James Currey African Futures in the Making (Future Rural Africa)

What lies ahead for rural Africa, given a rapidly increasing population, climate change, poverty, inequality and projections of an increasing vulnerability to natural hazards and food shortages? Bringing together scholars in ecology, agriculture, economics, human geography and cultural anthropology, from Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Germany, The Netherlands and the UK, this book focusses on social-ecological transformation and future-making in rural Africa, especially in areas of rapid land-use change following the establishment of development corridors, conservation areas, and large-scale infrastructure projects. In Africa, discussions on the way forward are particularly conflict-ridden because people do not agree about desirable goals, because the gap between winners and losers seems to be bigger than elsewhere, and because the struggle for desirable futures is embedded in a problematic history of foreign domination and exploitation. Focussing on eastern and southern Africa, topics examined range from the history of conservation initiatives and wildlife protection to visions of green development, from the gender implications of extreme climate events on pastoral economies to the use of information and communication technologies on farms and mobile money in geographically remote territories, from large-scale energy infrastructure projects and growth corridors to local ways of managing risk. The volume opens with reflections on African utopic registers of the future and conceptual decolonization in African futurity. CONTRIBUTORS: Martin Ajei, Michael Bollig, Maxmillian Chuhila, Peter Dannenberg, Clemens Greiner, Prince K. Guma, Carolin Hulke, Linus Kalvelage, Eric Kioko, Britta Klagge, Uroš Kovač, Astrid Matejcek, Richard Mbunda, Kennedy Mkutu, Detlef Müller-Mahn, Frankline Ndi, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Rupert Neuhöfer, Anne Oketch, Dennis Ong'ech, Maggie Opondo, Gilbert Ouma, Javier Revilla Diez, Julian Rochlitz, Dorothea Schulz, Ian Scoones, Tahira Shariff Mohamed, Masresha Taye, Gideon Tups, Hauke-Peter Vehrs, Julia Verne Published in association with the Collaborative Research Centre FUTURE RURAL AFRICA, funded by the German Research Council (DFG). This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the collaborative research center "Future Rural Africa", funding code TRR 228/3.