ABSTRACT
The chapters making up this book have examined regional continuity and change at a range of scales and from a diverse range of perspectives: they have effectively explored various West African worlds and, more importantly, offered these for our scrutiny. In the process, authors have attempted to highlight recent and longer-term change and development, while interrogating contemporary debates on the transformations and evolutions underway. In West Africa, as elsewhere on the continent, the key challenge confronting the development planner or policy maker, or, indeed, the urban inhabitant or rural producer, is the basic one related to securing and sustaining a livelihood within the context of dynamic change, usually involving but not restricted to, globalisation and neo-liberalism. Ironically, this is precisely the case that regional policy makers, and their development partners, have always made, even if not necessarily in the same language, to justify development intervention in regional society and nature. It is the case, too, given the region’s continued dependence on a bewildering array of natural resource-based livelihoods, and the myriad and complex links between rural and urban ‘fields’ of livelihood activity spheres or spaces, that environmental modification and change remain integral components of the regional livelihood context.
