)

This edited volume contains nine papers presented at an international seminar on conflicts over natural resources, a seminar organized by the Institutes of Anthropology and Geography of the University of Copenhagen in November 2002. The authors argue for a more complex approach to conflicts over natural resources, an approach that moves beyond simplistic models of population growth and scarcity. Although it is not clear from the title, the volume focuses exclusively on African countries: Lesotho, Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, Senegal, Sudan, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The case studies illustrate the factors that play a role in causing or characterizing conflicts. Without entirely dismissing the use of models, the authors argue for a more thorough consideration of social, cultural, and political constructions with new spatial and historical scales (p. 8).

In the introduction, Gausset and Whyte lay out the theoretical framework of the volume, starting with an explanation of the models of population dynamics that policymakers currently accept. The Malthusian approach assumes that the exponential growth of a population is limited by the linear growth of production (or carrying capacity), resulting in regular population crashes. The Neo-Malthusian approach is more pessimistic, and supports the idea of a downward spiral, in which population pressure leads to environmental degradation and thus a decreasing carrying capacity. More recent researchers, such as Boserup and Netting, have incorporated the possibility that pressure leads to innovation and agricultural intensification. Although the Boserup-Netting approach allows more flexibility, all three theories find their limitations in the assumption of territorial boundaries.

The purpose of the case studies is to demonstrate alternative approaches that recognize the complexity of individual strategies, include consideration of economic and political influences on regional and global scales, and identify the source of conflicts over natural resources. Boehm shows how scarcity in a densely populated Lesotho can be understood only by considering the closure of mines in South Africa. In 1979, 49.7 percent of all households in Lesotho had at least one member working in the mines, but their proportion had declined to 11.9 percent by 2002 (p. 32), the result of an increasing dependence on depleted farmlands and an ongoing need to find alternative sources of income.

Mortimore builds his theory of disequilibrial social resilience on the persistence of communities in drylands in Niger and Nigeria through knowledge, flexibility, adaptability, and values. Although this resilience, and the consequent intensification and diversification of sources of income, may know its limits, it is limited not necessarily by territorial boundaries, but by access to options.

Van Beek and Avontuur focus on flexibility and challenge the dichotomies between nature and culture, human and habitat, and system and chaos, dichotomies that exist in the paradigms of equilibrium and exploitation (p. 71); however, they explicitly question the limits to flexibility. They sketch the situation for the Kapsiki in the Mandara Mountains of North Cameroon within a historical context of slave trade, colonialism, population growth, and an increasing inequality. The Kapsiki have adapted to population pressure by intensification and diversification, but van Beek and Avontuur expect a decreasing difference between equilibrium and exploitation.

Gausset's case study, situated in Cameroon, concerns conflicts between agriculturalists and pastoralists in the Tikar Plain. Gausset argues that these conflicts are caused not by population pressure, but by "complex social, political, cultural and historical factors" (p. 90). The perceived scarcity of resources and the desire to maintain a certain level of quality play an important role, in combination with conflicting interests for the designation of land (e.g., maintaining grassland for grazing purposes, or allowing regeneration into forest for the purpose of shifting cultivation); however, most problematic is perhaps the ambiguity of issues related to ownership, authority, regulation, and management, issues that leave room for continuous renegotiation of the rules.

Juul describes the innovation of refugee FuutankoBe pastoralists in Senegal who, driven away by drought in the 1970s and 1980s, avoided conflict with the residents...