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NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT: THE REPRODUCTION AND USE OF ENVIRONMENTAL MISINFORMATION IN GUINEA'S FOREST-SAVANNA TRANSITION ZONE Melissa Leach and James Fairhead 1 INTRODUCTION policy institutions have evolved and operate. While An erroneous analysis of environmental change has this short article cannot consider these issues more informed environmental policy in part of Guinea, than schematically, it does suggest and exemplify West Africa for almost a hundred years. In examin- important parameters for the sort of analysis needed. ing how such error has persisted, in this case concerning ongoing savannization oftropical The vegetation of Guinea's Kissidougou prefecture forest which is not in fact taking place, one is forced reflects its position in West Africa's forest-savanna to examine critically the relationship between the transition zone, and consists of patches of humid information produced about environmental prob- forest in more or less wooded savanna. The forest lems, and the external institutions which have as- 'islands', which surround old and new village sites, sumed responsibility to deal with them. The range of have been considered by environmental policy-mak- concerns to which environmental policy responds ers to be the relics of a once extensive natural forest influences not only how information is (or is cover now destroyed by local farming and fire-set- not) used, but also how it is constituted. In short, ting; a destruction which they have sought to redress. inaccurate information and the methodology pro- But village experience, archival and air photographic ducing it can persist and drive policy because of the comparisons do not support this view. Instead, they institutional structures they serve. show forest islands to be the result of human management, created around villages in savanna by their In this article we explore how inaccurate assess- inhabitants. They also show that the woody vegeta- ments and explanations of environmental change tion cover of savannas has been increasing during the and local people's roles in it, based on particular period when policy-makers have believed the oppo-- sorts of data and analysis, are generated and vali- site (Fairhead and Leach et al. 1992a, Leach and dated by the external institutions involved with envi- Fairhead 1993). In the Kissidougou case, therefore, ronmental policy.These institutions include not 'official' interpretations of environmental change and only local and national forestry and agricultural of local responsibility for it, dependent on and rein- administrations and NGOs, but also foreign donors forcing the agendas of state institutions, have been responding to global and regional concerns. We upheld at striking odds with local experience. examine some ways in which institutions, policies and the information on which they depend have co- 2 ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION evolved within particular relationships to scientific PERCEIVED and popular opinion about environmental processes. West African vegetation maps, showing the forest zone, forest-savanna transition zone, guinean, An attempt is made to explain how certain views and sudanian and sahelian savanna zones, and desert in explanations of change have gained credence and more or less horizontal bands easily lend themselves acquired validity, while others have been excluded to interpretation as temporal, as well as spatial tran- from consideration and investigation. This involves sitions. Whether from desertification, sahelianization tracing not only the relative dominance of particular or savannization of forest, observers have been disciplines in investigating environmental trends, tempted to see each zone as the anthropogenically butalsothepriorityaccordedtoparticular degraded derivate of a vegetation type now found methods and data sets within those disciplines, and further south. On many maps, the forest-savanna the deductive theories which guide data interpreta- transition zone is marked as a 'derived savanna' - or tion. We find that such dominance canonlybe ex-forest - zone. In Guinea, policy-makers since the understood in the context of the socio-political and turn of the century have been convinced of this financial structures within which environmental southwards shift, as the conflation of spatial and 81 ids bulletin vol 25 no 2 1994 temporal transitions has been incorporated into the impact of local practices from them. Their discipli- scientific canon informing Guinea's and West Afri- nary position and the social conditions of their ca's environmental policy. The first forest reserves fieldwork reinforced their pejorative vision of the established in KissIdougou in 1932 were conceived of environmental impact of local farming and fire as a protective 'curtain' to halt the southwards spread management practices, rendering it both difficult of fire and farming-induced savannization, on the and seemingly unecessary properly to verify change grounds that: 'everywhere, the cultivation of dryland with local people themselves. rice with intensity ruins the forest and causes it to disappear. In Kissi country, one has arrived at such The acceptability of interpretating vegetation history an advanced stage that the levél of afforestation and anthropogenic impact from snapshot landscape certainly does not exceed one-tenth (Guinée Service observations still persists, not only in phytosociology Forestier 1932). but also in deductions from plant and other indica- tors, vegetation surveys, and in the use of remotely- In 1993, the conflation of spatial with temporal zones sensed imagery. For example modern observers of provided the logic which led a major donor-funded Kissidougou often consider the presence of oil palms environmental rehabilitation project to take 40 to indicate that forest has retreated from the area, Kissidougou farmers on a journey to northern Mali, while the team preparing Guinea's forestry action to see the future of their own landscape if protective plan (République de Guinée 1988) deduced from measures were not undertaken. their air photographic 'snapshots' and vegetation surveys that southern Kissidougou was a 'post-for- The assumption of anthropogenic degradation of a est' zone. Similar social distance and pre-conviction prior natural forest formation was integral to the first as characterized the colonial botanists enables to- delineation of West African vegetation zones in the day's analysts, too, to overlook both local people's early colonial period by the botanist Chevalier. Thisenvironmental experiences and management, and analysis was transferred directly into contemporary the use of historical methods (e.g. oral histories and policy since Chevalierwas, at the time, the seniormost archive consultation) to understand environmental advisor to the French West African colonial adminis- influences and trends.In the Kissidougou case, trations responsible for environmental concerns. historical methods lead to quite different conclu- Subsequently, deductions made from analysis of the sions; local management has caused palms to ad- botanical composition ('phytosociology') of vegeta- vance into long-established savanna, and the tion in these zones by botanists such as Aubreville bushy vegetation now inthesouthofthe and Adam reinforced the hypothesis that the forest- prefecture has replaced grassland, so the area is savanna mosaic was in temporal transition. Observ- actually a 'post-savanna', not 'post-forest' zone. ing the tree species characteristic of the boundary between these different vegetation forms, botanists It is only more recently that past and present survey deduced that this 'transition woodland' represented data and remotely-sensed images have been avail- savannized forest (e.g. Adam 1948, 1968). They did able for comparison, adding time depth to these not consider other possibilities: that transition wood- scientifically acceptable data sources. Yet in Guinea, land could represent a stable intermediate form, the environmental services have been so convinced of establishment of forest in savanna, or the complex the degradation they are combatting that they have outcome of local management strategies. not thought it necessary to compare the air photo- graphs and satellite images they have commissioned As Aubreville and Adam, in turn, became senior with those available from 1952. Furthermore com- figures in French West Africa's forestry administra- parative interpretation, even when carried out, is tions, so their phytosociological analysis, interpreted frequently not independent of preconceived ideas of within the logic of degradation, became institution- vegetation change. In Kissidougou, the incredulous alized as the principle methodology for assessing reactions of forestry staff when presented with 1952- regional vegetation change. At the same time, their 1990 air photograph comparisons showing increased publications became key texts in comprehending woody vegetation led them to a sceptical search for West African environmental history more generally ways to render the comparison invalid (the photo- (e.g. Aubreville 1949).In their characteristic ap- graphs were taken in a-typical years, or incompara- proach, these botanists directly observed landscape ble seasons....). In other parts of West Africa, simi- features and deduced landscape history and the larly surprising results have simply been disbelieved 82 ¡ds bulletin vol 25 no 2 1994 and dismissed: for example 'A comparison of the desertification. While the projection of global and information from the two

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