west african environmental narratives and development-volunteer praxis

WEST AFRICAN ENVIRONMENTAL NARRATIVES AND DEVELOPMENT-VOLUNTEER PRAXIS“

WILLIAM G. MOSELEY and PAUL LARIS

ABSTRACT. Environmental narratives in Africa have been examined in a flurry of publications since the mid-1990s. In this article we seek to offer insights into the role and motivations of volunteer development workers in perpetuating environmental narratives. We examine the factors that led to the questioning or nonquestioning of environment-development discourses and their influence, if any, on the actual work undertaken by volunteers. As former development volunteers, we also explore the role that the development-volunteer experience subsequently played in shaping our own research as academics. Our analysis is based largely on our tenure as U.S. Peace Corps volunteers in Mali from 1987 until 1989 and our later experiences as academics. We draw on our memories, interviews with former colleagues, and training materials to describe how volunteers were introduced to, and encour- aged to act on, environmental problems in the West African Sudano-SaheL We adopt a reflexive approach to explore briefly how our experiences as volunteers influenced our research and writing as academics. Keywords: desertification, development volunteers, environmental narratives, Mali, West Africa.

S i n c e the mid-1990s environmental narratives have been discussed in a spate of publications (for example, Fairhead and Leach 1996; Swift 1996; McCann 1999; Bassett and Koli Bi 2000). Often inspired by poststructural critiques, these works have aimed to overturn long-established environmental explanations through critical analysis of discourse and science in combination with detailed local studies of environmental change that drew on local experiences. Scholars working in this arena have often concluded that colonial interpretations of environmental degradation were fre- quently based on little to no systematic investigation, that these interpretations per- sisted over time primarily for political reasons, and that, in some cases, evidence suggests that actual trends may be quite different.

Furthermore, numerous scholars have made calls to challenge orthodox nature-society views and to explain the reasons for their persistence (M. Leach and R. Mearns 1996b3 Batterbury, Forsyth, and Thomson 1997; Forsyth 2003). Others writers have suggested that a fundamental objective for scholars is to develop “counternarratives” that will foster better decision making than do the currently popular scenarios (for example, Roe 1995). Counternarratives typically build an explanation of environmental change-or stability-from the ground up by beginning with the perspective of a local, usually rural, population or marginalized group.

* We are grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their feedback on earlier versions of this article. We also wish to thank our many Malian friends and collaborators with whom we have interacted over the years, as well as our fellow Peace Corps volunteers who directly or indirectly informed the findings we share in this article.

4t DR. MOSELEY is an associate professor of geography at Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota 55105. DR. LAMS is an associate professor of geography at California State University, Long Reach, California 90840.

The Geographical Review 98 (1): 59-81, January 2008 Copyright 0 zoo8 by the American Geographical Society of New York

60 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

In addition to conducting careful analyses that challenge these narratives, a variety of academics have examined the groups that support, promote, and perpetuate environmental narratives, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. These scholars have argued that researchers should contextualize environmental evidence according to the agendas of the regimes that establish them. In the African context, the origins of several narratives date back to the colonial era. In many instances researchers demonstrated that environmental narratives were less the product of systematic, scientific investigation than of conjecture. Scholars argued that colonial foresters and administrators had an incentive to support a story of widespread degradation at the hands of local people because this allowed for the transfer of resource control from local people to colonial authorities or to white settlers in East and southern Africa (M. Leach and R. Mearns 1996b; Moore 1996).

This is not to argue that some colonial-era scientists did not attempt to rigor- ously apply scientific methods to understanding African environments (Tilley 2003). For example, colonial scientists carried out a range of applied and basic research projects in the process of developing an ecology model for the savanna region (Laris and Wardell 2006). But colonial science suffered from a number of significant short- comings, including: the inappropriate transposition of ecological models derived from temperate climates to the tropical savanna; a deep, underlying belief that Afri- cans were careless and were destroying their environment through the “evil” practices of slash-and-burn agriculture, bush fires, and intensive grazing; a spatial and temporal bias, seen in findings that were often extrapolated from very localized and short-term studies to the larger region in order to explain broad-scale environmental changes; and a near-complete failure to incorporate local understanding of environmental processes into research and policy agendas (M. Leach and R. Mearns 1996b; McCann 1999; Turner 2003).

Scholars further suggested that a number of contemporary actors contributed to the persistence and promotion of these narratives. In commenting on the role of expatriate scientists in this process, Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns noted that, “by comparison with the colonial period, some notable similarities can be observed in the relationship of the contemporary expatriate scientists and academic advisers to the process of public policy formation in Africa. One is the exchange of ideas of like-minded individuals, a second is the tendency for scientists to be-more or less directly-‘in the pay’ of policy institutions” (1996a, 19).

Some scholars argued that nongovernmental organizations ( NGOS) have also had an incentive for promoting a narrative of environmental degradation. Jeremy Swift, for example, outlined how disasters have led to greater fund-raising possibili- ties for the NGO community, not to mention employment for NGO workers (1996). Jesse Ribot described a similar incentive for certain ministries in African countries, and their employees, who benefit from natural-resource disasters in terms of larger budgets and more civil-service jobs (1999). For example, during the 1980s national governments had a strong incentive for demonstrating that they were concerned about environmental degradation in order to appeal to the major donors who were

WEST AFRICAN ENVIRONMENTAL NARRATIVES 61

funding such projects. At the height of the desertification period in Mali, for example, the regime of President Moussa Traork sought to strengthen its appeal for so-called green-development money. The regime did this by crackmg down on the indigenous practices thought to be contributing to environmental degradation in order to demonstrate that it was serious about protecting the environment. In some cases the oppressive policies continued even after their ineffectiveness had become clear because the revenue generated by fines for the supposed environmentally degrading activities was filling government coffers (Laris 2004).

Furthermore, Leach and Mearns implicated development consultants, noting that, “under strong time pressure, an analysis is produced which tacitly confirms and further reinforces the conventional wisdom embodied in the original terms of reference” (1996b, 25). They went on to suggest that, although some consultants may recognize flaws in their analysis, the existing incentive structure-in the form of potential future contracts-encourages them to produce reports that reinforce environmental narratives. Clearly this does not apply to all consultants; rather, it suggests structural and individual factors that can influence the perpetuation of a false narrative.

Despite the wealth of attention paid to the subject, no one, to our knowledge, has examined the position of development volunteers in the process of environmental narrative formation, persistence, and subsequent critique. By “development volunteers” we mean those who work for subsistence pay for North American and European government agencies, such as the U.S. Peace Corps, the French Volontaires du Progres, the British Voluntary Service Overseas, or the Canadian International Development Agency. This group of actors struck us as particularly interesting because they have no apparent incentive-financial or professional-for supporting the dominant narrative. Furthermore, many volunteers, ourselves included, returned to the field site to conduct master’s, doctoral, and/or postdoctoral research.’

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE AND METHODS The objectives of this article are to explore the role and motivations of U.S. Peace Corps volunteers ( PCVS) with respect to the persistence and promotion of environmental narratives in the West African context, to examine the factors that led to the questioning or nonquestioning of environment-development discourses and their influence, if any, on the actual work undertaken by volunteers, and to reflect on how our field experiences in Mali during a period of heightened efforts to halt desertification in late 1980s shaped our later research and writing. Given our tenure as PCVS

in Mali from 1987 to 1989, we focus on the U.S. Peace Corps and the West African Sudano-Sahel-a region encompassing the Sahel and Sudan savanna-particularly in Mali. We draw on our memories, on approximately fifteen semistructured interviews with former colleagues, and on training materials.

Our approach is reflexive in the two senses: We interrogate our own memories and those of other volunteers in Mali during the 1980s to better understand what influenced our behavior and thinking at the time, and we employ the concept of

62 T m GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

reflexivity to consider how our experiences influenced our subsequent research and writing as academics. Broadly defined, “reflexivity” means turning back on oneself, a process of self-reference. According to Charlotte Davies, “In its most transparent guise, reflexivity expresses researchers’ awareness of their necessary connection to the research situation and hence their effects upon it” (1999, 7). In the context of social science research, reflexivity at its most immediately obvious level refers to the ways in which the personnel and process of doing research affect the products of research, in all phases from the initial selection of the topic to the final reporting of results (England 1994; Davies 1999).

THE WEST AFRICAN ENVIRONMENTAL NARRATIVE AND

DEVELOPMENT VOLUNTEERS An environmental narrative consists of a body of texts-scholarly, popular, journal- istic, or literary-that produces an internally consistent understanding. Richard Peet and Michael Watts called narratives associated with specific geographical regions “regional discursive formations” and described them as certain “modes of thought, logics, themes, styles of expression, and typical metaphors [that] run through the discursive history of a region, appearing in a variety of forms, disappearing occa- sionally, only to reappear with even greater intensity in new guises” (1996,14).

Allan Hoben suggested that the degree of dominance of a specific narrative de- pends on its correspondence with observed facts and also on the political power of those telling the story (1995,1019). The influence of a narrative is enhanced when:

Donor experts and user constituents are strongly attached to them; Donors are politically, strategically or morally pressured to act quickly; Little technical or socioeconomic research has been conducted, and the data base in the recipient nation is weak; The recipient country must rely heavily on expatriate experts for advice; The recipient government is dependent on foreign assistance; and The recipient government is weak, authoritarian, or both and does not have the institutional capacity to hear and learn from its rural inhabitants.

All of these conditions held true during the 1980s in Mali. In the late 1980s, the time when we were PCVS, the dominant environmental

discourse in the West African Sudano-Sahel was that of desertification. As has been argued elsewhere, the 1970s and 1980s Sahelian drought and famine breathed a new life into a somewhat dormant, and long-standing, narrative on the human causes of desertification (Thomas and Middleton 1994; Swift 1996; Fairhead and Leach 2000a). In our view the West African desertification narrative is a quintessential example: It combined several different ecozones into one grand regional explanation of degradation involving savannization of forest, sahelization of savanna, and desertification of the Sahel (Figure 1). In a sense the desertification narrative for the Malian Sahel and Sudan savanna in the 1980s combined a suite of degradation stories under the


Savanna

0 250 500 Km I - Climate Regions of West Africa I I

FIG. 1-Climate regions of West Africa. Sources: Modified and simplified from the Koppen-Geiger climate classification; G I S data from UVMV 2007. (Cartography by Birgit Muhlenhaus, Macalester Col- lege)

one umbrella term. Scholars assumed that the causal factors were the same for each ecological belt: overpopulation and overgrazing, poverty, poor farming, wood cutting, and fire. In other words, complementing the desertification narrative was the long-standing neo-Malthusian fear that “overpopulation” was leading to environmental destruction. The desertification discourse dominated policy documents, influenced development plans, and pervaded the popular media of the time (Tho- mas and Middleton 1994).

To cite an example of the period, two months into our four-month-long training, many of us received the August 1987 issue of National Geographic magazine with a cover story entitled “Africa’s Sahel: The Stricken Land.” The author, William Ellis, described desertification as an expansion of the Sahara Desert southward into the formerly productive Sahelian and Sudanian zones. The dominant view of the era described desertification as a process largely driven by human action. A caption in Ellis’s article illustrates this point: “Man has punished this barren realm, strip- ping it of trees and bankrupting the soil. Abetted, the desert advances and the region edges toward catastrophe” (1987,141).

The desertification narrative jibes well with the more contemporary concern about a vicious cycle of poverty and environmental degradation (critiqued by, for example, Broad 1994; Bryant 1997; Moseley zooi,2004,2005). That view is encapsu-


lated in this quotation from Our Common Future, commonly known as the “Brundtland Report”: “No . . . region [other than the West African Sahel] more tragically suffers the vicious cycle of poverty leading to environmental degradation, which leads in turn to even greater poverty” ( WCED i987,27). Indiscriminate burning practices were also thought to be a major cause of desertification (examined extensively by Laris 2002,2004; Laris and Wardell 2006).

The dominant view, as reflected on the pages of National Geographic as well as in other mainstream media, was in part the outcome of an international process to address the calamity of famine in the African Sahel during the 1970s and 1980s.~ A United Nations conference on desertification ( UNCOD) in 1977 helped mobilize international concern about the topic. Leading up to UNCOD, scientists and policymakers debated a plethora of perspectives on the causes, and indeed the definition, of desertification (Johnson 1977). UNCOD resulted in a master “Plan of Action to Halt Desertification” that became a blueprint and inspired the many antidesertification measures undertaken during the 1980s (UNCOD 1977). For example, the UNCOD Plan became the basis for the Malian Campaign against Desertification, which was the major focus of the Forestry Service and donor organizations during the 1980s (Republic of Mali 1987). It is now widely recognized that the policymakers at the UNCOD meeting prematurely diagnosed the extent and rate of the problem and overemphasized the anthropogenic causal factors (Mortimore 1989; Tucker and Nicholsen 1999; Mortimore and Turner 2005; Herrmann, Anyamba, and Tucker 2005).

Although discussion continues concerning the meaning of desertification, the degree to which it has occurred, and the role of humans in the process (Reynolds and Stafford-Smith 2002; Hermann and Hutchinson 2005; Mortimore and Turner 2005), consensus is emerging that climate fluctuations play a more critical role in determining the condition of Sahelian vegetation than previously thought. For example, recent findings strongly suggest that the 1970s and 1980s were a period of unusually low rainfall, that rainfall has increased in recent decades (Nicholsen 2005), and that vegetation has responded to the increased rainfall to some degree, produc- ing a “greening’) of the Sahel that is clearly visible in satellite images (Herrmann, Anyamba, and Tucker 2005). Finally, convincing evidence now shows that the drought was triggered not by human action but by Sahelian rainfall patterns strongly linked to sea-surface temperatures (Gianni, Saravanan, and Chang 2003; Zeng 2003; Nichol- sen 2005).3

INDOCTRINATION INTO THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE “These trainees, volunteers, and hopefully thousands more who will follow them, will help in the greening of Africa, and around the globe” (Ruppe 1985, 2; italics added). These words, spoken by Peace Corps Director Loret Miller Ruppe at a Rose Garden commemoration of the corps) twenty-fifth anniversary, illustrate how deeply the desertification narrative infiltrated the Peace Corps’ mission in Africa. Ruppe was the principal force behind the development of the new African Food Systems


Initiative (AFSI) program, designed to increase food production by smallholder farmers. The “greening of Africa” was a reference to efforts to simultaneously reduce the causes of desertification and improve agriculture through small steps such as introducing a plethora of appropriate techniques and technologies to smallholder farmers (Harrison, 1987). The program adopted a systems approach to address Africa’s inadequate food production in that volunteers would work in teams to integrate improved food production and storage techniques with the development of small- scale irrigation systems, soil conservation, and agroforestry measures (Ruppe 1985).

At a send-off gathering of new Peace Corps volunteers headed to Africa, Presi- dent Ronald Reagan noted that PCVS would play a vital role in helping the most impoverished Africans by working in food production, soil conservation, forest preservation, and water-resource development. The objective was to move Africans from short-term dependence on food aid to long-term self-sufficiency. Similarly, Vice President George W. Bush, who toured several sites in Africa, spoke of the difficult challenge that faced new volunteers, stating that “over the next ten years [the] Peace Corps would be working with African farmers on the nitty-gritty of turning that food production around” ( PCT 19853). The (‘greening of Africa” was a lofty new goal for the Peace Corps. To achieve it would require well-developed, country-specific training programs for the new AFSI teams.

Mali became a pilot AFSI program in 1986. As with all its programs, the Peace Corps designed the AFSI to closely follow country-specific priorities set by national government ministries (PCT 1986a). In the Malian context, this meant that the AFSI

became integrated with the Malian Campaign against Desertification. Efforts to improve agricultural production in Mali would require a long-term, integrated approach that emphasized soil conservation, water-resource management, reforestation programs, and an effort to reduce wood consumption through the dissemination of fuel-efficient woodstoves.

As a new cohort of Peace Corps trainees, we recall how our instructors couched our training in terms of desertification. We learned that, as part of the new AFSI

program, our goal was to address declining food production within the context of deforestation and desertification in Mali (Figure 2). We were eager to become fa- miliar with the suite of new appropriate techniques and technologies selected for the task, including: reforestation, to reverse the trend; dissemination of wood stoves, to cut down on wood consumption, the presumed cause of deforestation; community-gardening efforts, to provide dry-season sources of food as well as to generate income; construction of rock lines, to slow soil erosion; and also construction of wells and microdams, to address falling water tables as well as to provide irrigation for dry-season crops and to improve health.

One of us recalls that, as a rural development trainer for new volunteers, he developed a skit to dramatize a Malian version of the Malthusian narrative. He asked the new volunteers to carry out a scripted “role play” illustrating how land scarcity was brought on by population increase and progressive division of farm plots into smaller parcels inherited by multiple sons. This scripted version of the


FIG. 2-Forestry volunteers behind a tree nursery during training. (Photograph by Julia Earl, rainy season 1987; reproduced with her permission)

Mathusian narrative was not rooted in his Peace Corps experience in Mali; rather, it came entirely from the literature, and it perpetuated a false version of the degradation process. We later learned that, in villages where we worked, labor shortages were the most acute problem because young men were leaving in droves in search of work in C6te d’Ivoire, France, or in Mali’s cotton-growing regions. Indeed, as we reflect back on the situation today, labor shortages may explain why many pro- posed land-improvement projects failed to take off.

Although AFSI teams learned about numerous technologies, no technology epitomized the Peace Corps effort to halt desertification better than the improved mud stove. As described in the Peace Corps Times profile on Mali in 1986, “Due to the severe deforestation problems and lack of fuelwood, Peace Corps’ largest project in Mali is improved woodstove production. . . . In an effort to stem the problem of desertification and to replenish the fuelwood supply, 12 forestry PCVS are working in the development of rural woodlots” ( PCT 1986b, 5). In 1986 about one-third of all Mali PCVS were involved in the stove-dissemination program. By the time of our training in 1987, all volunteers received training on how to make and disseminate improved mud stoves (1986b). Those stoves had become the Peace Corps’ quintessential antidesertifiation technology (Figure 3). As one PCV described to our training group, “Teaching the craft of stove making is a great way to integrate into a village, because everybody likes stoves and everyone can build one.”

We later learned that one reason villagers wanted stoves was because the Malian government had threatened to fine households that did not have an improved wood


FIG. 3-A Peace Corps volunteer displays improved mud stoves. (Photograph by William Moseley, dry season 1988).

stove. A massive advertising campaign was designed to link the use of stoves with the greening of Africa. For example, one program involved giving away two free saplings to every person who built a stove.

Mud stoves were an ideal Peace Corps technology. They had all of the character- istics that Ernst Schumacher ascribed to an appropriate technology: They were easy to build, made from local materials, and designed to reduce fuelwood consumption (1973). During our fifteen-week training, stoves were the sole technology that all of us learned how to build and disseminate; specific subsets of volunteers learned other technologies.

But stove dissemination involved more than mastering the craft of stove making and developing the skills of technology transfer. Our training emphasized that a proper stove session began with a village meeting that involved a “needs assess- ment.” During this session the volunteer would discuss the history of environmental change in the village with women (the main recipients of stove training). The idea was to link the “problems” of deforestation and desertification to fuelwood consumption, population growth, and agricultural expansion. The volunteer’s goal was to make the village women understand the linkages between their “overuse” of fuelwood and environmental degradation over time. Quite bluntly, the “needs as- sessment” was an effective means of disseminating the desertification narrative.

One technique promoted by Peace Corps and other grassroots development organizations was an educational kit produced by the Groupe de Recherche et d’Appui pour 1’Autopromotion Paysanne ( GRAAP). In theory, using the GRAAP ap-


FIG. +-The Malian counterpart of a Peace Corps volunteer uses the Groupe de Recherche et d’Appui pour I’Autopromotion Paysanne (GRAAP) method to facilitate a village group discussion on environmental change. (Photograph by William Moseley, dry season 1988)

proach one was, in a participatory fashion, to work with villagers to understand how the environment had changed over time (Figure 4). The idea was that, once villagers realized the trend of environmental change, they would be motivated to plant trees and build wood stoves. In reality, the technique drew out a carefully scripted degradation narrative. Indeed, long before we could effectively communi- cate in Bambara, the local language, we could recite the story of how fuelwood cutting led to deforestation and contributed to a broader trend of desertification.

Although the stove program epitomized Peace Corps involvement in the greening-of-Africa project, it was only one of many technologies we learned to disseminate. Each AFSI sector-water resources, forestry, agriculture, and appropriate technology-learned specific techniques designed to improve agricultural output while also halting desertification. Indeed, one of us recalls fondly how he led a chant about working to h,alt the desert while carrying rocks as part of a training exercise to build antierosion rock lines. As in the case of stoves, the technologies we learned were often tied to the narrative.

Our indoctrination into the desertification narrative had several components. It began prior to our arrival at the training site in Mali as we sought knowledge about the place where we would spend the next two years. We eagerly read popular accounts of the narrative in magazines and travel books. We arrived at Peace Corps training during a time of heightened expectations that our new AFSI program would


turn Africa green and reverse the expanding desert. Once at training we learned from our trainers not only how to disseminate appropriate techniques and technologies but also how to disseminate the desertification narrative. In short, our training, use of appropriate technologies, and the GRAAP method all worked to so- lidify our preconceived notion that we were in Mali literally to “halt the desert.”

CHALLENGES TO THE NARRATIVE Most of us envisioned, and in some cases started, our work in a fashion consistent with AFSI’S goals. We helped establish tree nurseries, build mud stoves, construct rock lines, and plant gardens. However, while we were combating desertification, our approach to interaction with communities was a philosophy of bottom-up development inspired by Paulo Freire ([1968] 2000). According to this approach, we were to listen to villagers, facilitate group discussions that prioritized the community’s main concerns, and then work with the community to address those concerns. Fur- thermore, we lived in the communities, learned the local language, and developed close friendships with community members (Figure 5). Our development philosophy, and the way we lived in the community, often led to at least two locally inspired challenges to the dominant desertification discourse. First, villagers often told US

that combating environmental change was not their top priority. From their perspective, trees were abundant, and land degradation was not an acute problem. Sec- ond, working and living closely with community members often meant that volunteers gained an immense appreciation €or local or indigenous knowledge. As a result, volunteers often sided with the local perspective, leading to a distrust of civil servants and large development organizations such the U.S. Agency for Inter- national Development or the World Bank.

Concerning the first point, many of us spent long hours socializing and hanging out with local members of the community. Villagers may have initially agreed with our interpretation of environmental processes in the area, but they tended to ex- press a different view as time went on and we came to be friends. As for the second point, one of us remembers arguing with the American ambassador who had come to a Peace Corps in-service training session midway through our service to share the U.S. development-assistance plan for Mali. Part of this plan involved ramping up assistance for export-oriented cotton production. This author recalls disagree- ing vehemently with the ambassador because he had had several conversations with villagers in which they shared their concerns about cotton cultivation.

Another example of PCV bias toward the villager perspective concerns volunteers’ reactions to an instance in which a PCV went about with his Malian counterparts when state forestry agents were fining villagers for infractions of the forestry code (for example, felling trees or burning without a permit). Other volunteers strongly condemned the actions of this volunteer, suggesting a broadly held perspective that the views of villagers should be given priority over state policy.

Given the current consensus that desertification was not occurring as rapidly, extensively, or in the manner suggested in the key policy documents of the 1970s


and 1980s, we reflect back on our interpretations and experiences in Mali. Upon arrival, many of us were surprised at the “greenness” of Mali. One could argue that our questioning of the narrative began the moment we landed in Bamako, Mali’s capital. As we were having lunch at a site overlooking the city, many of us marveled at the fact that it was so lush, not what we expected for a place experiencing severe desertification. This impression was later amplified when we reached our village sites, many of which were in southern Mali, away from the Sahel proper.

Looking back, however, it seems clear that some environmental change was occurring. We repeatedly saw, and villagers noted, that the water table was dropping. One such case involved a small village on the Manden Plateau where seasonal streams are numerous. Villagers had traditionally gathered water from streambeds by digging shallow wells during the dry season. The problem was that the water table had fallen significantly, so the villagers were having difficulty digging deep enough to tap a suitable source. The men and women were tired of their annual struggle to find water and even debated where the village should be moved in order in to se- cure a better water source. As a consequence, PCVS helped construct an improved well in the village.

Projects such as this provided insight into how the climate and environment had changed in specific locales. We recall wondering, at times, whether villagers were telling the truth. Had the streams truly had water year-round in the past? Was rice formerly grown in the floodplains? Were the harvests truly bigger and better? Over time these local accounts clearly painted a picture of a different past environment. The larger question was the degree to which the changes were due to human action-degradation-versus climate-long-term drought. As volunteers we reached our own conclusions. For example, one of us concluded that the falling water table was climate driven but did not rule out the possibility that the drought itself was somehow caused by anthropogenic change-deforestation-as had been suggested in the desertification discourse.

RESPONDING TO THE COUNTERNARRATIVE Despite our awareness of-or indoctrination into-the regional discourse regarding desertification, most volunteers with whom we spoke simply engaged in other activities once they were confronted with different local concerns. In other words, most volunteers opted to address the priorities of local people even if these local concerns did not jibe with the underlying prioritization in our training. PCVS often changed tacks to help allay the villagers’ greatest concerns: assisting beekeepers, building improved wells, helping farmers graft fruit trees, working on infant and child nutrition, and other such projects. Sometimes this required a complete switch in job description. One volunteer we interviewed, whose initial position was as a forester, eventually became a health worker and went through training again after village women repeatedly told her that they had no interest in planting trees. Simi- larly, one of us switched from helping women build fuel-efficient mud stoves to training teams to construct improved wells. The change was initiated primarily by


FIG. 5-A Freirian-inspired development approach emphasized close communication and friendships with community members. Here, William Moseley chats with village elders. (Photograph by Julia Earl, dry season 1989; reproduced with her permission)

the interest level of the local population. In the eyes of some villagers, at least, the need for increased access to clean water outweighed that for fuelwood. Indeed, subsequent studies found that initial estimates linking wood cutting and deforestation to fuelwood shortages were overblown (G. Leach and R. Mearns 1988; Ribot 1999).

Curiously, even though most of us opted to undertake other forms of work in response to village demands, neither we nor any of the PCVS we interviewed seriously questioned the desertification narrative at the time we were volunteers. We may have questioned the notion that villagers were driving this problem in our locales, but we did not seriously question the higher-level concept that broad-scale, human- and climate-induced environmental change was occurring.

EXPLORING THE CONTRADICTION Unlike other development actors, we would argue that volunteers changed what they were doing because the Freirian inspired bottom-up approach they employed allowed local knowledge to trump regional discourse. Moreover, our position as “volunteers” in small villages gave us freedom to modify our agenda in most cases. That is, as volunteers we neither felt a professional obligation to adhere to a preor-


dained development plan nor were directly supervised by someone who could en- sure that such a plan was carried out. But why did volunteers change what they were doing yet tend not to challenge the dominant narrative, either in their own minds or in discussions with their peers?

In their analysis of government employees’ interactions with similar environmental discourses during the colonial period, James Fairhead and Melissa Leach argue that it is important to consider the broader social and political context as well as the specific local circumstances to understand why dominant views go unchal- lenged (2000b). In terms of the broader social and political context, we were volunteers working for the U.S. government in loose conjunction with a Malian government agency. We were driven primarily by a desire to help and not by a need to carry out a formal environment/development agenda. As such, in cases of disagreements or controversies between government agencies and the local population, volunteers tended to side with the villagers because of their closer personal connections with this group. Our position as quasi-development workers allowed us a degree of Ereedom that was not available to professionals. Although we were officially assigned to a government agency, usually a rural extension service, many of us operated nearly independent of our designated Malian counterparts, so our allegiance was to the village rather than an official government agency.

In terms of the local circumstances, many of us were in very small villages and had little supervision. Although we were assigned a specific role with the AFSI, we conducted our own needs assessments and were deeply influenced by participation rates of villagers. Villagers often “voted with their feet” and declined to participate in development activities if they did not see the benefits (or lacked the labor). Un- like many NGOS, the Peace Corps provided little money to support projects, and we had few options for encouraging villager participation through incentives or gift giving. When villagers showed little interest in adopting a particular technique or technology, rather than push, volunteers often turned to something that was popular with villagers. Unlike our Malian counterparts who worked for national agencies such as the forest service or cotton extension agencies, we were not required to follow tightly a national antidesertification agenda.

Our position in between the government agencies and the villagers gave us a unique-and sometimes overwhelming-freedom to choose and design our own projects as we saw fit. Given the broader context and local circumstances just described, we offer at least five potential explanations to elucidate the apparent contradiction raised at the beginning of this section: Why did PCVS change their on-the-ground work in response to village demands yet not seriously question the desertification narrative in their own minds or with their peers?

First, perhaps some volunteers not only believed in the desertification narrative but also wanted to act on this in the face of the local counterview. The previously discussed case of a volunteer who toured with civil servants as they fined villagers for infractions of the forestry code exemplifies this. However, this case is somewhat exceptional because that PCV had the power of the Malian state behind him. In


nearly every other case, even if volunteers sought to pursue an aggressive antidesertification agenda, they were powerless to act on this desire because they com- manded few if any resources.

Second, many of us may have rationalized the contradiction between the desertification narrative and what we experienced in terms of space and scale. Yes, we reasoned, desertification may not have been occurring where we were working, but surely it was happening someplace else or at a broader scale. Or even if desertification was not occurring in our more southern villages today, it would surely be a threat in the near future, thus it was a good idea to halt degrading activities before irreversible damage was done.

Third, even though we had no professional or financial incentive to support the dominant discourse, perhaps questioning the discourse would have presented us with an ethical dilemma. In other words, if we were not there to do good, to fight desertification, then how could we justify what we were doing? This reluctance to question the broader environmental rationale of our program may have been exac- erbated by the fact that many PCVS did struggle with their own cultural predilec- tions to be busy, active, and constructive. For some, this was especially difficult in a different cultural context and a demanding physical environment (which led to a relatively high PCV dropout rate in a number of Sahelian countries, including Mali). As such, an unthinking reluctance to seriously question the desertification narrative in order to maintain an alreadyprecarious sense of utility may have been present.

Fourth, we were aware of our temporary position-the Peace Corps requires a two-year service commitment, plus training time-so we chose to seek out projects, whether related to desertification or not, that we could accomplish in a relatively short period of time. Most volunteers were concerned primarily with the immedi- ate need to start their own project to meet the needs of the village (however small) rather than fulfilling part of a broader mission to halt desertification.

Fifth, perhaps we did not question the dominant narrative because of our education at the undergraduate level. Our own experiences illustrate this point. One of us was an undergraduate at a fairly progressive liberal arts college in the mid-1980s and was trained to be highly critical of conventional development approaches. But being critical of development was not that difficult for a left-leaning student who viewed capitalism-and its attendant development philosophies-as highly prob- lematic. This author is disturbed that he was not able to turn this critical eye on his own left-leaning, neo-Malthusian environmentalism of the time, which underlay much of his then tacit support for many aspects of the desertification narrative. The other of us was trained as an engineer at the undergraduate level. He was taught to be a problem solver and relished the opportunity to use the knowledge and skills he had acquired in college to solve problems in rural Mali. He was so eager to apply the techniques he had acquired to help solve local problems that when people declined to accept his services he initially assumed that they must be naive or else so overworked that they did not have time for him. Later, once he had grown to understand what it meant to be a rural farmer in Mali, he realized that people were mak-

74 T H E GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

ing rational decisions based on their circumstances, and he sought out individuals and villages with specific needs and desires to work with. In the end he thinks he was focused primarily on spreading the techniques and technologies. Thus the issue became finding villages interested in these practices regardless of the overlying desertification issue.

Given the closeness of the relationships we developed with some villagers, it is worth asking why we were never made aware of some of the fallacies of the desertification discourse-or at least the foolishness of some of the projects aimed at halting the desert-through our conversations with them. After all, the one thing we had plenty of in Mali was time for conversation with our Malian neighbors. Here again, it is important to view the situation in terms of both the broader factors and the specific local context. From the rural villager perspective, PCVS were often viewed as part of “big development” even though they did not see themselves that way. That is, from the perspective of village leaders-or “gatekeepers” as described by Campbell and others (2006)-volunteers, like all development workers, might bring project money into villages. The result, at least initially, was a huge incentive to keep volunteers happy and to show a village commitment. If that meant providing labor to carry out some of our antidesertification activities, such as planting trees or constructing antierosion rock walls, then this was a worthwhile investment because down the road might come the funding for a new microdam, health center, or other larger project that involved capital investment.

It is also important not to underplay the context we entered into during the late 1980s from the villagers’ perspective. By the time we arrived in Mali in 1987, a persistent drought had already caused hardship. People had endured poor harvests, had lost livestock, and were struggling to shift their livelihood strategies in order to adapt to the drought. In addition, the desertification propaganda program was at its height-a national media blitz had been aimed at halting desertification and the destructive human acts that purportedly caused it. The system of environmental regulations designed to alter presumed damaging human behaviors, such as cutting wood or setting fires, had been in place for some time. The pervasiveness of the antidesertification campaign meant that many rural Malians were convinced that some form of desertification was occurring-or that they understood that, in conversations with officials, they needed to adhere to a certain perspective. Here again scale was an issue: Even if the local environment was not in dire straits, “up north in the Sahel” the situation was believed to be much worse and, as the narrative suggested, the desert was marching southward.

Finally, perhaps we and our fellow volunteers were caught up in a classic case of “Kuhn’s paradigmatic thinking.” In the 1960s and 1970s Thomas Kuhn wrote about the persistence of paradigms-defined as working assumptions, procedures, and assumptions routinely accepted by a group of scholars-within certain scientific disciplines (1970,1977). Although the application of this notion to scientific disciplines is now somewhat discredited because, among other issues, good scientists do not necessarily accept paradigms in the manner Kuhn described, perhaps a practi-


tioner’s version of Kuhn’s paradigm was at play in this instance. In other words, certain ideas were maintained, not because of any professional or financial motivation but because, as undergraduates, we volunteers had been taught a paradigm of neo-Malthusian-inspired, human-induced environmental degradation. During our tenure as PCVS we were neither asked to critically examine these beliefs nor confronted with enough counterinformation to completely overturn the paradigm, even if we encountered many smaller examples that were inconsistent with the desertification narrative. The explanatory value of a “practitioner’s paradigm” may be use- ful in this case because it helps elucidate why volunteers may not havekntirely rejected the desertification narrative when confronted with smaller inconsistencies at the village level.

REFLECTING ON OUR EXPERIENCES AND

CONSTRUCTING COUNTERNARRATIVES

Although we did not challenge the dominant narrative as development volunteers, confronting and critiquing it has become a focal point for both of us since we entered academia. Given our experiences as PCVS during the height of the efforts to combat desertification, it is not surprising that we were deeply influenced by the works critical of the West African desertification thesis, such as those by David Tho- mas and Nicholas Middleton (i994), James Fairhead and Melissa Leach (1996), Jer- emy Swift (1996), and Michael Mortimore (1989). Reading these works forced us to revisit our Peace Corps experience in a new, more critical light. Here we adopt a reflexive approach to explore how the Peace Corps experience influenced our subsequent research and writing.

Although our formal research projects in Mali commenced years after we had wrapped up our volunteer work, one could argue that our research began while we were volunteers. As Lynne Heasley notes (2005), the Peace Corps village was where we received our first training as researchers. It was a place where we tried to find ways to help people help themselves. But was also where we lived, shared hours with people sipping tea and waiting out the hot afternoons, and witnessed malnu- trition and other forms of suffering firsthand. Through these experiences we not only learned to understand local culture, politics, and land management, we also developed personal ethics about development and change. We thus experienced our Peace Corps villages personally as well as professionally. Heasley suggests (2005),

and we agree, that in the village some of us first identified questions about people and land that later became subjects for academic research and exploration.

The Peace Corps was where we first honed an approach to interacting with our subjects. As volunteers, most of us aimed to find a position “in between” the villagers we worked and lived with and the professional development workers or government agents with whom we were assigned to work. As PCVS many of us took measures to develop a strong sense of betweenness. For example, we prided ourselves on our ability to converse in the local language. We chose to live in conventional village housing; some of us even rejected such simple improvements as tin roofs because


we did not wish to be associated with the “civil-servant” class. Most volunteers chose to eat their meals and socialize with typical village families. We wore clothing made from Malian fabric. Many of us spent long hours during the raining season working the agricultural fields with our adopted families. Most took deep-seated pride in our ability to live at the village level. We were more than participant ob- servers; our acts were part of our daily lives and part of our commitment as volunteers. Together, they provided us with insights into local culture that might not have been obvious to other development workers who were more often based in regional centers rather than in small villages. Perhaps most important, when we returned to conduct formal research, these approaches were integral parts of our research meth- odology.

Establishing a position of “betweenness” is a common goal of feminist geographers for the purpose of negotiating the difficult power issues of doing research involving marginalized groups of people (see, for example, Katz 1994; Nast 1994; Pulsipher 2001). This “in-between’’ position served us well when we returned to Mali as researchers. Indeed, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to sepa- rate our role as researchers from our past roles as PCVS. It also would have been counterproductive. Our knowledge of language, custom, village life, and even our inherited Malian names indicated to those we interviewed that we were former vol- u n t e e r ~ . ~ Many of our key contacts and most reliable informants were those we worked with while serving as volunteers.

Our position, somewhere between volunteer and development worker, researcher and villager, opened many doors for us in the field. In particular, it allowed us to gain the trust of many interviewees. For example, one of us conducted research on the delicate topic of illegal fire use. By allowing himself to be introduced as a former PCV by a past host, who was a well-respected member of the community, he was in a position to gain access to somewhat sensitive information.

Feminist scholars such as Diane Wolf and Juanita Sundberg have argued that researchers commonly face ethical dilemmas, a persistent and systematic feature of fieldwork due to the researcher’s privileged position, particularly when the research involves marginalized populations in the global South (Wolf 1996; Sundberg 2003). As volunteers we confronted ethical issues on a daily basis while we struggled to develop an understanding, rationale, or belief that our work was ultimately going to improve people’s situation in some small way, a perspective we carried with us as researchers as well.

Heasley suggests that the moral complexity of research relates to the moral complexity of nature-society relations in sub-Saharan Africa (2005). African social-environmental relationships are complex and subject to a moral economy and logic that is quite often different from our own. In order to gain access to the situated knowledge of marginalized Africans, we as researchers need to understand their worlds through participatory practice and research methods. The Peace Corps experience gave us this opportunity, but it also came with a certain responsibility, one that comes with joining any comrnunit~.~


As Heasley argues, efforts by the researcher to remain morally detached in Af- rica may result in negative consequences for the researched: “Not only does detachment produce its own biases, in the worst cases it reproduces incorrect interpretations of relationships between people and their environment. These interpretations have extraordinary negative consequences for African people, farmers and herders alike” (2005,512). Many of the scholars we cite above-ourselves included-have written about how African environmental narratives, produced from the kind of detached position that Heasley rejects, resulted in policies and practices that negatively im- pacted rural populations.

We argue that the work of constructing counternarratives in rural Africa requires rejecting the traditional objective and maintaining the detached-researcher position. As articulated by numerous feminist researchers, the most objective science emerges from the perspective of the marginalized (see, for example, Haraway 1988; Harding 1993). The detached-observer position is best resolved when researchers develop relationships with communities, share results with them, and remain open to dialogue about conclusions. Accessing this perspective requires that researchers engage with the community being researched and reflect on this experience. We argue that, in places as impoverished as rural Africa, this process involves developing a deep relationship with those being studied, something we accomplished as volunteers. Our own counternarrative work can be seen, in part, as an outcome of the relationships we developed with rural Malians combined with the shock of reading the critique of the West African degradation narratives upon our entry into graduate school. Our Peace Corps experiences in Mali deeply influenced our choice of research topic, not only because we experienced life in Mali firsthand during a difficult period but also because our development experience in Mali was shaped by a narrative of desertification that we helped perpetuate and disseminate. As such, our recent publications of counternarratives need to be seen through this reflexive lens.

MOVING FORWARD We believe we are contributing to the literature on environmental narratives in Af- rica by examining the peculiar case of development volunteers who, unlike some other actors, have no clear professional or financial incentive to support the dominant narrative. In their historical work on the role of forestry extension workers of the colonial era, Fairhead and Leach explored a similar issue and found that instances in which the deforestation discourse became juxtaposed with villagers’ al- ternative ideas about landscape history were relatively few and insignificant, due to the government agenthillager disjunction (2000b). They conclude that, although colonial science was not homogeneous and that environmental issues were discussed, the debates tended to fine-tune rather than challenge the dominant narratives.

In our view, despite the fact that narratives had a real impact on Peace Corps volunteer training and programs, at least initially, a bottom-up development philosophy led to a villager-driven counternarrative that ultimately determined what happened on the ground. In other words, local knowledge and local agency actually


trump global narratives when outside development agents present themselves to the community as equal partners rather than as experts with enough financial resources to purchase local compliance.

Despite the victory on the ground, local knowledge was not able to completely debunk the desertification narrative in the minds of young volunteers. We do not blame the Peace Corps for the small role it played in promoting the desertification narrative in our minds; the issue is much larger than the Peace Corps. Instead, we tend to cast a more critical eye at the system of higher education that produced us. As described by Thomas Kuhn (1970)) perhaps we were overly influenced by a particular “paradigm” of environmental change that faculty members uncritically articulated to us when we were undergraduate students in the mid-1980s. Such a paradigmatic understanding of the human-environment interface may explain, in part, why, in the absence of professional or financial motivation, we continued to believe in the desertification narrative.

This last point is particularly poignant because we are now professors teaching about African environment and development. The lesson we take away from this is that one of the most important skills we may impart to our students is an ability to critically evaluate arguments and paradigms, and this may include questioning those assumptions with which we are most comfortable. It also means that, although environmental counternarratives are now popular in our discipline, we need to critically examine them as thoroughly as we examine the narratives they are countering. Adopt- ing a reflexive, self-critical stance is crucial in this regard. As Charlotte Davies re- minds us, “Not only the personal history of the [ researchers] but also the disciplinary and broader sociocultural circumstances under which they work have a profound effect on which topics and peoples are selected for study” (i999,5). Clearly our experiences, both in Mali and later in graduate school reading the critiques, influenced our research approaches and our topics of study. In an effort to be reflexive and self- critical we have often questioned whether our analysis of poverty-environment interactions and savanna fires-our counternarratives-are a reflection of the “ t ru th or whether we are guilty of a bias. We have confidence, however, that the views we have presented are grounded in local experiences of marginalized groups, and as such they represent a partial perspective that needs to be considered seriously.

NOTES 1. Examples of former Mali Peace Corps volunteers who returned to West Africa for academic

field research include William McConnell (geography), Christopher Duvall (geography), Lynne Heasley (environmental history), Stephen Wooten (anthropology), Erik Silla (history), Kent Glenzer (anthropology), Zeric Smith (political science), Craig Tower (anthropology), Scott Lacy (anthropology), Julia Earl (environmental studies), and Timothy Docking (political science).

2. Indeed, it difficult to understate the pervasiveness of this dominant view. We have found ex- pressions of it in the Lonely Planet travel guide to West Africa (Else and others i999), in geography textbooks (for example, Strahler and Strahler 2005), and in educational video series such as Earth Revealed (Lattanzio 1992).

3. Despite the emerging consensus, some critical issues and disagreements persist. In particular, the role of scale remains at the root of an ongoing debate over desertification in Africa. Evidence


suggests that some areas of the Sahel have been degraded. Questions remain about whether the observed greening pattern detected in imagery reflect vegetative recovery on the ground or indicates a shift to a different ecological state, one that may be as “green” but less productive for human livelihood systems (Herrmann, Anyamba, and Tucker 2005).

4. For a discussion of the importance of names to research in Mali, see Jansen and Zobel2002. 5. Our personal ethics were not fixed but evolved as we shifted from volunteers to researchers.

For example, as PCVS we labored to remain somewhat detached from the community. We strongly supported the “teach-them-to-help-themselves” philosophy of the Peace Corps. When we returned as researchers, however, we found that we could not maintain the same level of detachment. Our relationship with the community had developed beyond that of simply “volunteer” or “researcher”; we were friends and members of the community as well.

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