Dietz, Ton

Dr. Ton Dietz is Professor in Human and Political Environmental Geography at the University of Amsterdam. As an Africanist, he is a specialist in semi-arid regions in Kenya, with additional experience in Ghana and South Africa. Key areas in his work are human geography of developing countries, political geography of Africa, poverty analysis, rural development, pastoralism, dryland development, impact of climate change, development aid, civil society and NGOs.

African Forests Between Nature and Livelihood Resources

2005 0-7734-5960-X
This book brings together work by African, European and American scholars with various disciplinary backgrounds and sheds light on attempts to reconcile global environmental values with local livelihood needs and development aspirations. The increasing numbers of people who are becoming dependent on forest and savannah resources for their survival constitute a challenge that seems to be greater in Africa than anywhere else. In many countries on the continent, conservation efforts have often neglected the rural poor and led to a loss of access to resources that they used prior to the establishment of conservation areas. The debate on how to develop more democratic and pro-poor forms of forest management has gained momentum due to changing constellations in the partnerships for conservation and sustainable resource use. The papers presented in this book bring together experiences and lessons learnt from conservation and forest management efforts in Mali, the Congo Basin countries, Southern Africa, Uganda, Kenya, Madagascar and Ethiopia. The authors highlight successes and failures in attempts to realize sustainable and pro-poor forest management and address the questions related to the conditions under which power imbalances and conflicting interest can be reconciled through multi-sector partnerships. This book is one of the first to deal with the effects of globalisation and decentralization on tropical forest management in Africa. As such, it contributes to the globalisation and shifts in governance debates in social and policy sciences, and to the debate in human geography circles on how processes at different scales interact and influence each other. The book not only advocates a multi-disciplinary approach but also puts it into practice and therefore presents a number of different proposals for policy actions, institutional development and research.