Over the past two decades, southern Africa has experienced both exceptionally high AIDS prevalenc... more Over the past two decades, southern Africa has experienced both exceptionally high AIDS prevalence and recurrent food shortages. International institutions have responded to these challenges by framing them as security concerns that demand urgent intervention. Young people are implicated in both crises and drawn into the securitisation discourse as agents (of risk and protection) and as (potential) victims. However, the concepts of security deployed by global institutions and translated into national policy do not reflect the ways in/security is experienced 'on the ground' as a subjective and embodied orientation to the future. This paper brings work on youth temporalities to bear on social and cultural geographies of in/security and securitisation. It reports on research that explored insecurities among young people in Lesotho and Malawi. It concludes that, by focusing on 'threats' in isolation, and seeking to protect 'society' as an abstract aggregate of people, global securitisation discourses fail either to engage with the complex contextualised ways in which marginalised people experience insecurity or to proffer the political responses that are needed if those felt insecurities are to be addressed. However, while securitisation is problematic, in/security is nonetheless an important element in young people's orientation to the future.
Background: Understanding individuals' experience of accessing care and tending to various other ... more Background: Understanding individuals' experience of accessing care and tending to various other needs during chronic illness in a rural context is important for health systems aiming to increase access to healthcare and protect poor populations from unreasonable financial hardship. This study explored the impact on households of access to free healthcare and how they managed to meet needs during chronic illness.
Marriage among African teenagers is currently a central focus of campaigns by UN agencies and int... more Marriage among African teenagers is currently a central focus of campaigns by UN agencies and international NGOs. Yet marriage has received only limited attention from geographers and has largely escaped the attention of geographers of youth. In this paper we explore the relational geographies of age that underlie young people's motivations for, and experiences of, marriage in two rural African settings with differing marriage practices: matrilocal southern Malawi and patrilocal Lesotho. We draw on participatory research activities and life history interviews conducted with 80 people aged between 10 and 24 years old. While the young people's attitudes and experiences were varied and complex, starkly different accounts emerged from the two settings. In particular, young women in Lesotho offered very negative assessments of marriage, while those in Malawi were very much more positive. Through these examples, we highlight how young people's marriage choices and experiences are relationally produced. Decisions about whether, when and whom to marry reflect socially entrenched expectations concerning generational allocations of resources, labour and responsibilities, which intersect with contemporary social and economic processes including poverty, unemployment, land scarcity and AIDS. Experiences of marriage, too, are produced through practices that are spatially structured and contextually situated in relation to socio-economic conditions. Thus marriage, as a 'vital conjuncture' in young people's lives, plays a key role in the relational construction of individual lifecourses and in (re)constructing relationships of age, gender and, especially, generation.
An urgent need to stop degradation is frequently cited as support for climate mitigation efforts ... more An urgent need to stop degradation is frequently cited as support for climate mitigation efforts involving forests. However, lessons learnt from social science research on degradation narratives are not taken into consideration. This creates a risk of problematic degradation narratives being used to legitimise forest carbon projects. This study examined a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) forest plantation in Uganda, where incomplete and partly contradictory evidence on land use change was interpreted in a way that overemphasised degradation. This interpretation was in line with the interests of the forestry company proposing the CDM activity and with national interests in Uganda, and was stimulated by CDM guidelines and regulations. Our investigation revealed a more complex picture of land cover change in the area that did not support the narrative of an area undergoing continuous degradation. We therefore recommend that close scrutiny of the degradation narrative presented be included in every type of forest carbon project.
This paper is a commentary on Lyons, K. and Westoby, P. (2014) Carbon colonialism and the new lan... more This paper is a commentary on Lyons, K. and Westoby, P. (2014) Carbon colonialism and the new land grab: Plantation forestry in Uganda and its livelihood impacts, Journal of Rural Studies, 36, 13-21.
The term ‘degradation’ is often used in the current discourse on carbon forestry. Tree planting p... more The term ‘degradation’ is often used in the current discourse on carbon forestry. Tree planting projects primarily aimed at mitigating climate change frequently claim that they simultaneously reduce degradation. However, despite the centrality of ‘degradation’ in the forest carbon discourse, reference is rarely made to the significant body of literature questioning generalizations about degradation in Africa since the mid-1990s. Many studies have exposed biases and problematic underlying motives in claims of degradation in various African regions. Combining this literature with discourse analysis, we present a framework for analysing degradation narratives in order to explore the extent to which these are based on evidence or opinion. We acknowledge that environmental change is complex, and increasingly so today in the face of climate change, and we stress that narratives cannot be pinned down as ‘true or false’. However, unconfirmed ‘truths’ about degradation being acute have resulted in significant, costly and far-reaching actions to halt it. Thus there is a need to scrutinize the empirical evidence using the best available knowledge. Our framework, designed to be easily applicable for practitioners, could facilitate increased engagement with and scrutiny of degradation claims in forest carbon interventions.
The 'new variant famine' hypothesis suggests AIDS is contributing to food insecurity in southern ... more The 'new variant famine' hypothesis suggests AIDS is contributing to food insecurity in southern Africa. Proposed causal mechanisms include a loss of livelihood assets and skills, brought about through AIDS 0 impacts on children's access to inherited property and intergenerationally-transferred knowledge. This paper employs a sustainable livelihoods framework to examine how AIDS is impacting on young people's access to assets and skills in two southern African countries: Malawi and Lesotho. Drawing on qualitative research with rural youth, the paper shows that AIDS affects some young people's access to some livelihood assets, but does not do so in a systematic or predictable way, nor are its impacts invariably negative. The broader cultural and institutional context is of key importance. The paper also demonstrates the need for the sustainable livelihoods framework to take greater account of the temporalities of livelihoods, and in particular the significance of lifecourse and generation.
Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography
Since 2001 when Lesotho embraced the neoliberal African Growth and Opportunities Act that offers ... more Since 2001 when Lesotho embraced the neoliberal African Growth and Opportunities Act that offers preferential access to the US market, its garment industry has expanded dramatically to become the nation’s leading employer. Elsewhere, large-scale employment of women in low-paid factory jobs has entailed spatial restructuring of gender and age relations. Lesotho is a distinctive context, with socio-spatial relations historically adjusted to male labour migration, high levels of contemporary male unemployment and alarming AIDS prevalence. Based on semi-structured interviews with 40 female factoryworkers and 37 dependents, this article applies a relational time-space analysis to explore how financial and spatio-temporal aspects of factory employment articulate to alter women’s relationships with those for whom they have culturally determined responsibilities: their children, those suffering from ill health and their (generally rural) home communities. The analysis highlights that such employment is not merely adding to women’s responsibilities, but transforming how they are able to undertake social reproduction, as practical, social and emotional roles are converted to largely financial obligations.
Agricultural interventions in South Africa have failed to deliver the promised poverty reduction ... more Agricultural interventions in South Africa have failed to deliver the promised poverty reduction for rural smallholders. Ecological economics, livelihoods studies, complex system methodology and discourse theory were used here to investigate the underlying reasons. The mismatch between local realities and programme management was found to be a central cause of failure. Lack of responsiveness to local realities within the programme resulted in tractors being sent to plough fields across a river with no bridge, leading locals to comment 'but tractors can't fly.' The neoliberal discourse in South African development policy was found to be a crucial factor behind such omissions.
Predicting the household's ability to cope with adult illness and death can be complicated in... more Predicting the household's ability to cope with adult illness and death can be complicated in low-income countries with high HIV prevalence and multiple other stressors and shocks. This study explored the link between stage of the household in the life cycle and the household's capacity to cope with illness and death of adults in rural Uganda. Interviews focusing on life histories were combined with observations during monthly visits to 22 households throughout 2009, and recorded livelihood activities and responses to illness and death events. For the analysis, households were categorised into three life cycle stages ('Young', 'Middle-aged' and 'Old') and the ability to cope and adapt to recorded events of prolonged illness or death was assessed. In 16 of the 26 recorded events, a coping or struggling outcome was found to be related to household life cycle stage. 'Young' households usually had many dependants too young to contribute significan...
This paper reports on a study with rural young people (aged 10-24 years) in Malawi and Lesotho, f... more This paper reports on a study with rural young people (aged 10-24 years) in Malawi and Lesotho, focusing on their opportunities to learn skills and access capital and assets to engage in income generating activities (IGAs). Participatory group exercises and individual interviews provide many examples of how young people learn skills and start small businesses, as well as insight into their strategic thinking around engaging in these livelihood options. Various factors, including the effects of AIDS, are shown to affect young people's prospects of succeeding in their ventures. Young people are themselves very keen on starting IGAs, and are supported by adult members of their communities in asking for interventions to help them do so. We argue that expanded vocational and business training, focusing on locally appropriate types and scale of businesses, coupled with help to raise start-up capital has the potential to improve poor and/or AIDS-affected young people's chances of securing sustainable rural livelihoods in their futures. Since AIDS is intertwined with many other issues affecting young people's livelihoods, it is however problematic to single out and target only AIDS-affected young people with interventions on skills building and IGAs. Policy makers' attitudes to vocational skills training and support for IGAs in Malawi and Lesotho are also explored, and policy recommendations made in relation to supporting vulnerable rural young people in their attempts to build sustainable livelihoods for themselves.
Methods of participatory research have become popular among children's geographers as they are be... more Methods of participatory research have become popular among children's geographers as they are believed to enable young people to speak openly about their lives in unthreatening contexts. In this paper we reflect on our experience of using participatory methods to explore the sensitive topic of (indirect) impacts of AIDS on young people's livelihoods in Malawi and Lesotho. We examine how different methodological approaches generate varying knowledges of children's lived realities; challenges of using 'insider' and 'outsider' research assistants, place of group-based approaches in participatory research and ethical issues. We suggest that researchers of young people's lives should take full account of the relationship between epistemology and methodology in selecting and employing methods appropriate to particular research questions.
Over the past few decades governments worldwide have developed youth policies, encompassing diver... more Over the past few decades governments worldwide have developed youth policies, encompassing diverse measures to address the problems and potentials of their younger populations. Hitherto, studies of these policies have focused on differentiating the goals and target groups inscribed in different national policies and on the relationship between youth policies and national political agendas. However, youth policies have not emerged independently in diverse countries; inter-governmental organisations and international ...
Southern Africa's AIDS epidemic is profoundly spatially and temporally structured; so too are the... more Southern Africa's AIDS epidemic is profoundly spatially and temporally structured; so too are the lives of the young people whose families it blights. In this paper we draw on qualitative research with AIDS-affected young people in Malawi and Lesotho, and recent work theorising time-space in human geography, to examine how time-spaces of AIDS-related sickness and death intersect with the time-spaces of young people and, importantly, those of their relations with others to produce differentiated outcomes for young people. We also explore the time-spaces of those outcomes and of young people's responses to them. The paper concludes that a relational timespace analysis of the impacts of AIDS on young people helps explain the diversity of those young people's experiences and allows AIDS to be contextualised more adequately in relation to everyday life and young people's wider lifecourses and their relationships with others. Moreover, the research points to the significance of the time-space structuring of society in shaping the outcomes of familial sickness and death for young people.
AIDS, in interaction with other factors, is impacting on the livelihood activities, opportunities... more AIDS, in interaction with other factors, is impacting on the livelihood activities, opportunities and choices of young people in southern Africa. This paper explores these linkages firstly by reviewing what is known about the impacts of AIDS on young people, before looking more specifically at how this impinges on their future ability to secure livelihoods. Within the home and family AIDS often results in youth taking on a heavy burden of responsibilities.. This can include caring for sick relatives, helping with chores and taking on paid employment. This burden of care and work can have further impacts on young people's future livelihoods as they find they have reduced access to schooling, potential loss of inheritance and a breakdown in the intergenerational transfer of knowledge, which is especially important for sustained agricultural production. The paper ends by suggesting that the sustainable livelihoods approach can be useful for understanding the complexity of the issues surrounding the impacts of AIDS on young people's livelihoods and calls for further research to explore how their access to future sustainable livelihoods in rural southern Africa might be supported. Akeroyd A 2004 Coercion, constraints and 'cultural entrapments': A further look at gendered and occupational factors pertinent to the transmission of HIV in Africa in Kalipeni E Craddock S Oppong J R and Ghosh J eds HIV and AIDS in Africa: Beyond epidemiology 89-103 Alumira J Kambewa P and Binauli L 2005 Impact of HIV/AIDS on inter-and intragenerational information flows among smallholder farmers in Malawi,
Over the past two decades, southern Africa has experienced both exceptionally high AIDS prevalenc... more Over the past two decades, southern Africa has experienced both exceptionally high AIDS prevalence and recurrent food shortages. International institutions have responded to these challenges by framing them as security concerns that demand urgent intervention. Young people are implicated in both crises and drawn into the securitisation discourse as agents (of risk and protection) and as (potential) victims. However, the concepts of security deployed by global institutions and translated into national policy do not reflect the ways in/security is experienced 'on the ground' as a subjective and embodied orientation to the future. This paper brings work on youth temporalities to bear on social and cultural geographies of in/security and securitisation. It reports on research that explored insecurities among young people in Lesotho and Malawi. It concludes that, by focusing on 'threats' in isolation, and seeking to protect 'society' as an abstract aggregate of people, global securitisation discourses fail either to engage with the complex contextualised ways in which marginalised people experience insecurity or to proffer the political responses that are needed if those felt insecurities are to be addressed. However, while securitisation is problematic, in/security is nonetheless an important element in young people's orientation to the future.
Background: Understanding individuals' experience of accessing care and tending to various other ... more Background: Understanding individuals' experience of accessing care and tending to various other needs during chronic illness in a rural context is important for health systems aiming to increase access to healthcare and protect poor populations from unreasonable financial hardship. This study explored the impact on households of access to free healthcare and how they managed to meet needs during chronic illness.
Marriage among African teenagers is currently a central focus of campaigns by UN agencies and int... more Marriage among African teenagers is currently a central focus of campaigns by UN agencies and international NGOs. Yet marriage has received only limited attention from geographers and has largely escaped the attention of geographers of youth. In this paper we explore the relational geographies of age that underlie young people's motivations for, and experiences of, marriage in two rural African settings with differing marriage practices: matrilocal southern Malawi and patrilocal Lesotho. We draw on participatory research activities and life history interviews conducted with 80 people aged between 10 and 24 years old. While the young people's attitudes and experiences were varied and complex, starkly different accounts emerged from the two settings. In particular, young women in Lesotho offered very negative assessments of marriage, while those in Malawi were very much more positive. Through these examples, we highlight how young people's marriage choices and experiences are relationally produced. Decisions about whether, when and whom to marry reflect socially entrenched expectations concerning generational allocations of resources, labour and responsibilities, which intersect with contemporary social and economic processes including poverty, unemployment, land scarcity and AIDS. Experiences of marriage, too, are produced through practices that are spatially structured and contextually situated in relation to socio-economic conditions. Thus marriage, as a 'vital conjuncture' in young people's lives, plays a key role in the relational construction of individual lifecourses and in (re)constructing relationships of age, gender and, especially, generation.
An urgent need to stop degradation is frequently cited as support for climate mitigation efforts ... more An urgent need to stop degradation is frequently cited as support for climate mitigation efforts involving forests. However, lessons learnt from social science research on degradation narratives are not taken into consideration. This creates a risk of problematic degradation narratives being used to legitimise forest carbon projects. This study examined a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) forest plantation in Uganda, where incomplete and partly contradictory evidence on land use change was interpreted in a way that overemphasised degradation. This interpretation was in line with the interests of the forestry company proposing the CDM activity and with national interests in Uganda, and was stimulated by CDM guidelines and regulations. Our investigation revealed a more complex picture of land cover change in the area that did not support the narrative of an area undergoing continuous degradation. We therefore recommend that close scrutiny of the degradation narrative presented be included in every type of forest carbon project.
This paper is a commentary on Lyons, K. and Westoby, P. (2014) Carbon colonialism and the new lan... more This paper is a commentary on Lyons, K. and Westoby, P. (2014) Carbon colonialism and the new land grab: Plantation forestry in Uganda and its livelihood impacts, Journal of Rural Studies, 36, 13-21.
The term ‘degradation’ is often used in the current discourse on carbon forestry. Tree planting p... more The term ‘degradation’ is often used in the current discourse on carbon forestry. Tree planting projects primarily aimed at mitigating climate change frequently claim that they simultaneously reduce degradation. However, despite the centrality of ‘degradation’ in the forest carbon discourse, reference is rarely made to the significant body of literature questioning generalizations about degradation in Africa since the mid-1990s. Many studies have exposed biases and problematic underlying motives in claims of degradation in various African regions. Combining this literature with discourse analysis, we present a framework for analysing degradation narratives in order to explore the extent to which these are based on evidence or opinion. We acknowledge that environmental change is complex, and increasingly so today in the face of climate change, and we stress that narratives cannot be pinned down as ‘true or false’. However, unconfirmed ‘truths’ about degradation being acute have resulted in significant, costly and far-reaching actions to halt it. Thus there is a need to scrutinize the empirical evidence using the best available knowledge. Our framework, designed to be easily applicable for practitioners, could facilitate increased engagement with and scrutiny of degradation claims in forest carbon interventions.
The 'new variant famine' hypothesis suggests AIDS is contributing to food insecurity in southern ... more The 'new variant famine' hypothesis suggests AIDS is contributing to food insecurity in southern Africa. Proposed causal mechanisms include a loss of livelihood assets and skills, brought about through AIDS 0 impacts on children's access to inherited property and intergenerationally-transferred knowledge. This paper employs a sustainable livelihoods framework to examine how AIDS is impacting on young people's access to assets and skills in two southern African countries: Malawi and Lesotho. Drawing on qualitative research with rural youth, the paper shows that AIDS affects some young people's access to some livelihood assets, but does not do so in a systematic or predictable way, nor are its impacts invariably negative. The broader cultural and institutional context is of key importance. The paper also demonstrates the need for the sustainable livelihoods framework to take greater account of the temporalities of livelihoods, and in particular the significance of lifecourse and generation.
Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography
Since 2001 when Lesotho embraced the neoliberal African Growth and Opportunities Act that offers ... more Since 2001 when Lesotho embraced the neoliberal African Growth and Opportunities Act that offers preferential access to the US market, its garment industry has expanded dramatically to become the nation’s leading employer. Elsewhere, large-scale employment of women in low-paid factory jobs has entailed spatial restructuring of gender and age relations. Lesotho is a distinctive context, with socio-spatial relations historically adjusted to male labour migration, high levels of contemporary male unemployment and alarming AIDS prevalence. Based on semi-structured interviews with 40 female factoryworkers and 37 dependents, this article applies a relational time-space analysis to explore how financial and spatio-temporal aspects of factory employment articulate to alter women’s relationships with those for whom they have culturally determined responsibilities: their children, those suffering from ill health and their (generally rural) home communities. The analysis highlights that such employment is not merely adding to women’s responsibilities, but transforming how they are able to undertake social reproduction, as practical, social and emotional roles are converted to largely financial obligations.
Agricultural interventions in South Africa have failed to deliver the promised poverty reduction ... more Agricultural interventions in South Africa have failed to deliver the promised poverty reduction for rural smallholders. Ecological economics, livelihoods studies, complex system methodology and discourse theory were used here to investigate the underlying reasons. The mismatch between local realities and programme management was found to be a central cause of failure. Lack of responsiveness to local realities within the programme resulted in tractors being sent to plough fields across a river with no bridge, leading locals to comment 'but tractors can't fly.' The neoliberal discourse in South African development policy was found to be a crucial factor behind such omissions.
Predicting the household's ability to cope with adult illness and death can be complicated in... more Predicting the household's ability to cope with adult illness and death can be complicated in low-income countries with high HIV prevalence and multiple other stressors and shocks. This study explored the link between stage of the household in the life cycle and the household's capacity to cope with illness and death of adults in rural Uganda. Interviews focusing on life histories were combined with observations during monthly visits to 22 households throughout 2009, and recorded livelihood activities and responses to illness and death events. For the analysis, households were categorised into three life cycle stages ('Young', 'Middle-aged' and 'Old') and the ability to cope and adapt to recorded events of prolonged illness or death was assessed. In 16 of the 26 recorded events, a coping or struggling outcome was found to be related to household life cycle stage. 'Young' households usually had many dependants too young to contribute significan...
This paper reports on a study with rural young people (aged 10-24 years) in Malawi and Lesotho, f... more This paper reports on a study with rural young people (aged 10-24 years) in Malawi and Lesotho, focusing on their opportunities to learn skills and access capital and assets to engage in income generating activities (IGAs). Participatory group exercises and individual interviews provide many examples of how young people learn skills and start small businesses, as well as insight into their strategic thinking around engaging in these livelihood options. Various factors, including the effects of AIDS, are shown to affect young people's prospects of succeeding in their ventures. Young people are themselves very keen on starting IGAs, and are supported by adult members of their communities in asking for interventions to help them do so. We argue that expanded vocational and business training, focusing on locally appropriate types and scale of businesses, coupled with help to raise start-up capital has the potential to improve poor and/or AIDS-affected young people's chances of securing sustainable rural livelihoods in their futures. Since AIDS is intertwined with many other issues affecting young people's livelihoods, it is however problematic to single out and target only AIDS-affected young people with interventions on skills building and IGAs. Policy makers' attitudes to vocational skills training and support for IGAs in Malawi and Lesotho are also explored, and policy recommendations made in relation to supporting vulnerable rural young people in their attempts to build sustainable livelihoods for themselves.
Methods of participatory research have become popular among children's geographers as they are be... more Methods of participatory research have become popular among children's geographers as they are believed to enable young people to speak openly about their lives in unthreatening contexts. In this paper we reflect on our experience of using participatory methods to explore the sensitive topic of (indirect) impacts of AIDS on young people's livelihoods in Malawi and Lesotho. We examine how different methodological approaches generate varying knowledges of children's lived realities; challenges of using 'insider' and 'outsider' research assistants, place of group-based approaches in participatory research and ethical issues. We suggest that researchers of young people's lives should take full account of the relationship between epistemology and methodology in selecting and employing methods appropriate to particular research questions.
Over the past few decades governments worldwide have developed youth policies, encompassing diver... more Over the past few decades governments worldwide have developed youth policies, encompassing diverse measures to address the problems and potentials of their younger populations. Hitherto, studies of these policies have focused on differentiating the goals and target groups inscribed in different national policies and on the relationship between youth policies and national political agendas. However, youth policies have not emerged independently in diverse countries; inter-governmental organisations and international ...
Southern Africa's AIDS epidemic is profoundly spatially and temporally structured; so too are the... more Southern Africa's AIDS epidemic is profoundly spatially and temporally structured; so too are the lives of the young people whose families it blights. In this paper we draw on qualitative research with AIDS-affected young people in Malawi and Lesotho, and recent work theorising time-space in human geography, to examine how time-spaces of AIDS-related sickness and death intersect with the time-spaces of young people and, importantly, those of their relations with others to produce differentiated outcomes for young people. We also explore the time-spaces of those outcomes and of young people's responses to them. The paper concludes that a relational timespace analysis of the impacts of AIDS on young people helps explain the diversity of those young people's experiences and allows AIDS to be contextualised more adequately in relation to everyday life and young people's wider lifecourses and their relationships with others. Moreover, the research points to the significance of the time-space structuring of society in shaping the outcomes of familial sickness and death for young people.
AIDS, in interaction with other factors, is impacting on the livelihood activities, opportunities... more AIDS, in interaction with other factors, is impacting on the livelihood activities, opportunities and choices of young people in southern Africa. This paper explores these linkages firstly by reviewing what is known about the impacts of AIDS on young people, before looking more specifically at how this impinges on their future ability to secure livelihoods. Within the home and family AIDS often results in youth taking on a heavy burden of responsibilities.. This can include caring for sick relatives, helping with chores and taking on paid employment. This burden of care and work can have further impacts on young people's future livelihoods as they find they have reduced access to schooling, potential loss of inheritance and a breakdown in the intergenerational transfer of knowledge, which is especially important for sustained agricultural production. The paper ends by suggesting that the sustainable livelihoods approach can be useful for understanding the complexity of the issues surrounding the impacts of AIDS on young people's livelihoods and calls for further research to explore how their access to future sustainable livelihoods in rural southern Africa might be supported. Akeroyd A 2004 Coercion, constraints and 'cultural entrapments': A further look at gendered and occupational factors pertinent to the transmission of HIV in Africa in Kalipeni E Craddock S Oppong J R and Ghosh J eds HIV and AIDS in Africa: Beyond epidemiology 89-103 Alumira J Kambewa P and Binauli L 2005 Impact of HIV/AIDS on inter-and intragenerational information flows among smallholder farmers in Malawi,
Uploads
Papers by Flora Hajdu
mitigating climate change frequently claim that they simultaneously reduce degradation. However, despite the centrality
of ‘degradation’ in the forest carbon discourse, reference is rarely made to the significant body of literature questioning
generalizations about degradation in Africa since the mid-1990s. Many studies have exposed biases and problematic
underlying motives in claims of degradation in various African regions. Combining this literature with discourse analysis,
we present a framework for analysing degradation narratives in order to explore the extent to which these are based on
evidence or opinion. We acknowledge that environmental change is complex, and increasingly so today in the face of
climate change, and we stress that narratives cannot be pinned down as ‘true or false’. However, unconfirmed ‘truths’
about degradation being acute have resulted in significant, costly and far-reaching actions to halt it. Thus there is a need
to scrutinize the empirical evidence using the best available knowledge. Our framework, designed to be easily applicable
for practitioners, could facilitate increased engagement with and scrutiny of degradation claims in forest carbon interventions.
mitigating climate change frequently claim that they simultaneously reduce degradation. However, despite the centrality
of ‘degradation’ in the forest carbon discourse, reference is rarely made to the significant body of literature questioning
generalizations about degradation in Africa since the mid-1990s. Many studies have exposed biases and problematic
underlying motives in claims of degradation in various African regions. Combining this literature with discourse analysis,
we present a framework for analysing degradation narratives in order to explore the extent to which these are based on
evidence or opinion. We acknowledge that environmental change is complex, and increasingly so today in the face of
climate change, and we stress that narratives cannot be pinned down as ‘true or false’. However, unconfirmed ‘truths’
about degradation being acute have resulted in significant, costly and far-reaching actions to halt it. Thus there is a need
to scrutinize the empirical evidence using the best available knowledge. Our framework, designed to be easily applicable
for practitioners, could facilitate increased engagement with and scrutiny of degradation claims in forest carbon interventions.