What are 'received wisdoms' and why are they common on environmental issues in the third world? Illustrate your essay with specific examples.

“Received wisdoms” are defined by Schubert as “the global discourses on, and the western imagination of, buzzwords such as “land degradation”, “desertification” and “woodfuel crisis”. They are wisdoms or knowledge that is assumed, wrongly founded or exaggerated and then used to make policy, or intervene in a particular practice; information that is not necessarily true or correct, but is used in policy making and is used as justification for the intervention by outside bodies for environmental maintenance and transformation. Received wisdoms may represent poor people’s understandings and experiences of environmental change but may not necessarily be accurate.
This may be better explained by giving an example of a belief, that because people are poor, they are uneducated about the environment around them and how best to manage it; they are therefore incapable of managing their environment and natural resources, or are not able to take care of the environment at the same time by providing enough food and resources to sustain themselves. In other words, there is a large gulf between certain global environmental concerns and poor people’s livelihood concerns. One belief is that the poor impact these environments even more and to a more disastrous degree with their rapid and untamed population growth. Other well-known narratives include the “Tragedy of the commons” Desertification, soil erosion and biodiversity loss.
It is common to read about these “received wisdoms” when reading about environmental issues in the third world because they are evident throughout the policies that are still be implemented. I will now look into this problem by evaluating the information put forward in several research papers.
In Reframing Deforestation: Global Analysis and Local Realities in West Africa, Fairhead, and Leach discuss environmental change in six African countries – Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo and Benin. After a review of how West African deforestation is represented in policy and environmental sciences, they take each country and evaluate how these policies have affected each one by examining social and historical anthropological evidence. Through their study, they encourage the reader to view the evidence in a different social context, and in doing so, present the argument that deforestation has been exaggerated throughout West Africa.
In recent years, there has been an increase in international concern regarding deforestation in various parts of the world. West Africa is one location in which there is a great deal of concern regarding “educating” the people about how to manage their landscape as many countries in Africa are considered to have experienced the most dramatic deforestation during the twentieth century; a huge issue because deforestation is strongly linked to climate change and other environmental issues such as wildfires and soil erosion. Evidence presented by Fairhead and Leach suggest that there has been a vast exaggeration in the scale of destruction by West African farmers during the twentieth century. They suggest that “received wisdoms” in global analyses have unfairly stigmatised West African farmers, and that their practices may even be sustainable and good for the landscape, enriching the fertility and productiveness of the soil. Available evidence proposes that the inhabitants of 15-20 million hectares of Western Africa may have been unfairly blamed for causing deforestation throughout the last century, attributing deforestation to current generations. Because deforestation is considered as recent phenomena by policy makers, it justifies the intervention by international organisations. Fairhead and Leach present evidence that a significat proportion of these people who have been blamed for mass deforestation of their countries, have likely been partially responsible for actually increasing wooded cover during their lifetime, and that in these areas, the extent of forest vegetation has been increasing throughout the last century.
Fairhead and Leach state that in recent years there have been many adjustments to the way conservation is approached and to the configuration of forest policies, and many of these have had emphasis on involving local people and getting them to participate in the policies that are aimed to improve the environmental situation. However, they argue that the frameworks of the policies and the thinking behind them have not fundamentally changed, and that there is a lack of accountability for the results of these policies due to the increasing contexts in which deforestation figures are used.
By questioning how and why deforestation has been exaggerated throughout West Africa, and encouraging the worldwide rethinking of policy approaches in forest and conservation, Fairhead and Leach raise awareness of how important “received wisdoms” are to environmental issues in the third world, and why they should be considered when presented with environmental “evidence”. It is very important that attention is paid to local knowledge and practices if policies to prevent or limit deforestation and environmental problems are to be successful. They stress that more respectful attention needs to be paid to local practice and knowledge if policies on deforestation are to conclude the way they are intended. Fairhead implies that West African people are much better custodians of local resources than is commonly thought, and that perceptions of local practices as a threat to the environment and policies are misguided. They do not take into account the good that West African people have done to their landscapes and fail to take into consideration the fact that it is in these people’s best interest to protect their natural resources. Views such as the ones held by some policy makers may promote poverty, conflict and invite further, more extensive ecological problems.
In their paper, Rethinking the Forest-Savanna Mosaic, Fairhead and Leach again discuss policy in West Africa, this time focussing, among others, on Guinea. They begin with a discussion about historical ecology and focus on the northern margins of Guinea’s forest zone. This discussion touches on how past policy makers and scientists have considered patches of dense semi-deciduous forest in this area to be the remaining areas of what was previously more extensive forest cover. It is suggested that people observing deforestation from the outside, have assumed it to be, and looked upon it as, a one way process, therefore blaming the local people and their use of land as destructive. However, through studying historical sources and talking with local villagers about their practices, it appears that the dominant ideas about environmental change in some regions are not necessarily accurate. Rethinking the forest savanna mosaic suggests the need for a fundamental challenge to the sociopolitical structures that have shaped environmental policy.
In their paper Escaping the forest mythology Fairhead and Leach again focus on Guinea, and more specifically, the Kissidougou region of the Republic. Again, they state how there are patches of dense forest in wide expanses of savanna grasslands, normally surrounding villages. This is typical of the West African forest-savanna ‘transition’ zone, stretching from Sierra Leone to Nigeria and for the best part of a century, these areas were thought to be the last remaining patches of forest cover and therefore the degraded and degrading landscape of Kissidougou attracted major international funding for environmental rehabilitation. However, Fairhead and Leach studied historical sources and conducted detailed research into local land use knowledge and practice and found that these islands of forest are not what remains of a bigger forest, but are areas of vegetation that has been developed by local people through years of cultivation. By talking to the local people about how their ancestors had arrived and founded the settlements, Fairhead and Leach discovered that it was these people who established these so-called “vegetation based fortifications” around their settlements. It was also discovered that these farmers’ practices create super-fertile soils which encourage the development of woody vegetation, and how these vegetation fortifications can help exclude fire and encourage further forest growth.
By focusing on and attempting to understand the settlers in these regions, Fairhead and Leach show how indicators in the natural landscape when not combined with other evidence, can lead to a myth through wrongful interpretation. These “received wisdoms” have become a problem because the scientific evidence for degradation and environmental problems has largely excluded historical evidence. Fairhead and Leach state that “Analysis which tracks vegetation change over time, making systematic use of historical sources and giving serious attention to inhabitants opinions, may not go the whole way towards undermining false orthodoxies, given the powerful institutional pressures which also uphold the latter. But it is an essential step in the right direction.”
In her paper, Shifting cultivation and deforestation in Tropical Africa: Critical Reflections, Development and Change, Ickowitz discusses the practice of “shifting cultivation”; the agricultural technique that the majority of farmers in many regions of Africa, employ to cultivate their crops. This technique is believed by policy experts and non-governmental organisations to be a very influential cause of deforestation. Icowitz investigates why this is and looks at the evidence which supports this view. She states that shifting cultivation is not accelerating the rate of deforestation and as Fairhead and Leach, and suggests that policy makers have not been presented with all the evidence that they need to or should consider before creating policies and plans of action.
As in Kissidougou, the Machakos district in Kenya has also believe to suffer from deforestation. However, today it has the highest level of soil and water conservation in Kenya as a result of a strong campaign by the National Soil and Water Conservation Project and local Mwethya Groups. These “Mwethya” are self help groups that have been set up within communities that focus on soil conservation, and have helped local farmers to realise the benefits of terracing to maximise the productivity of their land and to minimise soil erosion.
In Webs of power: forest loss in Guinea Fairhead and Leach again discuss the Kissidougou region of Guinea and again state that the patches of forest in the region were or are though to be parts of extensive natural forest destroyed by local farming and fire-setting, but that the experiences of most of Kissidougou’s Kissi and Kuranko inhabitants, air photography and archival historical evidence all fail to support these ideas. This evidence instead indicates that it is as a result of human management, that these areas of forest survive and that woodland cover has increased this century, rather than the views formed by observing maps of the region. Fairhead and Leach state that maps of these areas of so-called ‘deforestation’ can often be misconstrued as temporally and spatially transitional and are wrongly labelled as ‘derived savanna’ or ‘ex-forest zone’, believed to be degraded areas of previous vegetation types. In Guinea, these are the maps which have informed national and regional environmental policy.
Fairhead and Leach state that it is not ignorance which sustains the views of degradation in Kissidougou or Machakos, but the “continual production of supportive knowledge” that is presented by policy makers and bureaucracies. They site Foucault to illustrate why this supportive knowledge is continually presented: “What has taken place… is the production of effective instruments for the formation and accumulation of knowledge – methods of observation, techniques of registration, procedures for investigation and research, apparatuses of control. All this means that power, when it is exercised through these subtle mechanisms, cannot but evolve, organise and put into circulation a knowledge, or rather apparatuses of knowledge”.
This essay has sought to show that received wisdoms are wide widespread beliefs that are not necessarily true when all the evidence is considered. In parts of Africa, received wisdoms regarding deforestation and soil erosion have been proved by Fairhead and Leach among others to be inaccurate and in some cases to show the opposite of what is commonly believed through the dominant narrative. By presenting deforestation as a problem created by local people, bureaucracies have justified removing local farmers control over natural resources but these narratives about the causes of deforestation in West Africa illustrate how the dominant wisdom that evolves is not always accurate. The findings of Fairhead and Leach’s studies have strong implications for the future, including studies of climate change, as well as, maybe most importantly, shaping new conservation and forestry policies.