Continuities in environmental narratives, Kabale, Uganda ... - Foodnet

conservation policies, a resettlement scheme and swamp reclamation. In the post-colonial period,
similar concerns have been expressed, but the implementation of policies has been rather different.
While similar policies have been discussed (with a continued focus on soil conservation) the extent
to which the government has been able to implement these policies has been very different. Civil
unrest and insecurity as well as budgetary constraints have meant that the government’s capacity to
implement policies in the post-colonial period has been much weaker than in the colonial period.
NGOs, however, have implemented a range of policies (particularly agricultural research and
agroforestry), which have grown out of the same set of assumptions and narratives. There have been
some changes with an increased focus on participation and increasing emphasis on
decentralisation and some reversals of policies, notably from reclamation to protection to
wetlands. But critically, as this paper will show, the assumptions that underlie contemporary
policy bear a remarkable similarity to those of the colonial period.
Conceptual issues
The power of policy narratives in environmental planning in developing countries has
been recognised in recent years. 4 As Hoben states
The environmental policies promoted by colonial regimes and later by donors in Africa
rest on historically grounded, culturally constructed paradigms that at once describe a
problem and prescribed its solution. Many of them are rooted in a narrative that tells us
how things were in an earlier time when people lived in harmony with nature, how
human agency has altered that harmony, and of the calamities that will plague people and
nature if dramatic action is not taken soon. 5
He notes that successful programs (in terms of mobilizing funds etc) are those that ‘depend on a
set of more or less naïve, unproven, simplifying and optimistic assumptions about the problem to
be addressed and the approach to be taken. Without such a cultural script for action it is difficult
for donors and aid recipients to mobilize and coordinate concerted action in the face of the many
uncertainties that characterize processes of economic, political and institutional change.’ 6
Leach and Mearns have observed that ‘by making ‘stabilizing’ assumptions to facilitate
decision–making, narratives serve to standardize, package and label environmental problems so
that they appear to be universally applicable and to justify equally standardized, off-the-shelf
solutions.’ 7 Such ‘received wisdoms’ have had the effect of promoting external intervention in the
control and use of natural resources, which in turn can have negative consequences for local people.
Received wisdoms are not necessarily new, and Leach and Mearns note that ‘in many
cases, the ideas that drive contemporary environmental policy in Africa can be traced back to
4
E.M. Roe, ‘Development narratives, or making the best of blueprint development’, World Development, 19 4,
(1991), 287-300; J. Fairhead and M. Leach, ‘False forest history, complicit social analysis: rethinking some
West African environmental narratives’, World Development, 23 6, (1995), 1023-35; J.C. McCann, ‘The plow
and the forest: narratives of deforestation in Ethiopia, 1840-1992’, Environmental History, 2 2, (1997), 138-59;
C.A. Kull, ‘Deforestation, erosion, and fire: Degradation myths in the environmental history of Madagascar’,
Environment and History, 6 4, (2000), 423-50; H.S. Marcusson, ‘Environmental paradigms, knowledge systems
and policy. The case of Burkino Faso’, Geografisk Tidsskrift, 2 (1999), 93-103.
5
A. Hoben, ‘Paradigms and politics: the cultural construction of environmental policy in Ethiopia’ World
Development, 23 6, (1995), 1008.
6
A. Hoben ‘The cultural construction of environmental policy: paradigms and politics in Ethiopia’ in M. Leach and
R. Mearns (eds), Lie of the Land: Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment (London, 1996) 187.
7
Leach and Mearns Lie of the Land, 8.
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