SCIENCE, POLICY PROCESS, AND POLICY OWNERSHIP IN AFRICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

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Notes

1 James Keeley & Ian Scoones, Understanding Environmental Policy Processes: Cases from Africa (2003) [hereinafter Keeley & Scoones], and James Fairhead & Melissa Leach, Science, Society and Power: Environmental Knowledge and Policy in West Africa and the Caribbean (2003) [hereinafter Fairhead & Leach]. The first of these books, which is published by Earthscan Publications, comes out of a set of research activities associated with the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. The network of sponsorships and research collaborations that made the book possible is described at length and is symptomatic of the complexity of the institutional environment giving rise to the processes the book explores. See Keeley & Scoones at x-xii. The other book is the second published by Fairhead and Leach with Cambridge University Press and, again, grows out of long-standing associations with IDS. See also James Fairhead & Melissa Leach, Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic (1996).

2 The countries used for case studies in the books that frame this review essay include four from Africa and one from the Caribbean: Ethiopia, Mali, Zimbabwe, Guinea, and Trinidad.

3 Keeley & Scoones, supra note 1, at 16.

4 M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-77 (1980); B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (2003). For other related discussions on these issues, see D. Sarewitz, Science and Environmental Policy: An Excess of Objectivity, in Earth Matters: The Earth Sciences, Philosophy, and the Claims of Community (Robert Frodeman, ed., 1999).

5 Fairhead & Leach, supra note 1, at 13, referring to arguments made by Latour, supra note 4, and to D. Haraway, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, 14 Feminist Stud. 575 (1998).

6 Fairhead and Leach, supranote 1, at 12-19.

7 Keeley and Scoones, supra note 1, at 30-38. It is also worth noting that both books pay tribute to the importance of structural forces and to the two-way dynamics that, first, link global institutions and discourse to local institutions and actors and, second, link the local to the global. Although both books incorporate constructivist thinking into their analyses, neither book fully embraces constructivism as a theoretical point of departure.

8 Id. at 17.

9 Curiously, the authors do not provide much detail about SFI. They say little about what exactly it is, how it works, who is in charge, and what effects it has. They devote nearly all their attention, instead, to the processes that surrounded the birth of this initiative. SFI is also, incidentally, an acronym well-known in the forestry arena, referring to the Sustainable Forest Initiative of the American Forest and Paper Association.

10 Anyone who has worked in partnership with the World Bank can attest to the fact that programs or initiatives that consume relatively small amounts of staff time (and that move relatively large sums of money) nearly always win out over those that require heavy staff time loads.

11 There are, of course, some analytical advantages to leaving out these differences, and downplaying the salient features of each individual country, at least in terms of keeping the focus limited to soils and soil fertility.

12 See, for example, Eleni Gabre-Madhin, Market Institutions, Transaction Costs, and Social Capital in the Ethiopian Grain Market, International Food Policy Research Institute Research Report 124 (2001).

13 The term ‘Empire’ derives from M. Hardt & A. Negri, Empire (2001). “The metaphor of a vortex captures something of the growing global coordination of science and policy, without orchestration by any particular international organization, state or located institution. The sense is more akin to Hardt and Negri's characterization of an Empire’ dominating contemporary world politics, premised on an increasingly de-centered, de-territorialised form of global governance … [Theorists] of globalization are [not] explicitly concerned with science, let alone the perspectives from an ethnographic approach to it, yet their insights are relevant to comprehending the networks and flows of institutions and ideas which constitute the ‘Empire’ that we term ‘Tropical Forest International.‘ Fairhead and Leach, supra note 1, at 27.

14 Id. at 102.

15 WWF originally stood for “World Wildlife Fund.” However, in 1986, WWF had come to realize that its name no longer reflected the scope of its activities. WWF changed its name from World Wildlife Fund to the “World Wide Fund For Nature.” The United States and Canada, however, retained the old name. The resulting confusion caused by the name change in 1986, together with its translation into more than 15 languages, led the WWF Network in 2001 to agree on using the original acronym as its one, global name—the acronym that it had always been known by since its inception way back in 1961: “WWF.”

16 Fairhead & Leach, supra note 1, at 137.

17 These views are based partly on the research findings reported in these two books and in the literature more generally and also on my own observations of initiatives in Africa and in other developing countries.

18 So, what is meant by ownership? Ownership means more than participation and more than empowerment. Ownership implies that an actor (individual or collective actor) stands to personally gain or lose if the project succeeds or fails, that the actor has a significant role in the implementation of an initiative as well as a significant role in at least one or more of the following: the science, planning, policymaking, funding, reviewing and assessment that are associated with the initiative.

19 Id. at 159, where Fairhead and Leach begin to get into this discussion a little bit more explicitly than elsewhere and even show how the ‘local’ finds its way up to the ‘global’, one of the few situations where this is explicitly illustrated in either book.