Introduction: Critical Sustainability Studies in Sub-Saharan Africa

The authors in this special issue converse about how the biome affects culture and vice versa by deploying an interdisciplinary and collaborative mode of scholarly exchange to understand how human beings in particular sub-Saharan African countries interact with the land. They generate a collective critical approach to sustainability studies, interrogate sustainability discourses, ask whose interests they serve, and carefully observe how environmental, economic, social, and cultural sustainability interact. Diagnosing how sustainability affects the well-being of a locale in Africa requires a multidisciplinary, all-systems approach, which examines questions of land use at interlocking scales. The authors complicate how to think about sustainable land uses and how to apply critical sustainability studies to heritage and conservation work by analyzing the dynamic interactions of human and natural systems.