Lynne Heasley

REFLECTIONS ON WALKING CONTESTED LAND: DOING ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY IN west africa and the united states

ON 29 OCTOBER 1991, near the village of Toda in southern Niger, a fight over crop damage erupted between Fulani herders and Hausa farmers that left two farmers dead. Hundreds of area Hausa went searching for revenge. When they arrived at Toda, they chased over one hundred Fulani women and children into a building, which they then set on fire. Less than a year after the massacre I drove to southern Niger, eager to begin field research on the historical connections of cropping to livestock systems in the West African Sahel. This gruesome story awaited me, and the people who told it—in hushed voices and in private—were farmers and herders who knew how high the stakes were in their shared histories and geographies.

Thirteen years later I came across an article in the Chicago Tribune that tried to make theoretical sense of a far larger and more brutal massacre unfolding in another arid African country, the Sudan. The "Sudan crisis," proclaimed the headline, "exemplifies clash of civilizations." And in the subheading: "Darfur's violence is rooted in the fight between the herder and the farmer, the primary conflict Immanuel Kant postulated in the 18^th century."¹ "For Kant," said freelance writer John O'Doherty, "the primary clash is the one between the settled farmer and the nomadic cattle herder," indeed it is the primary conflict "in the development of human society." O'Doherty's prima facie evidence was that the Sudanian antagonists were nomadic cattle-herding Bedouin and sedentary Fur farmers. He then asserted two causal factors in the current Sudan crisis. One was "the prolonged drought of the 1980s, which decreased the availability of land suitable for either herding or tillage." A second reason, said O'Doherty, was the "incursion" of herders onto farmland.

African historians and geographers are well acquainted with O'Doherty's interpretation. Kant or no Kant, it represents the most common political understanding of conflicts involving herding and farming groups in sub-Saharan Africa. (In fact O'Doherty is a Johns Hopkins doctoral student in political science, according to the article.) O'Doherty recapitulated the governing narrative of the region. The narrative in a nutshell, according to Sahelian scholar Matthew Turner, is one of shifting conflicts between groups of people competing for scarce resources.² The emphasis is on conflict and scarcity, and the primary relationships in the narrative involve competition between individuals or cultural groups. Had the article pursued the theme of scarcity further, it might have referred to severe grazing pressure from cattle and goats. Yet O'Doherty's clear-cut analysis is decidedly not what you will find from many historians and geographers who study the environmental history of the region—from people like Matthew Turner, for example. At least it is not what U.S. historian Paul Sutter found when he examined African environmental history in a thought-provoking essay for Environmental History.³

In his 2003 essay, Sutter's reference point was not Kant but regional historiography. While O'Doherty deployed Kant's "Speculative Beginning of Human History" as "an excellent framework for understanding [the Darfur] conflict," Sutter was impressed by how complex and ambiguous scholarly narratives were about African degradation and its causes. The African scholarship, it turned out, took nothing for granted, including the notion of some kind of inherent, scarcity-driven conflict between pastoralists and farmers. What especially struck Sutter were differences between environmental history from sub-Saharan Africa and India and environmental history from the United States. African environmental historiography, Sutter observed, weaves "humans and nature together into a single fabric." Unlike U.S. environmental historiography (and also unlike O'Doherty's narrative), it is "a complex story of conjuncture, adaptation, and cultural and environmental flux."⁴ Sutter speculated that "the willingness of U.S. historiography to blame humans and the reticence of African historiography to do the same—might well reveal instructive differences about the historical context and moral impetuses of the two fields."⁵ What can U.S. environmental historians learn, Sutter asked, from non-U.S. environmental historiography? For Sutter, the answer lay in considering whether scholars studying other areas of the world approached their subject differently than scholars studying the United States.⁶

By the time I read Sutter's essay I was no longer an Africanist. Years before I had decided to come home, to turn my international sensibility—which Sutter aptly abridged as the story of "cultural and environmental flux"—on my own Great Lakes region. But his essay took me back to my shock on first hearing about the events in Toda. They seemed so close at hand then, when I was studying villages whose cultural profiles were not too different from Toda's, and whose landscape profiles were nearly identical: fields and brousse (generic uncultivated bush to some, rich Acacia-dotted pasture to others), a semi-arid place where people struggled to grow millet and cattle. Toda had stunned me of course, because of the gut-wrenching specter of people being burned alive by their own neighbors. Yet for reasons that will become clear soon, I did not see Toda as a new fissure in a fundamental Kantian divide between herders and farmers. Quite the opposite; Toda seemed to me a dark anomaly in the agropastoral history of the area. It was a new outlier in a much larger pattern of interdependence, and this pattern encompassed negotiation, cooperation, change, and, yes, mediated conflict. Toda, in other words, was a disturbing data point to account for but not necessarily a main entry point.

In this essay I want to offer a partial explanation for the differences Sutter observed between U.S. and non-U.S. environmental history. This involves constructing, four times over, an alternative historical narrative for the Sahel: cultural and ecological interdependence. My argument is quite simple: Non-U.S. environmental history appears so different in part because the relationship of researchers to the communities and landscapes where they work is profoundly different. The boundaries between humans and nature are not only blurred in the historical narrative, they are blurred between the researcher and other people during the study, and between the researcher and nature too. I propose that African environmental history, and African environmental scholarship more generally, has been shaped by the ways in which researchers have navigated two levels of complexity. The first level is the complexity of production systems— herding and farming and the tangled connections between them. Here any universal application of Kant will not hold up under scrutiny. The second level is the explicit context of moral complexity and responsibility involving researchers and the researched (whether people or environment). In most writing on American history there is a kind of detachment, no matter how passionate or committed a scholar is. In general, historians are removed from the people and policies about whom they write. In the field they are also removed from other researchers. Sahelian researchers, like Africanists generally, have a harder time attaining this detachment, and often reject it as unproductive. Not only does detachment produce its own biases, in the worst cases it reproduces incorrect interpretations of relationships between people and their environment. These interpretations can have extraordinarily negative consequences for African people, farmers and herders alike.

I will not repeat the thorough literature survey that Sutter carried out so skillfully. Instead, I will retrace the development of the sorts of narratives Sutter identified to illustrate four main points: (1) Africanists often are integrated into local communities during their fieldwork, and so they experience landscape and culture in subtle, intimate ways. (2) Africanists rely on non-written sources, thus achieving a rich engagement with indigenous knowledge and decision making. (3) Africanists are part of multidisciplinary and even multi-professional communities while in the field. This gives transdisciplinary contours to the larger scholarship, and encourages attention to problem solving. (4) Explicit relationships among researchers, policymakers, and local communities bring to the fore ethical questions about control over policy and academic research.⁷ My purpose is to show how the moral complexity of doing research relates to the moral complexity of people-environment relationships in sub-Saharan Africa. This complexity is not limited to Africa. Michael Lewis's approach in his fine new book on biodiversity in India embodies the very points I make here.⁸ The question is whether and how U.S. historians should adapt more participatory ways of doing environmental history.

POINT 1, INCLUSION IN LOCAL COMMUNITIES: BASSI

IN SUB-SAHARAN Africa, researchers often live in or very close to their study communities while doing research. What's more, they must negotiate with their communities to gain access to people and landscapes. As they become part of a local web of relationships—albeit a temporary part—they gain a grassroots perspective on their topic, and they become comfortable with analytical gray tones. This is especially apparent in the narratives environmental historians develop to explain socio-environmental relationships.

In Niger, I worked in villages where two or more cultural groups lived side by side, often forming what looked like distinct neighborhoods in the same small town. Bassi was one such village. Its residents referred to their ethnic neighborhoods as Bassi Zarma and Bassi Peul (Peul being another name for ethnic Fulani, the term I use here). The Zarma called themselves farmers, while the Fulani called themselves herders. Zarma, however, owned large numbers of livestock, and Fulani had farmed in the village for many generations.

The practical differences between my research in Niger and my later research in the U.S. began with the first round of introductions and permissions that an Africanist must seek from local officials, village elders, and religious leaders— this to simply consider a study site. If introductions prove successful, the community will situate a researcher socially within itself, not outside. The researcher, however, will find herself situated outside for long periods—no matter how hot, windy, sandy, or malaria-laden the environment. One telling example of my own co-optation was a condition the regional livestock association placed on my research. The charismatic marabout who led the association asked that I include a young member from a prominent herding family on my research team. This presented all sorts of social signals to area villages, some undesirable. I had little choice. Nonetheless I welcomed the expanded entrée my new field assistant offered me. Without him I might well have missed one of the most important insights of the study.

When I arrived in Bassi a simmering land dispute was working its way through a variety of customary and official channels (what town anywhere doesn't have a simmering land dispute?). For nearly twenty years the Zarma neighborhood had tried to claim a portion of Fulani cropland. The Zarma were pursuing the claim for environmental reasons. Some of their own land was experiencing depleted soils and declining crop yields. Both ecology and culture stood out in this conflict, and I wanted to mine those connections. Equally valuable to me, Bassi Zarma and Bassi Peul competed for historical righteousness. They looked back over one hundred fifty years for proofs of ownership, debating who was the first to settle, which authority sanctioned their territory, and who was the first to clear land around Bassi for cultivation.⁹ My initial impression was that these groups were angry, volatile, and estranged.

But as I spent time in Bassi, mundane events started to challenge my understanding of conflicts within the community. During my rounds, Zarma or Fulani might recount a grievance with relish, even high drama, then they would cheerfully shepherd me to the other neighborhood. In passing me off they would pass the time of day as well. Fulani and Zarma women would chat at the well or call greetings to each other as they pounded millet. The Fulani rouga (a liaison between herders and the village chief) would update the Zarma chief on the condition of the herd, or a problem in another village, or how his sick son was doing. A rich Zarma merchant who presumably owned more cattle than anyone else in the village would stop by the home of a Fulani family. A newer farmer in the area would pay his respects to the chief with kola nuts. Fulani elders, the village chief, and the Imam would consult with each other and nearby government extension agents about the respectability and parameters of my visit to young male herders many miles out in the bush.

As I became part of everyday scenes, I came to see relationships between the two groups in a different light. The Fulani, it turned out, had lost most of their livestock during the droughts of the mid-1980s. But they continued to manage cattle for wealthier Zarma neighbors while they reconstituted their own herds. The Zarma benefited especially from the extended family ties of Bassi's Fulani to Karey Kopto, another village farther south. Relatives in Karey Kopto had long provided Bassi herders, and thus Zarma livestock, passage to the Niger River and good pasture around it.

These horizontal village relationships became clearer as I got to know particular families and became privy to their historical sense of space. I also began to identify important vertical networks. By vertical I mean relationships with authorities or institutions outside these villages who had effected some kind of change in them—another village or canton chief with superior territorial claims, a government official or agency, a non-governmental organization (NGO), a national political party, an international development office or lending institution. The Nigerien government played a pivotal role in Bassi's agropastoral history. Bassi sat on the edge of a plateau called the Fakara, whose low water table—fifty meters deep—had long restricted agricultural settlement. Fulani herders depended on the Fakara as a major north-south transhumance route between Mali and Burkina Faso. (Transhumanceis the seasonal trek cattle herders make over large areas to exploit shifting rainfall, diverse pasture, and postharvest crop stubble.) In the 1950s, the government began installing deep wells along the Fakara for watering livestock. Contrary to that objective, traditional Zarma and Fulani chiefs, who controlled "vacant" common land on the Fakara, began renting it to landless farmers, who now had a dependable water supply.¹⁰ By the early 1990s, fields had overtaken pasture. Vertical relationships reshaped the landscape around Bassi; they provided the historical context and contingency essential to any just account of the village. Without that context, the land dispute between Fulani and Zarma in Bassi would have looked like a provincial turf battle.

None of these relationships would have been clear without the access I had to herders en brousse because of my field assistant. For one thing, a herder had to consent to show me the way. This was not a given with young men who faced legally and socially delicate day-to-day decisions in managing livestock. But gain the confidence of herders in Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, or Senegal, and you can document a shifting array of short- and long-distance routes that clans or villages have established over decades to exploit seasonal pastures, graze crop stubble after the harvest, manure client farmers' fields, hit watering spots at appropriate intervals, and respond to drought. You also can experience the landscape firsthand for extended periods, no small advantage in environmental history.

Ultimately the Zarma relented on their claim to Fulani land for a reason I had not anticipated at the outset of my research. Why did the Zarma relent? Because, by long custom, Fulani controlled the manure of even Zarma cattle in their care, and manure was a critical resource, as important in the long term as water was in the short term. Farming in a region of infertile soils and variable rainfall was not sustainable without manure—i.e., without cattle. It was well-manured Fulani fields the Zarma had coveted, fields producing higher yields than their own degraded land.¹¹ Cattle had forged inseparable ties among Zarma, Fulani, and the land itself. This single fact overturns the popular political narrative in many ways. Rather than livestock threatening farming, expanded farming threatened livestock and, by extension, threatened an elaborate system of fertility management; rather than cattle overgrazing pasture, fields had eliminated large areas of pasture altogether; rather than herding and farming being separate activities, they were part of a spatially and temporally dynamic agropastoral system. Nonviolently but forcefully, Fulani in Bassi had worked to resolve the immediate conflict in their favor by boycotting Zarma fields. To press their point, they had entered into manure contracts with other farmers or reserved manure for their own use. In this case interdependence trumped competition, and it trumped it peacefully.

At first my research risked reducing Bassi to a portrayal of scarcity-driven resource conflict. Bassi's most prominent dispute was a tempting entry point for understanding the village. Its twin ethnic and production dichotomies made a Kantian-like analysis equally tempting. Such a portrait might not have been wholly unreasonable. Different cultural groups in the region did distinguish themselves by their modes of production. Fulani considered themselves first and foremost livestock managers. A Fulani village might have retained this specialty even if it had lost all of its livestock to drought, even if it had cultivated millet for as long as its elders could remember, even if its members had long shared their village with Zarma or Hausa farmers. Generalist strategies were essential to their survival, but the skills, lifestyle, social organization, and values that revolved around herding remained culturally central. It would not have taken a vast leap of logic to emphasize competition with other groups.

Yet this narrative would have misrepresented Bassi by problematizing its relationships so completely. The reality in the region was that many herders farmed and most farmers owned livestock, which they entrusted to the very herders with whom they might, at some point, come into conflict over crop damage. Obscured in narratives about ethnic conflict and scarce resources was another set of cultural, economic, and ecological relationships. These encompassed interdependence and cooperation, conflict and accommodation. By insisting that I take my own place in their cultural landscape, Bassi residents were able to tell this different story. This is the narrative thread that Paul Sutter noted in African historiography. Returning to Toda, no doubt that terrible event deserved to be more than the off-stage ghost it was during my research in Bassi. But were I to probe Toda's mysteries today, my working hypothesis would be this: Buried in the horror of the moment was a history in which the massacre was a shockingly abnormal end to a common, almost ritualistic negotiation between Sahelian farmers and herders over access to land. Buried under the burnt ruins was a subtler story than red-hot rage and murder.

POINT 2, NON-WRITTEN SOURCES: MAASINA

THE DIFFERENCES SUTTER observed between U.S. and non-U.S. environmental historiography make sense in light of approaches to studying social and environmental change in African settings. Africanists use far more non-written sources than most U.S. environmental historians. They make extensive use of oral materials, and not only formal oral histories (though these are prominent). Being methodical observers, often in extant communities like Bassi, researchers can literally see competing evidence. This opens up new questions that written sources might not. In addition, documentary resources in many poor countries are limited or scattered—a fugitive literature for scholars to hunt down. The dominant mode of research in African environmental history is thus a combination of ethnographic work and archival methods. One result is a sophisticated engagement with indigenous knowledge and decision making. Matthew Turner's work with Fulani herders in Mali is an important example. Turner demonstrates how an alternative research process (not just a different research setting) can lead to unexpected narratives of interdependence and moral complexity.

Today Turner's scholarship is in the vanguard of African ecological history. His work is hard to pigeonhole; it falls comfortably under the rubrics of political ecology, cultural and historical geography, environmental history, and even range ecology. For the purposes of this essay, two strands in Turner's research stand out. The first is his ecological fieldwork on the effects of livestock grazing on Sahelian grasslands. Turner's data, along with those of contemporary range ecologists, have challenged conventional wisdom on the historical causes and effects of dryland degradation.¹² I consider the topic of range ecology later in the essay. For the moment I want to focus on a second strand of Turner's research, his ethnography of Fulani agropastoralism in Maasina, Mali. Turner not only interviewed individual herders, he observed entire communities in action for months at a time. His approach included following transhumance routes with Fulani clans and their livestock. Turner even became something of a legend among Peace Corps volunteers in the region (disclosure: I was one at the time), who spread the exaggerated story of the day Turner said goodbye to his wife before a short field visit and did not come back for a month. When it came to farmer-herder conflicts, Turner's working knowledge of the nuts and bolts of Fulani decision making led him in new analytical directions.

Figure 1. Missira, Mali, 1989.

Photo by author.
Fulani villagers under the village baobab tree.

During his study, Turner became familiar with numerous quarrels between herders and farmers.¹³ In Maasina, like Bassi, violent conflicts were unusual, but Turner examined these, including a prominent attack by his host clan on a rice farmer. Turner also posed scenarios to clan leaders about what they would do in various hypothetical conflict situations. He found that the most violent incidents were not impetuous; they were strategic. Far from reacting to the "here-and now struggle" over resources, Turner concluded that clans carefully planned and provoked violence as a form of conflict management. Sometimes it was the right moment, in clan leaders' eyes, to force official action on a long-term concern, or to propel that concern into a preferred venue for arbitration. Like Fulani and Zarma in Bassi, Fulani in Maasina faced shifting burdens from powerful state institutions, which had controlled and redistributed land and set terms for use in ways that had benefited some people over others. Still less obvious, violence often was rooted in the belief that someone had violated long-standing social norms in an egregious way. The rice farmer, Turner learned after considerable time with his host clan, "had taken back livestock entrusted to a clan member without providing a valid reason."¹⁴ The farmer had broken his contract with the herder in a way that set a dangerous precedent. Beneath the facade that these were conflicts over scarce resources was a moral reasoning that had little to do with the immediate importance of an individual pasture or field. Turner once asked an elder what the clan would do if farmers encroached "on a particular floodplain pasture." "They would do nothing," he recalled the elder saying, "since the pasture in question could only feed three head of cattle for a week."¹⁵ Turner noted a durability and flexibility in Fulani social relationships corresponding to the durability and flexibility they tried to maintain in their production systems. It was this flexibility—founded on historical interdependence—that Fulani occasionally used violence to protect. Given a recent history of severe restrictions on indigenous land management, the surprise for Turner was that there was not more violence.

The depth of Turner's field experience gave him remarkable access to community-level strategy sessions. He did not have to default to common assumptions about motivation; he could interpret meaning and motivation with a credibility that scholars without such access could not. Native American historians often adopt ethnographic approaches comparable to Africanists like Turner, and for some of the same reasons of community norms and community wariness with researchers. But in general U.S. environmental historians do not achieve such close interaction with their study communities. The balance of time tips toward archival work and formal oral histories with individuals. The result is likely to be different analytical emphases. Documentary evidence can lean toward the most contentious or formal interactions between people—for example, adjudicated conflicts over land. Ethnography concerns itself with the overarching labyrinth of everyday relationships. You have to perceive the labyrinth in all its complexity to untangle the complicated history of farming and herding in the Sahel.

Turner has become concerned not just with popular portrayals of farmer-herder enmity, but also with simplistic academic portrayals of rural life. Scholarly narratives devoid of the moral dimensions of resource use risk denying the poor their humanity by presenting conflicts as "naturally arising ... almost instinctual responses to increased scarcity."¹⁶ Bad as that is, he cautions, the policy outcomes for the communities and landscapes being portrayed can be even more negative.

POINT 3, RESEARCHERS AND POLICYMAKERS

WHEN A RESEARCHER like Matthew Turner warns against environmental narratives "that greatly reduce the social, political and moral lives of rural peoples in pursuit of policy prescription," he is acknowledging, among other things, a basic condition of doing research in Africa: There is no ivory tower.¹⁷ European, American, and African academics, USAID personnel, NGO project directors, World Bank and IMF consultants, Peace Corps volunteers, religious missionaries—a whole host of expatriates—rub elbows to an extent that most U.S. historians never experience. Rather than being part of a community of historians, or a community of geographers, or any community of scholars who touch base primarily at professional meetings, in the field, Africanists are part of fluid multidisciplinary, multi-professional, and multinational communities; and those larger communities are devoted to addressing contemporary environmental, social, and economic problems. While I was a Peace Corps forester in Mali, for example, Rebecca McLain, a USAID-funded researcher from the University of Wisconsin, used my village as one of her study sites. At the time I worked for a British NGO that had a project in the village, and McLain became both friend and colleague to the NGO project director. For several months I was McLain's field assistant for her research on historical land and forest tenure relationships in the Mopti region. While visiting her villages we met researchers from Canada and Europe; we hiked with a National Geographic photographer and shared a meal with his editor; we socialized with a protestant missionary who was born and raised in the region; and I gave a tour of my village to McLain's project director at the UW Land Tenure Center, who much later gave me an academic research assistantship, and who still later moved on to become a country director for the Ford Foundation. Obviously such an extended kinship experience is formative, and that in itself is important. But the porousness of these professional boundaries has two additional consequences. First, there is the transdisciplinary quality of African environmental history. The scholarship is as likely to be defined by a particular region and topic of inquiry as by whether the researcher is an American historian, a French geographer, or a Canadian anthropologist. Second, one strand in the environmental history of sub-Saharan Africa is the interaction of academic research with African environmental and social policy. Evolving policies on livestock management in sub-Saharan Africa provide a case in point. Beginning in the 1970s, Sahelian countries embraced sedentarization schemes to settle herders and confine their livestock to local pastures. These efforts make for a generalized version of the Bassi and Maasina narratives. Like Bassi and Maasina, this version tends toward what Paul Sutter saw as a tightly woven fabric of people and land—and away from coarse notions of scarcity and competition.

Sedentarization had interwoven rationales. I want to pull out two in particular because of the way academic research shaped and was shaped by them. The principle rationale hinged on the concept of carrying capacity. Range ecologists, drawing on their work in the arid American West, had begun applying the theory of carrying capacity to a new frontier, the Sahel. The theory posited livestock pressure as a primary driver in land degradation. If ever there was an environmental villain it was cattle. This single assumption had dramatic scientific and policy ramifications. By quantifying net primary productivity of vegetation and livestock consumption—applied scientific exercises—experts in government and development agencies believed they could calculate the number of cattle a rangeland could support. Proper range management thus required predictable numbers of cattle (as well as sheep and goats) not exceeding a place's carrying capacity. The rational policy—the experts thought—was to divvy up the range into management units, then regulate access to it. Linear and efficient, the analytical idea of carrying capacity became a powerful tool for problem solving.

A second rationale, derived from agricultural economics and agricultural science (especially their union in the Green Revolution), was that sedentarization would help raise productivity in cash crops such as rice. This rationale made the farmer a protagonist and the herder an antagonist. Under conditions of scarcity, farmers required security of tenure (long-term access to and control over land) and its shorter-term derivative, security from livestock competition. Otherwise they would be less willing to establish vegetable gardens near water sources, invest capital in irrigated agricultural projects along river basins like the Niger Delta, and intensify their overall production. In theory, herders would not lose out. As they reduced the size of their herds and settled into farming, they would diversify their production; with manure from their remaining cattle they would intensify production; and by settling on their own land they would take responsibility for its long-term fertility. A political corollary accompanied this rationale. If you could separate traditional herders and traditional farmers, give them their own places, then you could calm ethnic tensions.

It is important to recognize, albeit briefly, the ideological underpinnings of these two rationales: separation through zoning (livestock from fields, herders from farmers, Fulani from other ethnic groups), individualism (each person or group responsible for the success of its territory), privatization (clearly defined property boundaries combined with state-regulated access to pasture), and capitalist development (agricultural production for the market rather than pastoralism for subsistence). Research, policy, and ideology converged around a shared vision of Sahelian production systems as inherently competitive. Note the close parallel to Garrett Hardin's The Tragedy of the Commons, perhaps our most compelling scientific parable of a degraded Sahelian kind of world dominated by zero-sum competition.¹⁸ Hardin's argument implicitly justified sedentarization and agricultural development policies in Africa.

In practice, development policies that tried to force sedentarization, or agricultural projects that created it as a byproduct, proved destructive. Limiting the mobility of livestock so that they grazed year-round in the same area caused severe localized degradation—soil compaction around watering spots, declines of grasses and forbs, and deforestation. Without the ability to adjust broad grazing patterns from year to year, herders could not navigate their cattle safely through drought. American-style ranches were not suited to the variable climate and diverse landscape mosaics of the Sahel.

American-style ranches were not suited to the Sahel's cultural landscape either. Sedentarization undermined indigenous, locally regulated common lands. It disregarded the seasonality of customary tenure systems, wherein farmers and herders—also men and women—accessed the same land at different times for cultivation, grazing, and collecting. Sedentarization overlooked herders' socioeconomic role in managing other people's cattle, not just their own. It all but ignored the economic role of cattle as the primary indigenous form of wealth— a live bank account of sorts. The upshot was that some policies actually fulfilled Kantian narratives of competition and scarcity.

Increasingly, however, range ecologists came to see both pasture and livestock responding to climate, a more fundamental driver of environmental change. Social scientists began to critically examine the ways in which international development impinged upon or altered regional land use; the ways in which it shifted intercommunity, intracommunity and intrahousehold relationships, often to the detriment of the most vulnerable groups of people—women, ethnic minorities, and impoverished communities. They also looked more closely at how environmental policies on deforestation and range management had worked or not worked in practice. Scientists and social scientists alike began to examine the unifying qualities and spatial complexity of livestock and agricultural production, qualities to which sedentarization and agricultural development policies had been blind.

The main problem, the critics argued, was how spatially narrow, static, and ahistorical the earlier understanding had been. In a revised scholarly framework, agriculture and livestock production were part and parcel of each other in large landscape mosaics. Scale was a crucial consideration: cropping was a local enterprise, while livestock management was regional. Fields needed manure, while livestock needed mobility. Water, crop stubble, manure, and livestock corridors made for necessary intersections between cropping and livestock management. Essential pasture was diverse and dispersed—large expanses of uncultivated savanna, village woodlots, aquatic bourgou grasses inside the Niger floodplain, and livestock corridors (linear bands of grassland that wound through more populated agricultural areas). Out of these intersections, Africanist scholars saw historical patterns of fields and pasture that involved more than uneasy coexistence; they demonstrated a larger unity, the agropastoral production system (with trees in the discussion it became the agrosilvopastoral system).

The producers themselves embodied the same local/regional dualism and the same interdependence, forming intricate and fluid cultural mosaics. Competition, the scholarship showed, was not an inevitable outcome of differences so much as one kind of relationship between people. Researchers began to ask: What is the whole range of relationships between people in this place? What have they been in the past? In what contexts? The result was a more holistic understanding of agropastoralism.

Sedentarization policies did not disappear with new scholarship on the Sahel. In Niger I met Peace Corps volunteers, NGO directors, and Nigerien forestry agents who all proposed sedentarization as the way to deal with Fulani herders crossing illegally into a national park during the dry season. In many African countries, economists were studying cadastral systems for delineating property boundaries. This was a U.S. model of land ownership, spatially referenced parcels accompanied by titles and deeds.

Nonetheless, with more complex histories of resource use came more nuanced discussions of policy. The power of emerging narratives of resource use was twofold: They were non-linear, and they focused on interdependence. By framing an array of interdependent relationships in the past, they provided a new framework for an array of approaches in the present. By the 1980s, African countries and international donors had begun to acknowledge that top-down approaches to resource management—which went back to French colonial rule— had created severe social and environmental problems. As a result, policy catch phrases from the 1980s and 1990s included devolution, decentralization, and developpement de terroirs villageois. The scholarship encouraged attention to social inequalities. It also evaluated land uses appropriate for arid climates, local conditions, and larger landscapes. By the 1990s, policy recommendations included maintenance of customary tenure regimes such as common pasture, seasonal access to land, gendered access, and connectivity between fields and pasture.

Sahelian land-use policies have impressed on many researchers at least one collective responsibility: to be attentive to the real-world implications of their scholarship over time. In this way, even historical research responds to contemporary problem-solving agendas. Researchers who study the environmental history of the Sahel tell stories that directly influence those agendas. They are therefore sensitive to how the interaction between policy and scholarship can affect study communities. The lesson from sedentarization is that researchers do not just share discipline-based questions or hypotheses, evidence, analyses, and revisions; they share a larger moral project of meta-queries and meta-analyses. This can be shoptalk that ranges from personal war stories of doing research to the scholarly implications of doing research in certain ways, from the validity of different scholarly interpretations to the non-scholarly audiences who would be most affected by those interpretations. Sahelian researchers, in other words, grapple with the history of doing international research as well as the histories of people and their landscapes.

POINT 4, TRANSCENDING SCARCITY: MISSIRA

EXPLICIT RELATIONSHIPS AMONG researchers, policymakers, and local communities raise ethical questions, not just about control over policy but about control over academic research. The primacy given to academic or technical expertise over indigenous knowledge becomes an unavoidable aspect of doing research. This creates a new level of moral complexity involving research subjects' humanity and self-determination. Here I develop a retrospective narrative of interdependence from the small Malian village of Missira. As I tell it, Missira's recent history is cumulative. It accrues all the conditions discussed so far and adds to them.

Let me state at the outset one of the most important points I will make: I experienced Missira personally as well as professionally. Missira, my Peace Corps village, was where I first identified specific questions about people and land that I thought an academic career could help answer.¹⁹ Missira was where I got my earliest training as a researcher. But Missira was also where I tried to get vulnerable, malnourished, displaced women to plant trees (and to believe, like I believed, in the wisdom of tree-planting); where I sat for hours drinking Chinese tea under grass-canopied refugee huts with adults who tolerated my abominable language skills and with children who spoke three languages; where I made mortifying cultural faux pas; in other words, where I shape-shifted regularly from an "expert" wannabe intoan inept foreigner in a strange land. To my mind Missira offers a rebuttal to Kantian narratives of scarcity and competition. But perhaps it would not appear so had I not experienced it so.

Located on a hill near the east bank of the Niger River in Mali's Mopti region, Missira was (and is) a Fulani village. Like Bassi, it had longstanding ties to other villages. Among these horizontal relationships, Missira Fulani cared for the cattle of Bozo fishermen from the nearby village of Daka-Womina on the Niger River, and those of Rimaïbe farmers from the village of Tiroguel (with whom they also bartered milk for grain). Also analogous to Bassi, Missira Fulani supplemented herding with family millet fields and rice plots in the floodplain. By the late 1980s, Missira had come on hard times. Drought had decimated its herds. Low floodwaters had rendered parts of the floodplain useless for cultivation. Far worse for the long-term viability of Missira, the village had lost most of its territory and control over vital natural resources. This was the conclusion of Rebecca McLain, who carried out research on land tenure around Missira from 1989–1991.²⁰ According to McLain, Missira's historical tenure system declined in three ways. First, in 1972 the state claimed eminent domain over land along the east bank of the Niger. Under the auspices of Opération Riz Mopti, it acquired agricultural land from villages in the area for a large-scale irrigated rice project. Second, control of Missira's traditional pasture, including valuable bourgoutières along the Niger River and its tributaries, went to the Opération de Développement d'Elevage à Mopti (ODEM), the government agency responsible for range management in the region. Both agencies redistributed land, Opération Riz by leasing small rice plots and ODEM by charging herders daily user fees to access pasture. Still a third state agency, Eaux et Forêt (Water and Forests), undermined Missira's exclusive rights to two village forests, from which they had once collected fruits, pastured livestock in the dry season, and harvested leaves for fodder. The cumulative result was that Missira was more visibly impoverished than Bassi. To be a guest at a meal in Missira was to know that you were consuming a portion of someone else's hard-won daily calories.

In the context of undeniable scarcity, the villagers of Missira did a remarkable thing. In 1987 they welcomed a new group of people to settle on land next to their village. The newcomers were destitute beyond even Missira's experience. What's more, they were strangers—foreigners—in the cultural ways that count: They came from another region, they were a different ethnicity, they shared no common language, and they could not claim any prior or even future cultural relationship comparable to those between the Fulani and the Bozo or Rimaïbe. The relationship would be new for both groups. It would add layers of social and environmental complexity to a village already under stress. Yet on Missira's part at least, the relationship was voluntary.

The backdrop was this: The drought of 1984–1985, which wiped out the majority of Mali's cattle, had made internal refugees out of many nomadic Kel Tamashek and Maure groups in the country's northern regions. Kel Tamashek (known internationally as Tuaregs) migrated south, where the Malian government and international aid organizations were establishing resettlement camps to funnel short-term relief and—of crucial importance to the Malian state and the NGOs—to promote the long-term sedentarization of these groups. Missira's Kel Tamashek (and Maure, Songhais, and Bellah) made up one such camp. To put it bluntly, the goal was to give the desert-loving, livestock-loving, radically independent Kel Tamashek a means of supporting themselves by turning them into productive yeoman farmers. As a member of the project's NGO team, I thus became part of still another vertical relationship.

The project helped the Kel Tamashek to rent land from Opération Riz, and set about training them to plow with oxen, to garden, to grow fruit trees, to establish live fences (thorny hedges), to cultivate all the agrarian skills necessary to put down roots, and to become a viable community. This was what the project team cared about. But what did the Kel Tamashek and Fulani in Missira care about? Apart from the struggle to survive, what relationships concerned them? Well, to spend time in the village was to see that they cared deeply about their relationship with God—Allah. This fundamental relationship shaped everyday life in Missira. Missira Un and Missira Deux—Missira One and Two as the Fulani and Kel Tamashek came to call themselves—interacted often through their religious leaders. It was Missira Un's Imam who had given permission for the Kel Tamashek to settle. A truly gentle man, he visited them every day, checking on their welfare and consulting with the settlers or the project team on any pressing issue. Missira Deux had prominent Islamic leaders too, including a venerated marabout and clan patriarch who became the Imam's friend. I have a photo of the marabout sitting on the ground under his makeshift shelter with a sheep lying comfortably beside him, like a pet dog.²¹

Figure 2. Sedentarization.

Photo by author.
Kel Tamashek (Tuareg) men learning to plow and sow fields using oxen, Missira, Mali, 1989.

Fulani and Kel Tamashek alike were passionate about their animals and the land: After God and clan, these were the essential ingredients in a good life. Among the Kel Tamashek, this passion took a form not quite in line with the development objectives set out for them. Most of all they wanted to rebuild their herds and return to a nomadic life. "Is the Sahara Desert beautiful," I occasionally asked. "You cannot imagine, Lynne," came the answer, with a wide sweep of an indigo-robed arm toward the horizon. Their skills, and their dreams, lay elsewhere.

To be sure, there was no idyllic harmony to be found in Missira Deux and it should not be romanticized. Kel Tamashek society was decentralized and fractious. To bewildered outsiders, internal Tamashek politics could seem operatically paranoid. Missira Deux, moreover, was a microcosm of a complicated class system with racial distinctions that included vassal clans. But for nearly five years Kel Tamashek and Fulani shared a small, insecure world. Poverty had not led them to compete over scarce resources, or to cooperate under duress when they would just as soon out compete each other. Nor had poverty led to violence. That came later, soon after I left Mali, as national events swept through Missira. A coup d'etat that overthrew Mali's dictator, Moussa Traoré, converged with an organized Kel Tamashek rebellion in the Sahara Desert of Mali and Niger. Rioting ensued, marked by an ethnic backlash against Kel Tamashek throughout the country, including those in Missira, whom their Fulani neighbors could not protect. Two members of Missira's NGO team (one the Scottish project director, the other a Tamashek extension agent) were accosted on a trip to Mopti and nearly set on fire by a mob of young men. Only the intervention of a bystander saved them from becoming human torches. Kel Tamashek refugees fled the Mopti region. But for a short time in Missira, accommodation was the norm. Missira was a place of scarce resources, but it was also a place grounded in the values of generosity, tolerance, and care.

There are twin moral and methodological implications to Missira. Most researchers feel some responsibility to the communities where they conduct research, especially when those places are very poor. We all hope to avoid the abysmal outcomes of compelling but simplistic analyses: that is, further impoverishment of people and their landscapes or, far worse, civil war. Africa has too many worst-case scenarios as reference points for what can go wrong when these conditions spiral downward.

But there is more to it than discretion. At the grassroots, researchers cannot help but see people as dynamic agents in their own destiny, as dreamers seeking hope and choice in the direction of their lives. In the case of Missira, it would be impossible for me to reduce relationships between its cultural groups, or between them and the land, to a purely pragmatic or materialist frame of reference (and even the ecological and social imperatives of agropastoral production are such a frame). How deep can our scholarship see? This is an important question to ask ourselves. For example, do the tools we use allow us to see relationships that involve care? Care of Fulani for their Kel Tamashek neighbors? Care for their animals? Care for their land? These are not romantic questions. They are of the utmost importance for environmental research, which by choice or default tells stories about how people have cared, not cared, or come to care for some part of the natural world. The answers may change the way people envision solutions to ongoing problems of conservation and development.

Rebecca McLain bought a cow before she left Missira, putting it in the care of one of her Fulani friends (and research subjects), Hamadoun Barry. Barry cared for the cow because he cared about McLain, and over the years he nurtured a great expansion of her livestock holdings. Did her own increasingly personal and complex relationship to Missira influence her scholarship? Says McLain: "One thing buying the cow did was it forced me to learn some of the rules of the relationships between absentee cattle owners and herders. I also ended up learning far more about cattle raising that I otherwise would have learned since Hamadoun felt it was his responsibility to keep me apprised of the cow's location and health on a regular basis. It also created a link that tied me closer to Mali. ... Cow ownership also enhanced my legitimacy when I interviewed Peul groups in Senegal, Guinea, and the Seno in later years. I suspect that I could have leveraged my cow ownership to learn far more than I did about herding issues if that had been the main focus of my research."²²

Figure 3. Kel Tamashek (Tuareg) Woman and Child, Missira, Mali, 1989.

Photo by author.

Missira's story has many implications. One is the malleability of approaches to carrying out environmental historical research. While researchers may become attuned to layers of complexity in their study sites, Missira shows that the very complexity of these places can also shape the development of research over time. Going further, nested within an evolving scholarship that responds to complex regional histories are the complicated ways in which individual researchers develop professionally over their careers. As McLain shows, how a scholar approaches her own place in a community during one project can shape future projects and even future career decisions.

On a deeper level yet, Missira's story is transformative: It focuses attention on the thorny question of whether and how to give local people a voice in scholarly discussions. Given the connections between research and policy, this is one of the central avenues by which local people might participate in decisions that will affect them directly. Toward the end of my time in Niger I transported a group of local people to the capital, Niamey, for a research presentation at USAID headquarters. I wanted them to be able to comment on my work before any kind of publication. I also wanted to introduce them to the USAID personnel and national-level Nigerien officials who were collaborating on a new Rural Code for the country. The Rural Code was supposed to clarify and codify property rights at the local level. The discussion was fascinating but awkward. The policymakers were not used to sitting with local people in a professional forum, while the villagers were not used to having a seat at the table. Normally researchers were a buffer between the two groups. This is a role that Africanists have come to deal with explicitly—and skeptically.

U.S. historians have started to tackle the same kinds of public-academic dialogue. In 2003, Marsha Weisiger organized a conference for stakeholders, policymakers, and scholars on the reintroduction of the Mexican gray wolf.²³ In Sense of History:The Place of the Past in American Life, David Glassberg explored the complicated connections between historians and local communities.²⁴ Historians, said Glassberg, should be facilitators as well as scholars, helping communities to engage their pasts.

ENTRY POINTS: THE UNITED STATES

MY REFLECTIONS WILL BE familiar ground to a contingent of scholars who have made similarly outlandish regional leaps but who seldom have the opportunity to reflect on both the enduring connections and the vast distances involved in such journeys. From the perspectives of great intimacy and great distance, the lessons of Bassi, Maasina, and Missira seem to me worth reflecting on. They end, or they begin, with converging efforts to include local people in policy discussions. Achieving their meaningful participation in policymaking might well mean making local people active participants—and decision makers—in the research process too. "Participatory" history, I can imagine some saying, risks becoming partisan history, parochial history, bad history. Perhaps. And certainly I am not suggesting a one-size-fits-all scholarly prescription in the United States any more than I would suggest a one-size-fits-all policy prescription in the Sahel. But the premise of participatory research is still worth considering: Local people should have a central role in developing the knowledge they need to strengthen their communities and protect their land.

Participatory research has been part of the scholarly lexicon in lesser-developed regions for a long time, but the term itself is slippery.²⁵ It encompasses guiding principles from which flow certain relationships, then choices about the scholarly agenda, and finally methods for gathering information. Three principles might have resonated with the villagers in Missira and their one-time Tamashek neighbors:

(1) Democratization of knowledge: The production of knowledge should be a more democratic enterprise, rather than the domain of experts.²⁶ Axiomatically, academic research is a social enterprise whose power differentials are hidden. Under this principle, all participants should help develop the research agenda and identify key questions. Likewise they should share in any tangible products of the research. Local field assistance and collaboration are only steps, then, toward egalitarian partnerships between researchers and local communities or other stakeholders.

(2) Deployment of local, indigenous knowledge: Scholarly expertise should not subordinate the experiences and knowledge of ordinary people.²⁷ The focus should be on learning from local people. Learning the hard way sometimes: Herders in Mali and Niger could be strict while teaching me the fine points of their landscape. They discovered that I paid closer attention when I took notes than after I stowed away my notebook. They became emphatic that the notebook must stay out. This principle suggests a plurality of research approaches to integrate the skills, knowledge, and analytical abilities of everyone involved. "Participatory research," explains sociologist John Gaventa, "attempts to break down the distinction between the researchers and the researched, the subjects and objects of knowledge production."²⁸ I would put it differently. To my mind participatory research seeks a higher level of interdependence.

(3) The most appropriate people to devise solutions are those who experience the problems: According to Gaventa, who is one of the most prominent theorists of participatory research in the United States, "the process of research should be viewed as both "education and development of consciousness and of mobilization for action."²⁹ Consciousness, explains social scientist Karen Brock, is "an important component in challenging existing power relations, and includes the social learning that can take place among those involved in participatory research."³⁰ This last principle captures a vision of research as transformative, especially at the grassroots.

The question is whether these principles can resonate for American environmental historians and their study communities. My own tentative answer is: Yes, sometimes. I suspect (without proof) that the moral vision behind participatory research, if not its actual practice, has helped reinforce differences between U.S. and non-U.S. environmental historiography. Likewise I suspect that it has contributed to shared approaches and perspectives among researchers of different disciplines so that internationally, environmental historians, political ecologists, cultural geographers, anthropologists, and other social scientists make up regionally based rather than discipline-based communities of scholars to a greater degree than in the United States. Yet Americanists might draw from Africanists and experiment with more interactive and even participatory forms of history whenever our research questions and historical periods make it possible, and especially when our research involves extant communities. From a purely practical standpoint this could enrich our scholarship: Documents often foreground conflict, while non-written sorts of evidence can open our eyes to subtleties the documents do not evince. We could enlarge our audience by giving people their own stake in academic research. We also could address the barriers and problems created by expertise of all sorts.

Non-U.S. environmental history opens a spectrum of possibilities for U.S. environmental history. Largely this means building complexity and some discomfort into our research and examining as a field what comes of it over time. This might be as simple as increasing local participation, similar to what the livestock association in Niger demanded of me. I did this with my research on property debates and landscape change in Wisconsin, and it generated many of the same benefits that I saw in Niger. During two summers I hired local field assistants from my study site, the Kickapoo Valley. I turned over aspects of their training in forest history (species identification, stand dynamics, landscape interpretation), as well as day-to-day supervision, to the Department of Natural Resources forester who worked in the Valley. He also gave our team a desk in his office, a room in his home, open access to forestry records going back fifty years, and lots of his time in the woods.

To build complexity into our work, we could live in the places and within the types of communities whose pasts are the focus of our studies, awkward as that might be at times. We could engage more actively with other professionals while in the field. We might even pull some of those professionals into the discipline as their own careers evolve. We could form partnerships with communities. Finally, we could encourage transformative first-hand experiences for environmental historians, and at different points in their careers. We have terrific examples of this already—Steven Pyne's work fighting fires, and Brian Donahue's suburban community farm, Land's Sake, in Massachusetts. Perhaps we should encourage graduate students, and undergrads as well, to find their own counterparts to fire, farming, and herding.

The scholarly struggle with moral complexity has special significance for environmental history. The field has embraced a project of building bridges— between people and their environments, between disciplines, between academia and the public, and increasingly between different regions of the world. In the future it might take on the project of interdependence—a complex condition to be studied, but also one to be sustained.

Lynne Heasley is assistant professor of history and environmental studies at Western Michigan University. Her book, A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley, will be out Fall 2005 from the University of Wisconsin Press. Her next book will be a history of the Peace Corps titled The Peace Corps and Ecology.

NOTES

I would like to thank Matt Turner for commenting on a draft of this essay, for acquiescing to my extensive use of his work, and for being a source of inspiration for over fifteen years. Nancy Langston, Marsha Weisiger, and Paul Sabin collaborated with me on the 2003 ASEH panel where I first presented these ideas. Paul Sutter provided the starting point. I am deeply grateful to a few people from my African past: Jim Delehanty, Tom Spear, Steve Lawry, Peter Bloch, Jess Reed, Annmarie Terraciano, and Tidgiane Ngaido. I never would have finished if not for Adam Rome's warm encouragement and focused feedback. I dedicate these reflections to Rebecca McLain.

^1. John O'Doherty, "Sudan Crisis Exemplifies Clash of Civilizations," Chicago Tribune, 19 September 2004.

^2. Matthew D. Turner, "Political Ecology and the Moral Dimensions of 'Resource Conflicts': The Case of Farmer-herder Conflicts in the Sahel," Political Geography 23 (2004): 883–89.

^3. Paul Sutter, "What Can U.S. Environmental Historians Learn from Non-U.S. Environmental Historiography?" Environmental History 8 (2003): 109–29.

^4. Ibid., 119.

^5. Ibid., 118.

^6. Ibid., 110.

^7. One premise here is that African environmental historiography is centered on the relatively recent past, colonial and postcolonial, even if the scope of some individual research projects is much longer.

^8. Michael L. Lewis, Inventing Global Ecology: Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal in India, 1947–1997 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004).

^9. Lynne Heasley and James Delehanty, "The Politics of Manure: Resource Tenure and the Agropastoral Economy in Southwestern Niger," Society and Natural Resources 9 (1996): 31–46

^10. Tidiane Ngaido, Land Use Conflicts in Western Rural Niger: Kollo and Tillabery Arrondissements, Land Tenure Center Cooperative Agreement with USAID/Niger, Discussion Paper No. 1 (Madison: Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1993).

^11. Heasley and Delehanty, "Politics of Manure."

^12. For example, Matthew D. Turner, "Spatial and Temporal Scaling of Grazing Impact on the Species Composition and Productivity of Sahelian Annual Grasslands," Journal of Arid Environments 41 (1999): 277–97; and P. Hiernaux and Matthew D. Turner, "The Effect of Clipping on Growth and Nutrient Uptake of Sahelian Annual Rangelands," Journal of Applied Ecology 33 (1996): 387–99.

^13. My synopsis of Turner's analysis is from Turner, "Political Ecology and the Moral Dimensions of 'Resource Conflicts.'"

^14. Ibid., 883.

^15. Ibid., 877

^16. Ibid., 867–68

^17. Ibid., 886.

^18. Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons," Science 162 (1968): 1243–48.

^19. The Peace Corps is a common launching pad into academic life. The experience inspires many to become historians, geographers, anthropologists, or ecologists. In the United States, I can think of no comparable post-undergraduate experience in terms of academic exposure and tracking.

^20. Rebecca McLain, Tenure and Agroforestry: Village and Household Studies in Central Mali (Madison: Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1990).

^21. I would publish the photo here except that it would be disrespectful on my part. I unknowingly committed a faux pas by asking the marabout to lower his veil, or tidjelmoust, so that I could photograph his face. He was kind enough to comply, but later I learned that Kel Tamashek men both receive and show respect by covering their mouths with these veils.

^22. Rebecca McLain to Lynne Heasley, 31 May 2004. Correspondence in possession of author.

^23. Marsha Weisiger, "The Debate over El Lobo: Can Historians Make a Difference?" The Public Historian 26 (2004): 123–44.

^24. David Glassberg, Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).

^25. For nuanced, critical explorations of participatory research in developing countries, see the essays in Kriemild Saunders, ed., Feminist Post-Development Thought: Rethinking Modernity, Post-Colonialism and Representation (New York: Zed, 2002); and Karen Brock and Rosemary McGee, eds., Knowing Poverty: Critical Reflections on Participatory Research and Policy (Sterling, Va.: Earthscan Publications, 2002).

^26. Patience Elabor-Idemudia, "Participatory Research: A Tool in the Production of Knowledge in Development Discourse," in Feminist Post-Development Thought, ed. Saunders, 232.

^27. Ibid., 227–242. See also John Gaventa, "The Powerful, the Powerless, and the Experts: Knowledge Struggles in an Information Age," in Voices of Change: Participatory Research in the United States and Canada, ed. Peter Park, et al. (Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey, 1993), 21–40.

^28. John Gaventa, "Participatory Research in North America," Convergence 24 (1988): 19.

^29. Ibid.

^30. Karen Brock, "Introduction: Knowing Poverty: Critical Reflections on Participatory Research and Policy," in Knowing Poverty, ed. Brock and McGee, 10.

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