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Title
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From geocoded to entangled landscape : forests, REDD+ environmental rule and everyday practices in DR Congo
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Author
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Abstract
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| This PhD thesis explores Congolese forested landscapes as constituted both by (renewed) planning attempts to reorganize forests and livelihoods into a ‘green plantation economy’ and by everyday lived practices that draw humans and nonhumans together. The basic premise of this thesis is that how we understand and conceptualize landscapes and their environmental changes play an active role in shaping them. Integrating approaches in political ecology, critical cartography and anthropology, and using qualitative data from multi-sited fieldwork, the thesis engages with two ways of framing and attending forests and deforestation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The first empirical part examines the representational politics of landscapes embedded in the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) policy scheme adopted by the DRC to end the loss of its natural forests and become an emerging economy by 2030. It focuses in particular on the use of maps and geospatial analysis as instruments of environmental rule for diagnosing problems and designing transformation of landscapes into spatially-demarcated zones of production and conservation, i.e. the ‘geocoded landscape’. The analysis deconstructs the entrenched, linear explanations of deforestation as caused by inefficient smallholder swidden farmers’ practices. It also demonstrates how socially weightless (yet political) framings of (de)forested landscapes further increase inequalities and reestablish the rationalizing and homogenizing logics that characterize identities, human labour and ecological complexity in the plantation model. The thesis’ second empirical part moves away from REDD+ abstract landscapes and takes the reader on a journey in Kisangani’s forested hinterland, which has been identified as a deforestation hotspot. The case study builds on a processual, relational conceptualization of landscape to reconstruct complex, socially grounded understandings of human-environment relations shaping the area’s changing forests. The natural forests REDD+ is concerned with, are in fact naturalcultural spaces that are continuously constituted, over time and across scales, through multiple (violent) practical encounters between people and between people and things (such as land, trees, crops or weeds), i.e. the ‘entangled landscape’. More particularly, this second part focuses on the relations between land tenure, identities and forests, on the socio-ecology of swidden farming and on local understandings of forest change. The data show how various group identities are dynamically articulated with national citizenship in relation to the evolving environment and various land uses, defying containerized logics of ethnic-based environmental governance. They also highlight the diversity among swidden farming practices that are shaped by various ecologies of forested land, historical and structural inequalities and the materiality of crops themselves. Finally the results suggest that processes of land alienation and intensification, rather than purely uncontrolled expansion for subsistence farming, are at the root of ‘anti-social’ forest cover change. xvi Throughout the thesis, the analysis demonstrates that prevailing expert representations of Congolese forests and their dwellers carry embedded notions of value and productivity that not only render illegitimate a plurality of human-environment entanglements and practices, but also push forward the very same (colonial) mechanisms that contribute to deforestation and uneven development in the first place. The conclusion argues that to address the various facets of the so-called ‘Anthropocene’, we need to engage with multiple dimensions of justice as much as shift focus from human-in-nature to humanwith-nature. The thesis, in this sense, also provides a theoretical contribution to ‘more-thanrepresentational’ approaches to landscapes by integrating them with the type of political economic analyses at the heart of the political ecology tradition. |
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Language
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English
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Publication
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Antwerp
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University of Antwerp, Institute of Development Policy
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2020
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ISBN
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978-90-5728-666-7
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Volume/pages
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229 p.
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Note
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Van Hecken, Gert [Supervisor]
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Bastiaensen, Johan [Supervisor]
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Full text (open access)
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