Returns to Kulturstudier and natural resource management in Ghana

During the past five years Dr. Paul Stacey´s primary interests have been disputes over land and the use of tradition and identity to substantiate relations of property in Ghana. He teaches at the Department of for Society and Globalisation at Roskilde University, but this autumn he returns to Kulturstudier´s Global Environmental Studies students in Cape Coast. In this brief interview he shares his understanding of the developments within environmental management in Ghana and West Africa - and the global discourses of climate changes.

--I think the most significant question right now is the role oil revenue will play, and whether the current and future governments are willing/capable of putting aside a fraction of this revenue to seriously improve on past mistakes and to invest, for real, in a more sustainable environment. At the same time is how the governance of Ghana, as a developing oil economy, will be affected by the discovery of oil – politically, socially, economically. Tentatively, it appears (from just looking around Takoradi and Accra), that the economic growth of recent years had not resulted in a visible lessoning of inequality to any significant degree – poverty, filth,  and deprivation are everywhere while the number of land cruisers and expensive hotels has multiplied exponentially!

There is a real risk of social inequality leading to increased resentment and a popular lack of interest in party politics, as the gap between haves and have nots gets wider. Also, I think it is problematic that the management of Ghana’s valuable natural resources is being left too much in the hands of private investors, who simply do not have the incentive to think in terms of long term environmental planning, and whose actions have enormous consequences, but are based mainly on the logic of extraction, cost, and export. The challenge is to avoid short term thinking and avoid the familiar scenario where future governments and populations are left with the social, economic and political clean up bill, after the profits have long disappeared to other corners of the globe, says Stacey. 

Explains the global politics of climate change strategies
Stacey will also this semester teach the module  “Environmental challenges in West Africa”. Here he will draw on his own research and academic contributions on rural development in Ghana.
--My take on the module has been that questions of ‘environmental management’ and our ability to overcome the environmental challenges the region faces, has a great deal to do with the ways in which global, national, and local actors interact. There are many examples of this which I tried to draw attention to. Global discourses and narratives of climate change and perceived ‘solutions’ for example, have an influence on the policies of West African governments. As such, it is important to realize that ‘climate change strategies’ constitute highly political arenas and become politicised. This is often overlooked. It  means that climate related policies produce winners and losers along a range of social fault lines. It is often the case that those worse affected by climate change and strategies of environmental management are those that are already the most vulnerable. Although they may live in fragile environments their plight may not be due to particularly hostile environments, but to being historically disfavored by governments and being the object of political, economic, or social marginalization. This is particularly the case with West African pastoralist groups, who in many areas have been marginalized since the colonial period. Hence, the local and regional debates are not only about ‘how to manage the environment?’ or ‘how to overcome climate change?’ but concern more the issues of ‘how do strategies become politicized? , ‘who has the right to decide what happens and on what basis?’, and ‘why don’t particular groups enjoy voice in these important debates, and why are they marginalized?’ It is in these contexts that climate change strategies and processes of natural resource management can become significant political instruments, says Stacey.   

Governmental versus local and traditional solutions
The student group in Cape Coast consists of Scandinavian and Ghanaian students, with teachers from around the world, which makes for interesting discussions in and outside the classroom.
--Perhaps I’m generalizing too much but I got the impression that in the North we’re much more programmed to think that government has all the best solutions, while in the South there’s a greater understanding that many long established local and traditional natural resource management practices actually work quite well, says Stacey

Personally he questions where we should look for inspiration in terms of sustainable development.
--On a global level political leaders across the board have been pretty much hamstrung for years now, and can only agree to disagree. There are also far too few large private actors that have meaningful long term incentives to seriously turn green. Most of us ordinary mortals either do what we can, which is simply not enough, or carry on as we’ve always done, which is worse. Meanwhile, the consensus of the global academic community is getting stronger but their political influence is very limited. So to put it mildly, I have a difficult job in identifying where global sustainable development, which is needed now more than ever, should come from. One thing is for sure: there is no easy fix and there is little inspiration from where we’ve come from. We all have to move forward in a different direction, together, but that’s the hard part, isn’t it, he concludes.