Description:
What dynamics of future-making are associated with the implementation of large-scale renewable energy projects in a previously marginalized dryland area? Focusing on community-investor relations, this project explores the risks and opportunities, land-use changes and governance of infrastructures at the interface of global and local dynamics.

Support:
DFG

Duration:
2026 - 2029

https://crc-trr228.de/c02-energy-futures/

Global demand for natural cosmetics and organic care products has led to increasing commodification of numerous ecological niche species. This project focuses on the sourcing of arboreal essential oils, which are an important ingredient mainly due to their fragrant properties. Growing demand increases pressure on these wild, rare, and often endangered resources, and also gives rise to calls for more conservation efforts. This leads to the search for alternatives to wild collections, such as plantation cultivation or attempts at biochemical development of near-natural or nature-identical alternatives. This project sets out to explore these processes from two angles. One the one hand, it explores the political ecology of arboreal essential oils, and, on the other hand, it examines the substitutability of wild for bioengineered ingredients. The thus project explores the materiality and making of olfactory value chains in Africa and Europe, and – by using approaches from sensory ethnography and immersing in the worlds of olfactory experts – the creation and valuation of smell, its associative relations with wilderness, and the consequences of sensory difference on sourcing practices in Kenya, Namibia and South Africa. More broadly, the project explores how things become resources, and raises critical questions about the commercial use of rare natural products in times of global environmental change and neoliberal conservation.

Funding: DFG since 2024

https://commodifying-the-wild.de/projects/smelling-the-wild/

A dramatic new phenomenon has been taking shape in rural Africa over the past two decades: the rise in the preponderance of medium-scale commercial farms. Within African landscapes, medium-scale farmers represent a new type of economic actor: domestic entrepreneurs who are mostly men and who enter agriculture often on the basis of capital they have accumulated elsewhere. The academic literature is divided on the implications, as to whether the trend drives economic dynamism and inclusion, or inequality, exclusion and conflict. We aim to contribute to this debate by investigating the repercussions of medium scale farmers’ investments on accumulation, wealth and impoverishment in the rural landscape and agrarian economies of Namibia, Ghana and Tanzania, using a combination of anthropological and political economy approaches. Our focus is on the agency of these farmers, their strategies for accumulation, and their impact on the agrarian economy and smallholder production. We work with four sets of variables that shape the context of their actions: translocality, belonging and changing patterns of urban and rural economic and social life; agri-food value chains, employment and local economies; kinship, gender relations and intergenerational inheritance; and local politics of state and traditional authorities that mediate access to resources.

Förderung: VW

Dauer: 2025-2028

https://gssc.uni-koeln.de/forschung-1/verbundprojekte/medium-scale-farmers-in-rural-africa

Description: 
Across CRC study areas projects work on overarching research questions:
Will conservation lead to well-being and a reduction of poverty? Will agricultural intesification create wealth? How are educational status/gender/age of individuals related to houshold decisions and related outcomes? How is migration linked to future making processes?
Answering these questions requires a systematic approach to longitudinal farm-household data collection.

Support:
DFG

Duration: 
2026 - 2029