In July 2019, the Sheffield Institute for International Development was privileged to have several colleagues with diverse expertise on conservation visiting from Tanzania: Christine Noe from the University of Dar es Salaam as well as Thabit Jacob and Wilhelm Kiwango from the University of Dodoma.

Together with two researchers working on conservation at SIID, Dan Brockington and Judith Krauss, we recorded a conversation on conservation which is now available as a SIID podcast, reflecting on the past, present and future of conservation.

We discussed big trends in conservation around what understandings of nature and conservation have been prominent, who makes decisions and how the global level affects the local level. We ended on some ideas about what we would like to see happen in conservation going forward.

How do people in rural areas in the global south access water and land – essential resources for their livelihoods? And how do institutions work to shape natural resource management and development? This is the ongoing focus of Frances Cleaver’s research.

For the last two decades or so there has been a strong emphasis on ‘getting institutions right’ in development policy. Robust and adaptable institutions are thought to contribute to good governance and democracy through a focus on pubic debate, and through mechanisms for accountability and transparency. They are also thought to deliver sustainability by ensuring appropriate and responsible local resource use. A lot of money and effort has been spent by governments and development agencies in building strong institutions at the local level – including Water User Associations, Farmer Groups, Forest Management Committees and the like. But the evidence for the success of these initiatives is mixed and critics say that such arrangements often reproduce power relations, exclude marginalised groups and fail to secure sustainable natural resource management. Additionally, the focus on formal public institutions overlooks the variety of other social arrangements through which people access resources.

Frances Cleaver is currently investigating these issues through two projects. One concerns green economy initiatives in Tanzania (including climate smart agriculture and conservation) and how these travel through institutions to produce variable outcomes for people’s land and water rights The other project aims to understand local management arrangements for waterpoints in Malawi, Ethiopia and Uganda. Here the emphasis is on understanding the obstacles to achieving ongoing functionality and equity of access.

Recently, companies that had supported the Fairtrade label through retail partnerships have decided to step away from this engagement. Cadbury one of the main supporters of the Fairtrade label has launched its own label “Cocoa Life”, although Fairtrade claims to be supporting this initiative. Similarly, Sainsbury the world’s biggest retailer of Fairtrade certified products has decided to replace the Fairtrade label for its tea’s with its own “Fairly Traded” label. Sainsbury promises to improve the Fairtrade practice of providing a minimum price guarantee and a social premium with additional benefits such as long term commercial relationships which it acknowledges are missing from the Fairtrade system. Sainsbury in presenting its rationale for making this change brings out the problem with the Fairtrade system.

Despite having been around since 1992, the Fairtrade label has not translated into sustainable livelihoods for smallholder farmers despite having made some progress in improving livelihoods. This is due to the fact that Fairtrade has focused its attention on its retail partners, who have benefited the most from their relationship with Fairtrade, which has also gotten a significant portion of its resources from the Fairtrade premium charged on retail products bearing its label. The Fairtrade system has enabled retailers to develop a profitable market niche that has bolstered their corporate social responsibility story but retailers have noted that consumers are not as enamoured by the Fairtrade label.

However, research at the smallholder end of the commodity value chains which are supposed to be the beneficiaries of the Fairtrade system show that the benefits of Fairtrade have not accrued at the smallholder level. The retailers shift away from Fairtrade portends an acknowledgement of this failure. It is also an indicator of retailer’s new business strategy to develop their own certification initiatives to garner a new market niche that would not be associated with the Fairtrade label that is starting to lose its glimmer. In this podcast, I present some of the issues related to this lack of accountability to the smallholder coffee farmers in the Fairtrade system and discuss the potential for alternatives to improve smallholder farmer’s livelihoods.

Dr Daniel Hammett is a senior lecturer within the Department of Geography. His research and teaching focuses on political geographies of the global south. In this podcast, he talks us through the ‘100 questions’ project, and gives us a glimpse into what he’s currently working on.

On the first day of 2016, the global development agenda underwent a significant shift with the move from the Millennium Development Goals agenda to a new set of shared goals, the Sustainable Development Goals. At the heart of this change was an awareness of the failures of the MDGs but also optimism that shared goals and shared commitment would help push forward an international development agenda that was now focussed on a global – not just global south – scale.

Inspired by the emergence of a post-2015 development agenda, a group of colleagues – led by Jean Grugel, Johan Oldekop and Lorenza Fontana amongst others – launched an ambitious consultative project to identify the key research questions that could inform and support international development in the years ahead. The results of this global consultation were eventually turned into 100 key research questions which, it is hoped, will act as focal points for development-related research moving forwards.

My own work links to several of the final questions included under the theme of ‘governance, participation and rights’ and, broadly put, explore opportunities and challenges for citizens and civil society in promoting development. In the years since the 100 key questions paper, my work has addressed issues of governance and participation in Asia and Africa – including an ongoing project working in Rwanda to support capacity building efforts among organisations working in the justice sector. Working alongside RCN Justice et Democratie, these efforts have produced tailored training materials and capacity building events to support civil society and non-governmental organisations working in Rwanda to promote peace and justice.

For more information, read the 100 key research questions for the post-2015 development agenda.

Military-style approaches are being employed as a means to call a halt to wildlife losses. This has led many to question whether such approaches are necessary to ensure the adequate conservation of some of our favourite animals. In the podcast, Rosaleen Duffy, Professor of International Politics, tells us more about militarised conservation, explaining exactly what it is, and the impact it is having on both animals and humans.

The rises in poaching of some of the worlds most iconic animals, especially rhinos, tigers and elephants, have led to a growing sense of urgency in conservation. It is often argued that we are in a race against time to save species from extinction. This sense of crisis and of urgency has been accompanied by a key shift in conservation towards more forceful and military–style responses. This is not just confined to active use of force, but encompasses a wider range of processes including training of rangers by former military personnel now working in the burgeoning private security sector; the use of technologies which have their origins in the military (drones is the most obvious example) and the development of informant networks for intelligence gathering.  The learning is not just one-way either – conservationists are learning from the military, but the military also able to learn and trial new techniques in the field of wildlife conservation.

There are many reasons to be cautious about this –  not only in terms of what kinds of conservation outcomes that a militarised response might produce. We need to ask ourselves: Do we want conservation with a martial face? If conservationists are operating in conflict zones, they can feel they have no option but to arm rangers in order to ensure their own safety. But even this can be problematic. For example, there are emerging reports of rangers suffering from PTSD; if external NGOs fund and support arming rangers then they may be breach of international arms embargoes; and of course there is always the danger that militarised conservation will just add to the conflict and increase levels of insecurity for local communities. We also need to consider the politics of race – the sector is populated by overwhelmingly white military trainers, and much of the imagery used harks back to that of European colonists imparting knowledge as part of a civilising mission in Africa.  

The BIOSEC team are researching these emerging dynamics in wildlife conservation; we focus on responses to poaching and wildlife trafficking, and we aim to develop a much better understanding of the challenges and pitfalls in integrating conservation and security.

Wellbeing is more than just being happy. But what exactly is it in its entirety and how can we measure its levels within our societies? Allister McGregor, is a Professor in Political Economy. He uses a human wellbeing framing to understand why issues such as poverty and inequality persist.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include a specific goal for improving human wellbeing (and health – SDG 3) but the overall framework for the SDGs is inspired by a broader conception of human wellbeing. It includes goals that address the material conditions that people face (having enough nutritious food, shelter, clean water), their relationships in society (gender relations and inequality  - “leave no-one behind”) and they also consider how we might ensure that the state of the planet is such that there is the possibility of wellbeing for people in the future (sustainable development – climate change, life under the water, life on land).

Although the term ‘wellbeing’ is very powerful and is used widely in international policy circles, the term often suffers from poor or weak translation from rhetoric to policy and research practice.  This is particularly so for the international development community.  For many decades now, development studies scholars have flailed around, anguishing about the neo-colonial character either of their detached study of the lives of poor people in poor countries or their role in the service of the development industry. Many policy makers and academics in international development remain stuck in their traditional and subservient paradigms of poverty studies or livelihoods frameworks.

Although the concept of wellbeing often is seen as being anodyne, it actually offers the prospect of a more universal and critical approach to the study of sustainable progress and the political and policy challenges associated with it. The notion of wellbeing can be profoundly political in its application – in particular it can bring to the fore the relations of power, at different level of abstraction (from beliefs and values to arrangements of coercion and consent), that shape the systems that produce and reproduce our currently profoundly unequal and unsustainable global distribution of wellbeing (see Devereux and McGregor 2014).  More than five years ago the authors of the Final Report of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress issued a challenge to scholars and policy makers to work towards the meaningful operationalization of a substantial concept of wellbeing. It is time for development studies scholars to get ‘on board’ with this challenge and to take a renewed and serious look at what wellbeing has to offer as a concept and a methodology for a more emancipatory and sustainable route to development.

For more information, see ‘Measuring what matters: The role of well-being methods in development policy and practice.’