Critical Zones Africa

Critical Zones Africa (CZA) comprises six peri-urban sites in Southern and Eastern Africa:

Project outline

CzASE Studies aims to set out proposals for environmental governance that are politically sustainable because they focus on achieving what local people want in terms of habitability, health and wellbeing. To do so, CZA studies engage deep traditions of African environmental thought in research and curricula that can support new African voices in global environmental negotiations.

Sound environmental governance policy requires more than information systems: it needs research that attends to what is happening on the ground. With the motto “Muddy Boots”, the social science-based CZA Studies research team will develop transdisciplinary comparative research at six African peri-urban sites in Ethopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Linking the ecological restoration strategies of Wangari Maathai – improving the relation of soil, water and plants to address gender equality, food security and health – with ecological economics (see 2023 Holberg prize winner Joan Martinez-Alier) and the new critical zone sciences (see 'Critical Zone Science Comes of Age' by P. Waldron, EOS 2020) on what makes habitability possible, this research programme will yield integrative research on soil and society to build a deep understanding of how landscapes and societies are changing in the Anthropocene, and how they may be cared for, repaired and restored. Crucially, this approach offers an alternative to implementing science-based environmental policy via the might of the State, which may result in environmental sustainability strategies becoming politically unsustainable, reducing trust in the institution of science. To reduce conflict around emerging forms of environmental governance (see The Violence of Conservation in Africa: State, Militarization and Alternatives. EdgarElgar, 2022) a big-picture “people’s science” is needed.

Themes

Research leaders from six universities will develop teams to research and compile local experiential knowledge of change, test that with empirical and qualitative research, and develop policy proposals for an African environmental governance based on care for the commons and its ecological relations.

Lead researchers at each university will be supported by six thematic clusters that will design curricula and guide graduate research to publication under the following themes:

1. Critical Zone rapid appraisal: assessing metabolism of water, nutrients and contaminants
2. Small-scale farming: soil and seed care to address emerging climate-based gender struggles
3. African environmentalism: landscape knowledge as ecological philosophy
4. Contaminant legacies and environmental justice: cleaning up the Critical Zone
5. Ecological economics for governance of the commons in the Critical Zone
6. Reducing precarity by amplifying habitability: toward Critical Zone-based environmental governance policy

Where Critical Zone scholarship based on new fields of biogeosciences has to date focused on natural sciences, this team will develop and refine a big-picture biogeo-social science that

• supports Critical Zone-based policies for habitability;
• links with African environmental thought;
• integrates the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals; and
• advances the African Union’s Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want”.

Partners:

• University of Cape Town, South Africa
• Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia
• University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
• Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources – LUANAR, Malawi
• University of Zimbabwe

• Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) of South Africa

Funders:

• Science for Africa Foundation