Environmental Crunch in Africa

Jon Abbink is senior researcher at the African Studies Centre Leiden and professor of Politics and Governance in Africa at Leiden University, The Netherlands. His main interests are political anthropology, developmentalism in Africa, the ethnology and cultural history of (Southwest) Ethiopia, and religious culture and the public sphere in the Horn of Africa. Recent books are the co-edited Anthropology of Elites, the co-authored Suri Orature, and A Decade of Ethiopia: Politics, Economy and Society 2004-2016.

• Introduction: Promise and peril in Africa: growth narratives vs. local environmental problems; Jon Abbink.- Chapter 1: Cash for cashews: does it add up?; Margaret Buckner.- Chapter 2: Trade-offs between crop production and other benefits derived from wetland areas: short-term gain versus long-term livelihood options in Ombeyi watershed, Kenya; Serena A.A. Nasongo, Charlotte de Fraiture & JB Okeyo-Owuor.- Chapter 3: Agriculture, ecology and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa: trajectories of labour-saving technologies in rural Benin; Georges Djohy, Honorat Edja & Ann Waters-Bayer.- Chapter 4: Is growing urban-based ecotourism good news for the rural poor and biodiversity conservation? A case study of Mikumi, Tanzania; Stig Jensen.- Chapter 5: Losing the plot: environmental problems and livelihood strife in developing rural Ethiopia. Suri agro-pastoralism vs. state resource use; Jon Abbink.- Chapter 6: Cameroon's Western Region: an environmental disaster in the making?; Moses K. Tesi.- Chapter 7: The impasse of contemporary agro-pastoralism in central Tanzania: environmental pressures in the face of land scarcity and commercial agricultural investment.- Tadasu Tsuruta.- Chapter 8: Down by the riverside: cyclone-driven floods and the expansion of swidden agriculture in southwestern Madagascar; Jorge Llopis.- Chapter 9: Challenging impediments to climate change initiatives in Greg Mbajojirogu’s Wake Up Everyone; Norbert Oyibe Eze.- Chapter 10: Future in culture? Globalizing environments in the lowlands of Southern Ethiopia; Echi Christina Gabbert.