CCI Conservation Seminar - Prof Melissa Leach, Executive Director, Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI)
From livelihoods to lifeways: Reflections on conservation justice from West Africa's Upper Guinean forests
Forests and the people who live in and with them are under the global scientific, policy and popular spotlight as never before. Forest-human interactions, often framed as disturbance of natural forest, are blamed for climate change, biodiversity loss and related planetary predicaments, whilst also celebrated for contributing to solutions. The importance of engaging local communities and indigenous people with forest conservation and management efforts is now well recognised, and approaches that emphasise local livelihoods and related equity and governance concerns are now commonplace. Yet do they go far enough to promote conservation that is not only effective but also socially just? Drawing on several decades of ethnographic and historical-ecological research in the Upper Guinea forest zone of West Africa, and more briefly on perspectives from North America and the UK, I will lay out a ‘lifeways’ approach that more fully recognises diverse ways of being and knowing in ‘more than human’ forest worlds, and the ways that past events – including conservation interventions – leave layered legacies in landscapes, shaping forest composition and claims in the present and hopes for the future. Lifeways highlight additional dimensions of equity that are missing or underplayed in livelihoods-focused approaches, paving the way for a fuller, multi-dimensional notion of conservation justice with important practical and political implications.
Melissa Leach is the Executive Director of CCI and also Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. She is an academic and policy leader with extensive international experience, combining thirty years of ethnographic work in West Africa with engagements and networks across Africa, South Asia, China and beyond. She has led national and international, policy-engaged programmes and consortia across the fields of global health, environment and sustainability, food systems, and social and gender equity. With a background in anthropology and geography, she has worked extensively with natural scientists and practitioners on forests, soils and biodiversity, with particular commitments to bringing local communities’ knowledge and perspectives into science-policy processes and practical conservation approaches. Prior to joining CCI, Melissa spent a decade as Director of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), helping it to become the world’s leading institute for research, teaching and policy engagement in global development. She also co-founded and co-directed the Economic and Social Research Council’s STEPS Research Centre and global consortium, is a Fellow of the British Academy and has won several awards, including a Queen’s Birthday Honours CBE in 2017 for services to social science. Her international roles including co-lead of the International Science Council’s Fellows network; leadership of UN reports and founder member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food).