Environmental rehabilitation and the vulnerability of the poor: The case of the Great Green Wall

Poor people in rural areas depend directly on functioning agroecosystems. Environmental rehabilitation, culminating in the reestablishment of tree cover, is seen as improving ecological functioning and in so doing, reducing the vulnerability of the poor who rely on these agroecosystems. This is what we refer to as the win-win vision for afforestation, reforestation, and revegetation (ARR) programs – increases in ecological resiliency will lead to increases in social resiliency. This highly appealing vision cannot be realized unless one takes seriously the two basic premises. First, to reduce the vulnerability of a rural population, even in rural areas of the Sahel, one must develop strategies to improve the conditions of the most vulnerable. Second, technical success in terms of ecological rehabilitation will not automatically reduce the vulnerability of the most vulnerable and may in fact directly or indirectly exacerbate their vulnerability. Thus, for ARR programs to approach their win-win goals, one must be attentive not only to their technical success, but also to their social consequences for the rural poor. The Great Green Wall program is the most ambitious ARR program in sub-Saharan Africa. It seeks to rehabilitate degraded lands and reduce the vulnerability of the rural poor in dryland West Africa. We reviewed project documents from twelve country programs of the World Bank’s Sahel and West Africa Program (SAWAP) initiative that falls under the visionary umbrella of the Great Green Wall. Our approach was to treat these project documents as “research sites,” allowing us to not only consider how these projects conceptualize the relationships between vulnerability environmental rehabilitation but also to identify the activities and outcomes that projects attend to and measure their success by. In general, attention was narrowly focused on achieving the technical goals of ARR with outcomes primarily measured by numbers of trees planted, hectares restored, and people trained. We looked for evidence in these documents of efforts and strategies used to identify and target benefits to the most vulnerable. We found little evidence in project design and evaluation of attention to the differential vulnerabilities of particular livelihood and demographic groups nor to the potential for these projects to serve as mechanisms of enclosure to benefit powerful local interests. Rapid rural appraisal at nine ARR sites in Niger revealed little attention to the needs of the most vulnerable with some of the most vulnerable either excluded (women with absent husbands) or ignored (pastoralists). Moreover, ARR activities often led to the direct and indirect enclosure of reclaimed sites benefiting powerful individuals. Options to improve these programs are discussed.