Project Future Rural Africa

Overview

Africa´s future is the object of expectations, dreams, fears and contestations. It emerges from the present, but it is not completely contingent. This is the starting point of the collaborative research center (CRC): Future-making, the CRC´s key concept, means that ideas of the future are envisioned and translated into plans, policies, and spatial transformations. They materialize along newly emerging development corridors, shifting bio-cultural frontiers and large-scale land-use changes. The CRC addresses the intricate relationship between future-making and social-ecological transformation. It combines expertise from different academic disciplines, ranging from geography, anthropology, and agronomy to political science, vegetation ecology and virology. It is based at the University of Bonn, in cooperation with the University of Cologne. Other members of this joint project are the Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC), the University of Münster, the Charité hospital at Humboldt University in Berlin, and many cooperation partners in Africa.
The three study sites selected as examples for the CRC´s inception phase all have a connection to growth corridors, but in different ways. In particular, the projects concentrate on three different examples:

The Kenyan Rift Valley (KRV) in relation to the “Lamu Port – South Sudan – Ethiopia” (LAPSSET) corridor
The Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT)
The Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA) in southern Africa and its links to the Trans-Caprivi corridor that was recently expended to form the Walvis Bay-Ndola-Lubumbashi Development Corridor (WBNLDC).

Contribution of ILR

Project B01: Invasive Futures: The social ecology of rangelands in changing savanna environments
This project aims to characterize and classify current rangeland scenarios along biophysical and social-economic gradients and under different invasion conditions (species, intensity, and spread dynamics), and to project future trends in pasture uses and their social-ecological implications. To test the hypothesis that rangeland systems will differentially evolve in different social-ecological settings and be affected by the spread of invasive/encroaching plants, the project will address the following objectives:

Invasion dynamics:- Establish an inventory of major invasive/encroaching species and attributes of associated pasture vegetation and assess triggers, drivers, and dynamics of invasive spread
Rangeland typology:- Assess and model biomass dynamics of rangelands, categorize rangeland quality and forage availability both seasonally and inter-annually, and determine phenology and digestibility of major species and (emerging) vegetation formations along biophysical gradients and with varying management regimes.
Socio-economic implications:- Determine actual and perceived risks and coping strategies of major rangeland user groups and infer implications of economic mobility on future-related behaviour (social-ecological feed backs)

Project Z03 Combined Farm/Household Survey
Across the three study areas of the CRC, a number of projects collaborate in the collection and use of primary data on farm-household characteristics. Such data is essential for answering the research questions of various CRC projects including A01, A03, A04, B01, B04, C01, C02, C03, and C06 for example: Will conservation contribute to well-being and declining poverty levels? Will agricultural intensification create more wealth? How is educational status/gender/age of individuals related to household decisions and related outcomes? How is migration of household members linked to future making processes? The surveys are designed to address both comparative and project-specific research questions. During the first phase, the focus lies on project-specific research questions, but comparison is pertinent in a number of projects already early on and address issues such as differences in rural development or land use trends and farm-household responses to such trends in terms of future making strategies and their outcomes.