Blazing a trail while lazing around: knowledge processes and wood-fuel paradoxes?

Abstract

Using autobiographical experience with reference to wood-fuel research in two locations in West Africa, this article illustrates how knowledge processes influence what can be produced as knowledge; how such knowledge is actually produced; and what is eventually produced as knowledge. However, although it explores the various roles that knowledge plays in the social relations at particular historical moments in the personal and professional development of a single individual, the questions that this subjective experience raises are of wider import: whose knowledge matters? How do certain knowledges get suppressed or denied, while others are privileged? In turn, this raises additional questions concerning the ways in which research and practice are mediated through local research, policy, and development prisms. In a general sense, the article is about the way in which wood-fuel philosophies, methodologies, and practices are constructed, modified, and maintained in existence as knowledge; and a reminder that such knowledge processes cannot truly be understood in isolation, but need to be situated within complex, diversified contexts of individual agendas, and group strategies, as well as in multiple sites of production.

Notes

1. It is worth noting, in the spirit of full disclosure, that the tutors in question were completely unaware of the unfolding ‘drama’, and were simply asked what they thought of my idea for a dissertation project.

2. I suspect that my tutor would probably argue that divisive choices were made rather than averted.

3. In truth, bewildering as it was, the situation that I faced was common to pioneer efforts in general.

4. Books, reports, and manuals outlining coherent wood-fuel research frameworks and providing useful tips on data collection and analysis were not as readily available then as they were to become.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Reginald Cline-Cole

Reginald Cline-Cole has undertaken extensive work in the field of development issues in rural environments, as well as forestry and its human impact. Currently a lecturer at the Centre of West African Studies at the University of Birmingham, he has previously taught at Bayero University in Nigeria and Moi University in Kenya.