ABSTRACT
This chapter applies the political ecological approach used in Chapter 8 to debates about desertification. Concern about the degradation of drylands and the spread of deserts became a feature of global environmental debate following the ‘Sahel droughts’ of the late 1970s and 1980s. It is still commonly assumed that ‘desertification’ is inevitable in such environments. This chapter argues that drylands such as the West African Sahel, and their characteristic droughts, need to be understood very differently. It starts by showing that fear of desert advance reaches back to the start of the colonial period in West Africa and describes the way in which a series of dry years triggered fears of human-created desertification through ‘bio-geophysical feedback loops’ associated with overgrazing and soil erosion. It challenges these assumptions in the light of the highly natural variability of rainfall in West Africa. But such narratives have power. The chapter analyses the way in which the idea of human-induced desertification became widely accepted in policy, persisting in the face of contrary evidence. The chapter ends with a more optimistic vision of drylands as environments where land users work to build and maintain sustainable livelihoods, despite often unsupportive policy.
