Plants and Politics

The working group “Plants and Politics” explores the intricate relationship between plant cover and politics in desertification-affected areas. Many of these regions experience significant environmental changes, resulting in new or further escalating conflicts, and vice versa. At the same time, security concerns arising from these conflicts often put limits to in-depth and long-term research in these areas. To address this situation, we propose an innovative combination of political, economic and anthropological conflict studies together with environmental and ecological analyses both on the ground and remotely. In a time of escalating ecological and political crises, such studies are highly relevant and urgent.

Research interest of the working group

We concentrate on one of the regions where this concomitance of ongoing desertification and a high level of conflict is most salient, namely the Sahel zone. Rather than looking just at conflicts, we will study ongoing efforts to address such crises, especially those interventions that are designed to increase vegetation cover as a way to combat desertification and to maintain the livelihood basis of the population, such as tree planting campaigns or regenerative green belts. We take as a starting point the Great Green Wall initiative, launched by the African Union, and we examine how sustainable interventions to support plant growth are that have been started under this initiative. To this end, our working group asks how such efforts deal with the biological, social, economic, political, and ecological aspects they face. We are most of all interested in the contradiction between what is needed for a vegetation cover to become stable under the challenging conditions of arid and semi-arid areas, and how non-plant living beings sharing the same ecosystem, including humans, make use of the plants. Our main analytical lens is the question of temporality in growth and use of multiple plant species, from seasonal food crops to long-living trees: How much time is given to different plants to grow and how are they used, whether having been planted or sown for this specific purpose (e.g., agriculture, grazing, soil stabilization, windbreak) or not? What ecological and political consequences follow from this temporal relation between growth and use? In how far do initiatives, such as the ones we examine, establish a change in the relation between plants, plant users and the environments they share, taking into consideration the overall ecological situation and the social, economic and political conditions under which such initiatives operate?

Research approach

To be able to address these questions, we will develop a transdisciplinary approach that bridges the location-specific level of plant growth with the larger environmental and human societal dynamics. To this end, our team is combining expertise from botany, ecology, geography, biodiversity economics and political ecology, as well as political science and anthropology. We work through interrelated case studies and large-scale models that do not only provide the basis for comparative perspectives but also open the door for multifaceted collaboration, especially with knowledge producers living in and off the Sahel zone.

Duration

2024 – 2026