Landscapes of Diversity: A Local Political Ecology of Livelihood Diversification in South-Western Niger

Abstract

The landscapes created by livelihood diversification in rural Africa result from human activity, from biophysical processes, and from their interrelations. The paper explores these interrelationships through analysis of ‘productive bricolage’ -the ways in which rural people in one of Africa’s most disadvantaged countries have constructed a livelihood system that is a response to local constraints and opportunities, and to broader patterns of income-generating possibilities. Zarma farmers in south-west Niger inhabit a region where the political economy has helped fuel economic migration and a partial withdrawal from agriculture, and has significantly altered social relationships and labour patterns in and between households. Zarma responses to these conditions include income diversification, and these activities are expressed in their fields and their farms, as well as in their economic and locational choices. Attempts to build bridges between the concerns of a geographically aware ‘local political ecology’, concerned with these patterns of livelihood dynamics and resource use, and the new cultural geography of landscape must continue to pay attention to material practices enacted through human agency. Social and environmental change is a fluid, non-linear, and dynamic process in drylands that are marginal to the globalized economic system.