ABSTRACT
Africa represents the hope toward a more sober, prosperous and environmentally friendly development trajectory. This huge continent is expected to be characterized by a lower trend of extractivism and less carbon footprint impact per capita compared to the energy-rich economies. It is well documented, however, that the energy-intensive economies of developed nations pillaged and transformed natural resources, including forests in the Global South, throughout the Industrial Age (1800–2000). The major socio-environmental effects of the related globalization processes in Africa are increasing conversions of forestlands and the over-exploitation of associated above-and-below-ground resources. Furthermore, deforestation is exacerbated by the growing demand (including from emerging economies, notably China) for global commodities such as precious wood, cocoa, palm oil, rubber and mining. Africa is simultaneously known as one of the tropical regions where forestland governance is deeply affected by systemic inequalities and multilevel power asymmetries – which jeopardize implementation of global sustainability goals. Those inequalities and the related potentate-subordinate relations occur from the degree of inclusion or exclusion to selective benefit sharing in the exploitation and conservation of forest ecosystems. The substantial contribution of this book is to bring together an original collection of case studies that address varied historical and contemporary aspects of the politics of forestland governance and biodiversity crisis in Africa. This book particularly focuses on actors’ power dynamics by scrutinizing formal and informal practices as well as political-economic resources they employed to get access to, control over and use of forestland for exploitation or conservation purposes.
