Rural afforestation programmes for sustainable rural development: How realist conceptualisation can help

Abstract

The role of conceptualisation in influencing the development process is the theme of this article, which demonstrates how poverty has forced rural households to exhaust their forestry resources at the expense of the long-term sustainable development of the broader communities concerned. The article stresses that the dilemma and contradictions of creating deforestation problems in order to develop can only be overcome by empowering the communities concerned to reverse the deforestation process through afforestation. Using a judicious blend of theory and empirical material, the article demonstrates that the realist method of rational abstraction has an important role to play in identifying the relevant variables that need to interact with the forestry sector to achieve sustainable development. The overall thrust of the article is that concrete development practices are intrinsically incomplete if not linked to a conception of sustainable development as a critical theory.