11

Drylands: A history of networks

Camilla Toulmin

Heavily pregnant with my second child, I heaved myself up one of the endless stairwells towards the attics of Endsleigh Street, and staggered into a smoke-filled room. I could see Richard Sandbrook through the haze, a massive plane tree casting heavy shadow through the window. ‘Don't smoke in front of Camilla – it's bad for the baby’, barked Sue, Richard's PA – she should really have been IIED's Director. I cadged a cigarette from Richard and hoped Sue couldn't see.

It was early 1987 and I was on a visit from the Overseas Development Institute where I had been working on the pastoral and irrigation management networks. I had met Ed Barbier, who was working on environmental economics at IIED, while preparing a paper for The Other Economic Summit. I had also met Geoff Barnard who was then working on agricultural residue use, and had come across my work on cattle, crops and dung in Mali. But despite this contact, I had very little idea of what IIED was, and did. Nor did I have any sense of where it got its money from, nor why it had so many staircases, and how you got from one part of the basement to the other. Only gradually have some of these queries become clearer, though several questions remain remarkably enigmatic even after 14 years.

Richard had successfully raised some funds from the United Nations Environment Programme to set up the Dryland Networks Programme, was looking for someone to run it and had heard my name from Ed Barbier. There was already a cast of nomadic characters associated with African drylands who passed through the IIED building – Charles Lane when he wasn't in Tanzania, and Ian Scoones when he came back from Zimbabwe. Robin Sharp was also a partner on the early programme – an experienced journalist, he was key in establishing Haramata and the Issue Papers. We had one difficult moment with the UNEP funds, when we were told that actually we could have the money promised, but only if we took it in roubles –‘come on Camilla, surely you can set up some of your activities in the Soviet Union? Hold a meeting in Samarkard, get your printing done in Vladivostock’, challenged Richard – but fortunately we persuaded UNEP to give us dollars instead, and offload their unwanted roubles onto someone else.

THE PROGRAMME RATIONALE

The Drylands Programme was set up soon after the 1984/85 droughts which had ravaged East and West Africa, bringing famine and disaster to many, and displacing huge numbers. Many donors set up new programmes to promote more sustainable patterns of dryland development, and NGO activity mushroomed in the North as well as in-country. Band Aid and SOS Sahel were set up and the big NGOs like Oxfam and Care launched major development projects in the Sahel and Horn of Africa. There was a widespread perception among many commentators that dryland areas of the world were becoming more and more hostile, and that people would need to be moved elsewhere, if necessary by force, for their own good. The Ethiopian Derg's strategy, which got underway in 1985, was to transport people from the northern highlands to the southwest of the country. Elsewhere, like in West Africa, people moved under their own steam, seeking out land in wetter regions and looking for new ways of making a living. There was also pessimism among many donors regarding technical answers to Africa's drought-prone areas, given their perception that irrigation schemes had failed in many areas. Equally, the potential of Green Revolution technology for raising yields in marginal rainfed farming areas was seriously questioned, while little research had been done on many of the dryland staple crops, such as millet, fonio and cassava.

Despite such pessimism, there was also increasing awareness that promising alternatives were starting to emerge to challenge conventional approaches to dryland agriculture. These involved a variety of activities involving low external inputs, such as simple soil and water conservation structures, agro-forestry work, support to pastoral associations, community-based systems for managing woodlands and pasture, and so on. These alternatives seemed to provide evidence that yields and productivity might be improved significantly without jeopardizing the longer-term sustainability of the agro-ecosystem, as well as being compatible with social and institutional structures. Often small in scale, frequently the product of the NGO sector, such activities pioneered new methods of managing land and making decisions. Projects where things worked best involved close participation by local people identifying priorities, planning what should be done, and allocating responsibilities for implementation.¹

The Drylands Programme sought to identify common concerns and make better known to the pessimists some of the promising options which might be followed. Thus, the major initial emphasis for the programme was its information and networking activities – the Haramata newletter and the Issue Papers – prepared in both English and French language editions. The newsletter was intended to provide short articles giving an overview of key issues, new research and publications, resources, training and meetings. Haramata is the name given to the Harmattan wind in the Ewe language of Ghana. This cool wind from the north starts to blow across much of West Africa in December and January, bringing welcomed relief at the end of the harvest. We hoped that Haramata could provide such a breath of fresh air. The Issue Papers provide a more in-depth treatment of particular questions, offering a quick way to get material published and circulated, and for which we sought African authors where possible. We have now published 40 editions of Haramata and more than 100 Issue Papers, which together constitute a veritable archive on drylands development.

Bit by bit, the programme started picking up speed, with both Charles Lane and Ian Scoones returning from the field and taking on major roles. Charles had been working in Tanzania for Oxfam and then with Barabaig herders who had lost much of their land to a Canadian-inspired mechanized wheat-farming scheme. Ian had just finished his field work in Zimbabwe, looking at herding patterns and grazing dynamics. Together, we identified a niche in African drylands, spanning francophone West Africa, East African pastoralism and Zimbabwe. I went off to Norway to explain our plans and strategy, and was greeted with great warmth by Mie Bjonness, responsible then for the NORAD Sahelian programme, who immediately pledged support. We also worked with Danida staff to flesh out their drylands strategy, the beginning of a relationship which continues to be central to our programme today. I began to understand how the programme might develop, by taking on work, finding good people to help carry it out, and building alliances with African partners.

I also began to understand more about how IIED worked institutionally, and about its failings. We all felt the need for a more systematic and transparent approach to people-management – hence the emergence of the union, the job evaluation system to grade different posts, and appraisal process for discussing performance and expectations. I began to get to know the other groups who inhabited both the basement and the attic – the Campaign for Lead Free Petrol, the Institute for European Environmental Policy, and Earthscan. I started to recognize the characters who passed through the reception area, such as Gerry Leach trailing a cloud of smoke and an inch of ash balanced on the tip of his cigarette, stooping to clear the lintel of the door, and Lloyd Timberlake in cycling gear, juggling bells under his arm.

When I came to set up Drylands, I brought with me a draught of enormous respect for the many millions of small farmers who succeed in making a living in difficult circumstances in the Sahel. I had lived for a couple of years in a small village in Mali, Dalonguebougou, having been hired by Jeremy Swift as a researcher for the International Livestock Centre for Africa (ILCA). Jeremy had become an ardent advocate of pastoral nomads in Africa, having often seen them displaced by projects to set up wildlife parks, irrigation projects, and mechanized farming schemes. His task at ILCA was to demonstrate the rationality of pastoral production systems, through a series of field research projects. Dalonguebougou was chosen to investigate the deeply enmeshed relations between livestock and crops in the millet farming zone, and the value of ‘black gold’ in the form of cattle dung.

I am sure that Dalonguebougou is not special, but it represents for me a spirited expression of how productive and successful local farmers can be – helped by being distant from government, able to continue many aspects of traditional ways of life without too much dependence on outsiders; proud in the maintenance of tradition, but eager to look at and adopt new ways of doing things. I knew from Dalonguebougou that farmers come in all shapes and sizes; some were much brighter and more aware than others, some had a clear vision and strategy for what they wanted to do and were eager to try new methods. Many observed and experimented, adapting to new circumstances and opportunities. Others were happier following others. But all tried to balance the varied parts of their lives, keen to ensure good relations with kin and neighbours, needing to negotiate with family members seeking a bit more personal space, and working out strategies to make their families more secure in future. So it continues to provide for me a touchstone against which to judge proposals for interventions.

A recent visit showed how much things have changed over the last 20 years, as seen by a survey of what Babou Dembele has in his shop now, compared with then. Babou, now in his early fifties, is the head of an 80-strong household, reputed for its bulging granaries and large cattle herd. With so many younger brothers in the field, Babou concentrates on running a shop, the benefits from which go to the whole family. In 1980, you could buy nine items from his table-top shop – green tea, sugar, soap, Liberté cigarettes, salt, petrol, sweets, kola and dates. Nearly 20 years later, when you walk into his store, he has more than 100 things for sale, including nail varnish, rope (nylon and baobab bark), batteries, chocolate biscuits, scissors, tomato concentrate and moped spare parts.² The village is booming, with migrants from elsewhere seeking to settle and farm, while village households themselves have an ever more extensive set of economic and social ties to Bamako and beyond. Such changes bring their own challenges, but they also demonstrate great dynamism and an outward-looking approach by the Sahel's ‘traditional’ peasants.

PROGRAMME ACTIVITIES: PASTORAL RIGHTS, SOIL CONSERVATION, PARTICIPATION

Digging in an old cardboard box recently, I came across the drylands programme strategy for 1992, drawn up for discussion of funding opportunities with the Norwegian government. The emphasis then, as now, was on equitable, sustainable management of natural resources on which the livelihoods of so many depend and to combine a variety of approaches and disciplines. The small size of the programme – in 1992 we were only two-and-a-half researchers and one administrator – meant that we had to establish close collaborative links with partners in Africa with whom to carry out a common set of activities. Our role then, as now, was seen as being to catalyse, coordinate and facilitate policy research and analysis, to challenge and re-think policy towards dryland development, and to feed findings from the field into broader national and global debates.

Pastoral rights and development

Charles Lane campaigned for the rights of East African pastoral groups to be recognized, working with indigenous peoples’ organizations, challenging government behaviour in the courts, and allying with key figures in the debate. In the case of Tanzania, foremost among these figures was Professor Issa Shivji, who had chaired the Presidential Commission on Land in 1991. His clear-sighted recommendations were largely ignored by the government, particularly his argument in favour of vesting land title in the village assemblies, thereby divesting the state of its control over land matters. Issa has remained a powerful voice in favour of supporting local people's rights and spreading knowledge and understanding of legal provisions, through the Hakiardhi organization.³

Charles also spent much time encouraging East African pastoral groups to come together in association to press for change and greater recognition of their rights. Thus support was given to Inyuat e-Maa for the first conference of Maa people, held in Arusha in 1993. The association's charismatic leader, Saruni Oitesoi ole Ngulay, came to IIED as a Drylands Visiting Fellow and spent some weeks in London to gain time to think and reflect on strategy. Charles’ work also brought him into contact with groups supporting land rights in Uganda and Kenya, such as the Centre for Basic Research in Kampala, led then by Mahmood Mamdani, and the African Centre for Technology Studies in Nairobi, which Calestous Juma had turned into a major centre for policy research.

The plight of the Maasai in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) was also a focus of his attention, and represents one among many such conflicts between wildlife bodies and local resident Maasai pastoralists. The former see the Maasai as a problem and barrier to achieving effective long-term management of this extraordinarily beautiful World Heritage site. Pro-Maasai groups contend that the resident pastoral population are in fact the best custodians of the Ngorongoro crater and plains, and protectors of key species such as rhino. As such they are essential to maintenance of grazing lands and control of poaching. The Maasai should thus be assured long-term rights within the NCA, a proper share of revenue from visiting tourists, and more effective representation on management and decision-making bodies. Charles brought together the various stakeholder groups to try and find common ground at a meeting in London in 1997. But there remain serious differences in view between those promoting wildlife conservation and those who argue that previous commitments to Maasai residents have been repeatedly betrayed.

Drylands’ work on West African pastoral issues was taken on by Richard Moorehead in 1993. I had known him since 1980, when he had met me in my first days in Mali. We drove out together for a first visit to various villages, and sat up much of the night chatting at the height of the hot season beneath a classic African sky, black as pitch save the thousands of holes burnt through by stars. Richard had spent several years in the heart of the inner Niger delta of central Mali, a magic complex swampland renewed by the annual flood of the River Niger. These lands are of enormous value to rice farmers, herders seeking lush grazing, fishermen tracking the shoals of catfish, and latterly the international conservation movement because of its wonderful bird life. Richard worked for IUCN trying to see how best to stitch together the diverse interests of each group into an agreed management plan. The strategies and shifting bargaining powers of different groups are well illustrated in his PhD thesis which Robert Chambers and I examined one summer afternoon in 1991.⁴ Richard, so talented and such good company, left us in 1996 to join the Department for International Development (DfID) as a social development adviser in Bangladesh where, in 1998, in a moment's black gloom he killed himself. The letters we received from Sahelian colleagues were testament to his love of West Africa and commitment to the pastoral cause.

Ced Hesse, formerly with Oxfam's Arid Lands Information Network (ALIN) in Dakar, took on the pastoral agenda for the Drylands Programme in 1997. I had first met Ced in 1981, when he was newly arrived to join Jeremy Swift's research group at ILCA, Mali. Ced was settled in Hombori to study a group of Bella agropastoralists. Under Ced's management, the pastoral programme has developed a wide-ranging set of activities in both West and East Africa. The principal objectives have been to help pastoral organizations understand the institutional framework within which they operate, identify policy openings to lobby for their interests, and better represent their membership.

Work on pastoral issues seems to generate a network of colleagues who may move to new jobs but maintain their interest in pastoralism. Soon after the Drylands Programme was set up, we were asked by the National Livestock Programme in Chad to help them with a study of pastoral organizations in the Sahel. We were given the name of Djeidi Sylla then working for ACORD in Gao, the hottest, most isolated corner of northeast Mali, as the River Niger bends itself round from the north to the southeast on its plunge towards the Gulf of Guinea, still more than 1500km away. We needed to draw in Djeidi's experience and wisdom gained from many years of dealing with support to pastoral organizations. So Djeidi set off from the banks of the River Niger to come to IIED for a fortnight in late November 1988, amid the cold and dark of London in late autumn. His report was a model of clear-sighted analysis which persuaded us to see how we could encourage him to work with the programme whenever possible. He made a major contribution to the Woburn Conference on management of grazing dynamics in savanna Africa,⁵ and has repeatedly helped to support our work in Mali. He has also had a spell as an IIED Board member.

Soils as the basis for dryland sustainability

Soil and water conservation is evidently of great importance for gaining better yields and ensuring some kind of harvest in years of low rainfall. This had become obvious from the work of Chris Reij of the Free University of Amsterdam who had shown that most farmer practices provide an excellent basis for trapping rainwater and topsoil. Development of the film and book, Looking after our Land – Lessons from Successful Soil and Water Conservation Practice in East and West Africa was an early activity for Drylands, in collaboration with ALIN. This project was realized thanks to funding from Comic Relief and Oxfam. Will Critchley did much of the footwork around the six countries covered and made sure we got the footage and cutting to make the film and prepare the book. It shows very clearly why soil and water conservation matters, and demonstrates the huge importance of ensuring that adapted technologies suit people's wants, priorities and means. Star of the film was Mathieu Ouédraogo, then the project coordinator of Oxfam's flagship Projet Agroforestier (PAF) in Ouahigouya, northwest Burkina Faso.

PAF achieved great prominence because it combined many of the characteristics of the new generation of ‘success’ stories. It helped to forge new attitudes to field-level development, by demonstrating the potential of working with local people, providing training in technical skills and building on local knowledge. It helped to turn opinion among donors, government and NGOs in favour of simple, community-led measures. Years of research by soil scientists and agronomists had led to little beyond ‘tied ridging’ techniques which no one wanted, and a dismissive attitude towards the unscientific approach of NGOs. Yet, it was just such a practical ‘can do’ attitude which was bringing results and leading to massive take-up of simple soil conservation techniques.

PAF's iconic status has led some to question how successful it has in fact been, whether poorer farmers have been able to benefit from its activities, and how far its approach can be replicated.⁶ Travelling around the Mossi Plateau of central Burkina Faso provides strong evidence for the replicability of an approach like that of PAF and other projects which have focused on improving local soil conservation methods. Enormous areas of farmland have been treated with rock bunds and terraces, making a great contribution to increased yields, improved tree cover and rising water tables throughout the region.⁷ Farmers from neighbouring Mali and Niger have also benefited from the lessons gained by PAF and others, having been brought to see with their own eyes what was being achieved, so they could take back ideas to try at home. PAF may have received too much credit for the astonishing spread of such simple soil conservation methods, since many other projects were following similar pathways. But being able to demonstrate a ‘success story’ by focusing on a single case can be the most effective means of conveying a message of hope to government and donors about how to support Sahelian farmers. PAF served as an emblem for a people-centred approach, which could be used to counter the pessimists who saw the Sahel as a basket-case which would never be able to feed itself.

Strengthening participatory approaches

As well as being our film star, Mathieu Ouédraogo from PAF was also a key figure in developing and spreading participatory tools and approaches to local development in the francophone Sahel, as part of the MARP⁸ programme led by Bara Guèye. At the beginning of the 1990s, it became increasingly apparent that the many actors involved in support to Sahelian communities needed a more systematic set of skills and methods for participatory development. Governments since 1984 had been using the rhetoric of participation but achieving little in practice. IIED's Jules Pretty had done a one-off training session in Senegal in 1989 for 15 people, organized by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Senegal. Bara had been among those first trainees, being based then at the Ecole Nationale d'Economie Appliquée, Dakar.

From our first meeting in Dakar, Bara and I planned work on how to promote better links between NGOs and research organizations. Robin Sharp and I had got some funds from UNSO to see how best to promote greater collaboration between these groups, in the belief that their complementary skills might generate a common interest in working together. This had all stemmed from an earlier study which we had commissioned through the Small Grants Fund (thanks to Band Aid's support). Pape Sène, a Senegalese forester, had carried out a study looking at all the mistakes which NGOs make when engaging in tree-planting programmes. He provided convincing evidence that NGOs do not always get things right and that it would make more sense for them to work with researchers who could provide some of their missing expertise. So Bara prepared a study of the links between NGOs and researchers engaged in horticultural work. This study was complemented by others, and then formed the basis for two sub-regional meetings in Uganda, and Senegal, to promote greater engagement by researchers and NGOs in each others’ activities.

But Bara and I also started discussing how to set up a network of people interested in developing skills in participatory methods to strengthen community-based programmes of natural resource management in the Sahel; this was known as the gestion des terroirs approach. The first meeting was held in Ouahigouya with help from Mathieu Ouédraogo, in recognition of the significance of PAF's experience with participatory methods. The workshop brought together a dozen people from Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, generated great energy and enthusiasm and helped to create the core group of MARPeurs of today. A series of grants from BMZ, NORAD and UNSO allowed us to get things moving over the first year.

I then made an ill-fated approach to the World Bank, to see if they would like to buy into our MARP programme, given their strong emphasis on gestion des terroirs. There had been much enthusiasm from Sahel regional staff, but recognition that we would need to deal directly with the people in Washington DC. Early encouragement for our initiative was followed by rising levels of mutual incomprehension and the overwhelming difficulty faced by World Bank staff in conceiving of making a contribution to someone else's programme, that they did not control. After six months of fruitless dialogue, the quarter-million-dollar support which had been dangled in front of us had vanished, and we realized we would be better off running our own programme without them.

Bara not only developed a very effective network of those devoted to MARP, but has also established a dynamic group of young colleagues in IIED Sahel, Dakar, Senegal: Fatou N'Diaye, Mansour Tall, Awa Ba and Marième Fall. Together they have been instrumental in reflecting critically on what is meant by participatory natural resource management, creating a partnership of structures in the Thiès Region of Senegal. Equally, they have provided methodological support to ARED/CERFLA⁹ in Senegal, which has generated path-breaking work with newly literate Pulaar communities to help them gain skills in community development, conflict management and civic rights. These materials, known by their Pulaar acronym, LOHU, have put into the hands of local people a set of participatory tools and methods for their own use, rather than having to rely on outsiders to initiate such community consultation processes. The work being led by ARED's Sonja Diallo now forms an integral part of our work on supporting decentralization in the Sahel, as we seek opportunities for groups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger to learn from what can be achieved by such methods.

THE INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION TO COMBAT DESERTIFICATION: A SUCCESS?

IIED's response to the process around the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, driven by Johan Holmberg and Koy Thomson, provided an opportunity to reflect on the importance of local management systems for achieving more sustainable livelihoods in the Sahel.¹⁰ It strongly argued the case for placing faith in local structures and ensuring a broader framework of law and institutions to facilitate such local control as the only way forward. The Rio process also generated an enormous body of new work for the programme associated with the decision by governments at Rio to negotiate an International Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD). Earlier initiatives such as the United Nations Conference on Desertification (UNCOD in Nairobi 1977), and UNEP's assessment of desertification in 1984 and 1991 had provoked considerable dissatisfaction from both governments and researchers who lacked confidence in the methods, definitions and purpose of such activities.

Developed countries involved in the preparation for Rio had been strongly pressed by African countries to agree to negotiating an International Convention to Combat Desertification. The latter felt that their particular interests and priorities had been neglected by the Rio process, since they did not fit neatly into issues of either climate change or biological diversity. If Rio was to gain international acclaim and support from Africa as well as the rest of the world, some gesture was needed to demonstrate commitment to the needs of poor, drought-prone, highly indebted countries in the Sahel and parts of Eastern and Southern Africa. But it was a commitment poorly thought through, which has landed us with an unworkable and poorly focused convention, unable to achieve its high ambitions. Desertification, or dryland degradation, is not and has never been an environmental issue of global dimensions; it is much more broadly tied into wide-ranging development, global trade opportunities, debt and aid relations.

Ian Haines at ODA threw us in at the deep end by commissioning a paper¹¹ to provide a first cut on what the CCD might seek to do, which then formed the basis for a meeting of EU member state experts, the UK holding the EU Presidency in the six months following Rio. The meeting in London was memorable for several reasons, not least the whispered consultations among French delegates and request for help on tips to distinguish the coffee from the tea – both mid-brown warmish fluids. At the meeting we needed to see how far there might be a common EU position on the CCD. What should it seek to do? How might it work? What kind of commitments and policy measures? There was a remarkable degree of consensus around the table. On the basis of my paper, I was proposed by ODA to be a member of the International Panel of Experts on Desertification (IPED), set up to provide technical assistance to the International Negotiating Committee on Desertification (INCD) proceedings.

The series of IPED meetings and INCD negotiation sessions provided a roller-coaster ride of emotions, with moments of exhilaration, that we might get agreement from governments North and South to sign up to far-sighted commitments to decentralized management of natural resources, the importance of pastoral systems, and the central role of participatory approaches. This sense of advance received a rude shock, when we realized that the IPED was more of a public show than a forum for achieving serious influence on the proceedings. We were two social scientists out of 14 experts. All the funds available for studies were allocated to review ‘scientific issues’ – such as climate change, and biodiversity – despite the recognition by all that degradation issues are intimately linked to social, economic and institutional dimensions.

My fellow social scientist, Brigitte Thébaud, counselled me early on: ‘don't believe this is going to do any good Camilla – it's all for show!’. I found this viewpoint hard to accept, but it was ultimately borne out. The technical bias continues, with emphasis in the Committee on Science and Technology (CST) and other bodies on ‘proper’ scientists, agronomists, rangeland scientists, climatologists, and so on. Nevertheless, the meetings could be enjoyable, due to an engaging collection of members, such as Moulaye Diallo from Mali, Stein Bie from Norway (currently head of the International Service for National Agriculture Research (ISNAR)), and Youba Sokona from Environmental Development Action in the Third World (ENDA-TM) Senegal who now works in collaboration with IIED's climate programme. We met, we discussed, we argued, often vehemently. But I don't think much of it made any difference. As Ambassador Bob Ryan admitted, he had got the draft text prepared already by cutting and pasting the relevant chunks from Agenda 21.

Going along to the INCD gave me an insight into international policy-making processes. There was a certain fascination about observing people and groups at work, along the corridors as well as in the plenary chamber, and in the restaurants of Geneva. You could get obsessed with questions such as: why are the Australians pushing a line on indigenous rights? What can the delegate from Japan be discussing so intensely with her colleague from Haiti? Have all the square brackets come off article 21? Does anyone know what the Global Mechanism might actually do, and who will get the job? But after a few days of this, I would be desperate to return to something which more nearly represented normal life. The ten sessions of the INCD have now been followed by five conferences of the parties (COPs), and the expected structures associated with all international conventions have been set up – COP, Secretariat, CST, Bureau meetings...

At an early session of the INCD in New York, an ancienne combattante for the Sahel, Anne de Lattre – who had set up and run the OECD's Club du Sahel for 15 years – asked with her elegant good manners whether the whole process was not becoming just a trifle complicated. Surely we could simply agree a code of good practice on which to base future activities in the drylands – might this not be a better way forward? But for many, the CCD had become a totem. The CCD had to have exactly the same structure and status as the other Rio conventions on climate change and biological diversity. Anything less than this would be a slight on poor drought-prone countries, pushing for recognition of their particular problems within a crowded international agenda. But the end has been a green cul-de-sac. Institutional politics and global empire-building have triumphed over getting effective action in the field.

Donors have maintained a lukewarm adherence to the CCD, anxious not to appear the agents of its demise, but at the same time funding a range of parallel activities through bilateral and other channels. They have repulsed attempts to set up a special CCD fund, having seen the poor results from earlier enterprises, such as the DESCON, the Desertification Fund established after the UN Conference on Desertification. However, it looks as though the Global Environment Facility (GEF) will now open a window for drylands in its future strategy. Meanwhile, the agenda for dryland nations has moved on to debt relief, poverty reduction strategies, decentralization, and land reform – all areas of great relevance to the principles underlying the CCD, yet the process of drawing up National Action Plans by ministries of the environment has often involved very little buy-in from neighbouring ministries.¹²

There was a flurry of hope and activity in CCD circles when it looked possible that the Clean Development Mechanism might provide lots of new money for carbon sequestration in drylands, if only you could get the peasants to plant lots of trees. There is also a growing consortium of NGOs and researchers who think there is good money and a living to be made from linking into the Kyoto accords. If farmers can grow cotton, cocoa and coffee for world markets, why not trees? Maybe you could also sell-out carbon storage credits through improved soil management? At one level, it seems weird and improbable, yet, perhaps no more unlikely than farmers in Europe being paid to conserve the landscape and provide animal welfare benefits, rather than producing food. Its success and sustainability at local level will depend on how it is done, what share of benefits farmers will receive, and whether government will see this as an opportunity to renew a policing role over their peasantry, on the grounds of needing to ensure compliance with this international accord.

Ten years on from Rio, we need a reassessment of the CCD and whether it makes sense to continue along this track. Can anyone provide evidence that the CCD has made a difference to the livelihoods and opportunities of poor drylands peoples? I feel that the CCD has not been the right mechanism for drylands, partly because ‘desertification’ or drylands degradation is not a global environmental problem of the same sort as climate change, or ozone depletion. The causes, manifestations and solutions are far broader and more diverse. Equally, there is no clear common global interest equivalent to that driving the other environmental conventions. There would have been, had we opted for a soils convention instead of the CCD, an option which some are still pushing for. Many governments North and South share a global concern for addressing poverty, debt relief and HIV/AIDS, and creating more equitable trading systems. But these issues are being tackled elsewhere. Hence, the seats at the CCD are emptying fast with the audience moving to more attractive and up-to-date shows in town.

It has become clear that the future of drylands depends not just on drylands but on what happens elsewhere. Take West Africa, for example. The life chances of a Sahelian household hang upon the travails and successes of their migrant brothers and sisters, whether in the plantations of Côte d'Ivoire, selling CDs in the shadow of the Eiffel tower in Paris, or getting an education and a job in government or an NGO. It also depends on West African professionals arguing their case within the global institutions which set policy on financial flows, markets, prices, patents and trade. The Club du Sahel¹³ and Comité Inter-Etat de Lutte contre la Secheresse au Sahel have clearly demonstrated the need to widen perspectives away from a narrow eye on the Sahel and broaden the vision to take in the West Africa region, and wider world of global opportunities. With more Cap Verdiens in New York than on the islands themselves, this is a perspective which marries more neatly with what local people themselves assess as their chances of making a decent livelihood.

Soils hit the global agenda

The notoriously unglamorous world of soils suddenly became hot property in the mid-1990s. The World Bank launched its soil fertility initiative, and a rock-phosphate programme was developed by the International Fertilizer Development Center, International Centre for Research in Agroforestry and others. Ian Scoones and I had developed a proposal for work to examine how farmers actually manage the fertility of their land, and the importance of diversity between farmers, locations, and different kinds of fields and crops. This built neatly on Ian's work in Zimbabwe and Ethiopia, and on my interest from Mali fieldwork days in the negotiations between farmers and herders to exchange access to water for dung, the essential ingredient for a good harvest.¹⁴We were concerned to find some middle ground between the gung-ho approach of the chemical fertilizer brigade (‘what we need is aerial spraying of rock phosphate across Africa’) and the low-input, organic school who seemed to believe in the moral superiority of making compost, and cutting and carrying organic matter regardless of yields achieved or labour expended.

With a grant from the EU, we got research going in Mali, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe working with a mix of NGOs and research organizations from the countries concerned and with support from Dutch colleagues at the Royal Tropical Institute, Toon Defoer and Arnold Budelman, with whom we developed a training manual for soil fertility analysis.¹⁵ We wanted to look at farmer perceptions of soil fertility, differences in farmer practice in relation to socio-economic status, and analysis of nutrient flows within farms. We also wanted to support farmer experimentation to improve systems of cycling and nutrient use, through the development of simple means to monitor nutrient flows, and to assess impacts of national and international policy measures on soil-fertility management options.¹⁶

Other work developed from research on soil fertility management at this set of field sites. We met Eric Smaling from Wageningen University, high priest of soil nutrient budgets and a key actor behind much of the flurry of interest in Africa's soil fertility problem. With his friends and colleagues we put together the NUTNET programme, with Dutch funding, bringing in Thea Hilhorst, who had spent the previous few years in Sikasso, southern Mali. A series of case studies¹⁷ and a new series – Managing Africa's Soils – were the fruit of such collaboration. A second EU grant allowed us to pull together our various African and European colleagues into a network for exchanging ideas and experience among soil fertility enthusiasts. We included a visit by African colleagues to the highlands of Scotland and intensive farmlands of The Netherlands. It was an eye-opener for us all, seeing the extreme dependence on agricultural subsidies, the very diverse livelihood systems in Scotland, and the strict reliance on soil-nutrient budgets for farmers in nitrogen-vulnerable areas of The Netherlands. The research also gave us space to think more broadly –Ian and I produced a summary for DfID on policy for soils management in Africa,¹⁸ and Thea and I prepared guidelines for The Dutch Ministry for Development Co-operation.¹⁹

The work on soil conservation involved with Looking After Our Land, and the interest which it inspired, led to a major collaborative programme between Chris Reij, Ian Scoones and myself. We commissioned a series of case studies of indigenous soil and water conservation measures from 25 different sites across Africa, from Tunisia to South Africa, from Mali to Ethiopia. Indigenous soil and water conservation practices are rarely acknowledged in the design of conventional development projects. Instead, the history of soil and water conservation in Africa has been one of imposing external solutions without regard for local practice. There is a remarkably diverse range of locally developed and adapted technologies for the conservation of water and soil, well suited to their particular sites and socio-economic conditions. Sustaining the Soil²⁰ documents the many farmers’ practices we could find, illustrating their ingenuity, and exploring their origins and adaptations carried out by farmers over generations, in response to changing circumstances.

West African land and the FBI

In early 1996, we were contacted by the Overseas Development Administration (ODA) to help with a new programme of work which involved collaborating with the French government in West Africa. A meeting had recently taken place between John Major, then UK Prime Minister, and Jacques Chirac, then the newly elected President of France. They had discussed the prospects for a Franco-British Initiative (FBI) to include collaboration on a wide range of issues, from defence and aircraft design to education and health. Policy development in West Africa was also included, and three fields chosen: cocoa policy among producer nations, strengthening collaboration between farmer organizations and agricultural research institutes, and opening up national and regional debate on land-tenure issues and options for intervention.

West Africa offers the opportunity to witness the marks of history and colonial heritage in patterns of government, legislation and attitudes. The FBI has helped to bring together researchers from anglophone and francophone countries in West Africa, with support from IIED, the Groupe de Recherche et d'Echanges Technologiques (GRET) and the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) –our principal French partners – supported by an advisory committee established by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The FBI started with a big meeting in the triste atmosphere of the island of Gorée,²¹ Senegal where the slave boats would dock to pick up unwilling passengers for the sugar plantations of the West Indies. The Gorée meeting provided a chance to get English- and French-speaking West Africans talking about common issues.

At the same time, our French colleagues generated a set of fascinating perspectives on how land issues might be addressed, based on much experience recently acquired such as through the Plan Foncier Rural in Côte d'Ivoire.²² Foremost among our French collaborators have been Philippe Lavigne Delville from GRET, and Jean-Pierre Chauveau of IRD, both bringing a powerful mix of practical experience from field level, with capacity to conceptualize and analyse the different kinds of institutional arrangements we have been studying with our West African partners. It has not been an entirely easy process, trying to broker the multiple barriers of language, intellectual tradition and approach. But it has been highly productive, with a series of studies now being generated from our joint programme on ‘derived rights of access to land’.²³

This research project has been investigating the wide range of secondary rights which people try to negotiate in order to gain access to land, including tenancy, loans, land pledges and share-cropping. Each location provides a diversity of practical detail which makes it difficult to draw up water-tight categories. Regardless of the detail, however, our recommendation seems clear – that local practice needs to be set within a broader government framework which can confer validation and legality on arrangements which are acknowledged locally as legitimate.²⁴ A new programme on shifting claims to land in West Africa with our francophone colleagues is now underway and will provide an in-depth framework for investigating whose land rights are changing, and how government policy might support poorer groups to assert their claims more effectively.²⁵

Networking land issues

Our work on land tenure in West Africa provided the basis for support to DfID's Conference on Land Rights and Sustainable Development in sub-Saharan Africa, held at Sunningdale in February 1999. We were a group of 70–80 people, including many professionals from East, South and West Africa – researchers and government officials with responsibility for land tenure issues. The combined experience of the group provided a heady mix of much in-depth knowledge and wisdom²⁶ from which grew the Landnet Africa programme. Launched in Addis Ababa in January 2000, this has established networks at national and regional levels among a broad mix of people engaged in land issues, providing a means to share lessons and ideas about making land rights more secure. We currently support Michael Ochieng from RECONCILE, Kenya and Hubert Ouédraogo of GRAF, Burkina Faso as coordinators of their respective regional networks. Both have been highly effective advocates on land issues within their regions, and are helping to generate wider debate on different options to approaching land-rights management. The challenge now is to see how Landnet can actively engage in the various land reform policies underway in many African countries. Judy Longbottom and Julian Quan have been key figures in facilitating Landnet's growth.

CURRENT AND FUTURE THEMES: DECENTRALIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION

Two main themes dominate the current Drylands Programme agenda – the decentralization process in West Africa, and sustainable livelihoods. Decentralization of government responsibilities and activity from central to local levels has been strongly advocated by both donor agencies and many national administrations. The hope is that decentralization will bring more effective local governance, better-tailored service provision, and the greater generation of resources for investment in local economic development.

Experience so far, however, provides little evidence of such benefits. Decentralization provides a setting with enormous potential benefits – but will they ever emerge? Who will gain? Will it provide cover for a local elite to seize power in the name of local democracy? How will questions of land allocation and administration be addressed, and what kind of compromise will be achieved with customary chiefs? Decentralization raises fundamental questions about power and governance within West African countries (as it does in many European states as well). Local government needs some measure of financial independence as well as firm commitment towards local accountability and willingness to listen to diverse voices, not all of which sing the communal hymn. But central governments remain unwilling to translate the rhetoric of decentralization and local responsibility into practical measures to ensure an effective transfer of powers and resources.

Drylands’ new programme – Making Decentralization Work –aims to address the major challenges and opportunities that such a process of decentralization can open up, to strengthen community-based approaches to natural resource management, and to identify with partners how best local-level practice can inform more effectively the national policy-making process. This means helping local institutions to become more inclusive and accountable, and trying to ensure that local voices and perspectives, and those of less powerful groups, are heard in national-level policy debates. Working in four Sahelian countries – Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Senegal – we hope to enable the exchange and dissemination of ideas and experience with new approaches.

In 2000, we finalized work with the Institut d'Economie Rurale (IER) in Mali and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Sussex, examining what make up the elements of a sustainable rural livelihood in Mali, Ethiopia and Bangladesh. It was an unrivalled opportunity to work with in-country partners and IDS research staff in understanding the different opportunities open to rich and poor, men and women, young and old, urban and rural. What strategies do people pursue? How does agriculture fit with migration and off-farm activity? What social, institutional and political constraints influence the choices people face? Working with Karen Brook of IDS and N'Golo Coulibaly of IER allowed us to go back to Dalonguebougou in Mali to see how people's lives had changed over nearly 20 years. It helped us to remember that such lives do not fit into neat boxes labelled ‘farmer’, ‘trader’, ‘migrant’ or ‘herder’. Instead, they combine an ever-changing range of activities in a myriad of fashions which allow people to pursue new things, try out emerging niches, experiment with new crops, explore the benefits of trading with a donkey cart, even fortune-telling. Rural households are highly inventive and able to seize new opportunities as they arise, in contrast to some perceptions of poverty in Africa which tend to categorize ‘poor people’ as victims, lacking in spirit and ever vulnerable to shifts and changes in economic circumstance.

Drylands and globalization

After 14 years of work, it is clear that the problems facing Africa's drylands must be seen as part of a much broader system, in which multiple inter-relations demonstrate the dense integration of much global activity. Sahelians find their way around the world, identifying opportunities where they can make a better living. The incomes of dryland peoples and nations also turn to an increasing extent on the operation of world markets in cotton and groundnuts, the price of gold, and demand for rare metals, as well as immigration policy in Europe and the USA. The new policy paradigms from Downing Street and the White House are tried out on sceptical developing-country governments, through the conditionalities attached to debt-relief agreements. Thus, it is not just users of the London underground who are exposed to the tensions inherent in public-private partnerships, but also families in Ghana seeking more assured water supplies.

Legislation in developed countries has its own impact, often far away, and not just directly related to trade. The EU chocolate directive of 1999 is a good example, with mixed impacts for West Africa. The directive established revised standards for levels of non-cocoa fat which would be allowed in products sold within the EU that can call themselves ‘chocolate’, the consequence of lobbying by the British confectionery industry. A lower proportion of cocoa fat is now acceptable, which has brought further downward pressure on world market prices for cocoa, damaging incomes and livelihoods in Côte d'Ivoire (with 40 per cent of world cocoa production) as well as Ghana. Yet, the shea-nut-oil producers of Mali welcomed the chocolate directive, having lobbied for its adoption, since it provides new market opportunities for output of this non-cocoa fat from a largely female dry-season activity in the savannah.

There are new health-related controls on imported foods brought into Europe aimed at protecting domestic consumers from high levels of pesticide residue and other potential toxins. Groundnut imports from drylands are particularly at risk, given the incidence of aflatoxin, thought to contribute to liver cancer, generated by a mould which grows too readily on the crop after harvest when inadequate drying has taken place. West African producers will need to find ways of raising the quality of their harvested crop if European markets are not to become closed to them. Equally, fruit and vegetable crops – from green beans to mangoes – will need to demonstrate conformity to tighter health requirements.

For centuries, the peoples of West Africa have adapted to changing circumstances and opportunities by moving. The creation of nation states and frontiers has partially checked such easy passage, though flows of people and goods within the region remain very important. The drought years of the 1970s and 1980s prompted many Sahelians to seek out new lands in higher rainfall areas. Thus, Côte d'Ivoire now provides homes and land to more than 3 million people from Burkina Faso and Mali. While cocoa and coffee prices were high, such massive rates of migration were positively encouraged, since this labour formed the backbone of the export economy. But now, as many commodity prices hit their lowest levels for decades, there are tensions between migrant settlers and local people.

New legislation passed in late 1998 circumscribes the rights to land which non-citizens can claim, so that only Ivorians themselves can be property holders in land. Conflict and expulsion of migrant farmers have taken place in some areas, leading to a significant return movement by Sahelian families to their homeland. Yet the incomes from migration and settlement in Côte d'Ivoire remain critical to the livelihoods of a huge number of farming families in the Sahel. At the same time, the production and harvest of cash crops in Côte d'Ivoire are highly dependent on the energies of their settler farmers. Such regional issues require mechanisms to defuse tensions and find solutions which build on the complementary interests of all parties.

Overall, it is not clear what ‘globalization’ will bring for drylands. On the climate front, predictions from modelling activity present a range of scenarios, some bringing more rain, others less. As in other regions of the world, it is difficult to specify the impact of global climate processes at local level. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change argues that whatever happens to rainfall, dryland regions will become more vulnerable to climatic risk, and exposed to higher variability in the amounts and distribution of rainfall. Hence, countries will need to strengthen systems for monitoring rainfall, to detect as early as possible any adverse impacts and trends, while evolving responses to adapt to new circumstances in future.

As far as biotechnology is concerned, great play has been made by proponents of genetic modification that it could provide new varieties able to withstand drought, grow in highly saline conditions, or even absorb nitrogen from the atmosphere thereby obviating the need for inputs of fertilizer. But the process remains vague by which such ‘miracles’ might be achieved, the skills and funding found, and corporate power and broader public interest aligned. The highly diverse range of crop varieties found within drylands, and the need to maintain capacity for self-provision of seed stock within such farming systems, argue for an agnostic approach to prospects for a new green revolution for marginal agriculture, at least in the short term. More immediate benefits could be reaped through improving the incentives and access to marketing opportunities faced by many farmers, and increasing their access to new thinking and practice about soil conservation and fertility management which make best use of local knowledge and resources. Putting GMOs on one side, simpler forms of biotechnology, such as marker-assisted selection and cloning techniques, are more likely to produce crop varieties with the range of characteristics needed to help them survive in harsh conditions, rather than focusing on a single gene.

Where next for IIED Drylands?

Our future depends on effective collaboration with a range of actors, with partners in Africa at the heart of the strategy. Our role remains to strengthen and support their activities, and act as broker, facilitator, catalyst and meeting ground for sharing new ideas. We continue to publish in both English and French, with the aim of making better links between people working in what remain different language areas. Promoting exchange between East and West African groups working on similar challenges is a significant component of the programme's work. A continuing role for IIED demands that we go on changing, so that our ‘partnership’ approach with Southern organizations really does live up to the values we claim. To this end, we have developed a code of conduct for collaborative research which outlines our goals for how we want to work with Southern partners. It recognizes the potential tensions involved in such relations and argues for greater responsiveness to partner priorities, more transparency and clearly accountable procedures. We must make more time at the beginning of projects to ensure that we share a joint vision of the work to be done, openness about the division of tasks and budgets, and negotiation of how results will be published and credited.

Our record here has been good, with a very large output of books, articles and reports clearly authored by both Southern partners and IIED staff. Such principles of collaboration and shared responsibility are key to IIED's capacity to sell itself in future yet, given our lack of core funding, we are also forced to be opportunistic, seizing new opportunities and openings as they arise, and hoping to mould them to fit our broader strategy. We must also evolve a different pattern of activity in which we work harder at trying to change the policies and practice of our own governments, where they damage the interests of poorer nations. Equally, we should be looking at the impacts of global trade, aid and finance initiatives on the particular interests of poorer African nations, so that our arguments for change have force and legitimacy. The New Partnership for African Development (NePAD) needs to keep the interests of more marginal countries in mind.

Over the last 14 years, it has been heartening to see in much of dryland Africa the serious policy advances made in favour of local institutions for managing resources, and the value accorded to farmer knowledge and perspectives. Now that the arguments in favour of decentralization have been won, come the challenges of putting such principles into practice. I trust that the next 14 years will demonstrate how the rhetoric in favour of more sustainable livelihoods for the poor can translate into tangible improvements to the opportunities faced by dryland peoples.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1Chambers, Robert (1998) Farmer First: Farmer Innovation And Agricultural Research. ITDG, London; Conroy, Czech and Litvinoff, M (1991) The Greening of Aid, Oxfam, Oxford; Harrison, Paul (1987) The Greening of Africa, Paladin, London; Rochette, RN (1989) Le Sahel en lutte contre la Désertification: Leçons d'Expériences, CILSS/Verlag, Weikersheim; Shaikh, A et al (1988) Opportunities for Sustained Development, E/Di for USAID, Washington.

2Brock, Karen and Ngolo Coulibaly (1999) Sustainable Rural Livelihoods in Mali. IDS Research Report 35, IDS, Sussex.

3Shivji, Issa G (1998) Not yet Democracy: Reforming Land Tenure in Tanzania, IIED/Hakiardhi/University of Dar es Salaam.

4Available as: Moorehead, Richard (1997) Structural Chaos: Community and State Management of Common Property in Mali, Drylands Programme Pastoral Land Tenure Monograph 3.

5Scoones, Ian (ed.) (1993) Living with Uncertainty, IT Publications, London.

6Atampugre, N (1993) Behind the Lines of Stone, Oxfam, Oxford.

7Reij, Chris and Waters-Bayer, A (eds) (2001) Promoting Farmer Innovation in Africa, Earthscan, London.

8Méthode Active de Recherche et de Planification Participative.

9Associates in Research and Education for Development and Centred'Education, de Recherche, de Formation en Langues Africaines.

10Bishop, Josh, Ian Scoones and Camilla Toulmin ‘The future of Africa's drylands: Is local resource management the answer?’ in Holmberg, Johan (ed.) (1992) Policies for a Small Planet, Earthscan, London.

11Toulmin, Camilla (1992) From ‘Combatting Desertification’ to Improving Natural Resource Management – A Significant Advance?, IIED, London.

12Freudiger, P and O Touré (1998) Implementation of the CCD in Seven Sahelian Countries, OECD, Paris.

13The West African Long Term Prospective Study, OECD (1998).

14Toulmin, Camilla (1992) Cattle, Women and Wells. Managing Household Survival in the Sahel. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

15Defoer, T and A Budelman (eds) (2001) Managing Soil Fertility in the Tropics: A Resource Guide for Participatory Learning and Action Research. Royal Tropical Insitute, The Netherlands.

16Scoones, Ian (ed.) (2001) Dynamics and Diversity: Soil Fertility and Farming Livelihoods in Africa, Earthscan, London.

17Hilhorst, Thea and Fred Muchena (2000) Nutrients on the Move: Soil Fertility Dynamics in African Farming Systems, IIED, London.

18Scoones, Ian and Camilla Toulmin (1999) Policies for Soil Fertility Management in Africa, IIED and IDS, London and Brighton.

19Hilhorst, Thea and Camilla Toulmin (eds) (2000) Integrated Soil Fertility Management. Policy and Best Practice Document 7, DGIS, The Netherlands.

20Reij, Chris, Ian Scoones and Camilla Toulmin (1996) Sustaining the Soil: Indigenous Soil and Water Conservation in Africa, Earthscan, London.

21Toulmin, Camilla, P Lavigne-Delville and S Traoré (eds) (2002) Dynamics of Resource Tenure in West Africa. James Currey, Oxford.

22Lavigne Delville, P (ed.) (1998) Quelles politiques foncières pour l'Afrique rurale? Réconcilier pratiques, légitimité et légalité. Karthala, Paris.

23For a synthesis of the findings, see: Lavigne Delville, P et al (2002) Negotiating Access to Land in West Africa: A Synthesis of Findings from Research on Derived Rights to Land, IIED, London.

24Lavigne Delville, P et al (2001) Securing Secondary Rights to Land in West Africa, Drylands Issue Paper 107, Haramata 39, pp12-15.

25CLAIMS to Land in West Africa, an EU-Funded Research Project in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'lvoire and Mali – see www.iied.org/drylands.

26Toulmin, Camilla and Julian Quan (eds) (2000) Evolving Land Rights, Policy and Tenure in Africa, IIED, NRI, DFID, London.