ABSTRACT
The people who now grow coffee, beans, and maize in Tanzania’s North Pare Mountains have relied on irrigation to make intensive agriculture possible despite generally low soil fertility and long dry seasons for at least several centuries (Sheridan 2002). Indigenous irrigation and intensive agricultural systems were somewhat of a rarity in pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa (Adams and Anderson 1988; Widgren and Sutton 2004), so understanding how and why these systems worked is a top priority for farmers and development administrators in East Africa. Population density in North Pare is now roughly 12 times higher than it was in the pre-colonial period, and irrigated agriculture would enhance food security and likely spark economic diversification. In the pre-colonial period (before c. 1890), North Pare irrigation had been a robust network of more than 400 water intake structures and canals that formed a web of water from the mountain peaks to the plains 5,000 feet below. The system was remarkably resilient throughout the economic, political, and cultural changes wrought by two colonial regimes (German 1885–1915 and British 1918–1961), but independent Tanzania left the system a shambles of broken intakes and dry canals. This chapter reviews resilience theory and evaluates how well this functionalist approach from systems ecology can account for the course of change in North Pare. Power and political history, rather than function, explain the area’s dynamics better than resilience, which suggests that resilience theory may be poorly adapted to the task of building new social-ecological systems.
