Abstract
A major challenge faced by human societies is to promote development that truly makes difference for people without jeopardizing their environment. This is particularly urgent in developing countries where, despite decades of development programs, local populations often live under poverty thresholds. With this study, we participate in the ongoing debate about the necessary global revision of development theory and practice in the rural Sahel. We retrace the development trajectories in the Ferlo, the northern silvopastoral zone of Senegal. We highlight how development has evolved from the 1940s to the present, from centralized development action programs focused on hydraulic infrastructure to current polycentric development with growing environmental concerns. We highlight multi-scale events that have influenced the successive development paradigms in the area. Focusing on the past thirty years, we analyzed twenty-five environment and natural resource management-oriented projects, describing the evolution of their objectives and actions over time and identifying recurring flaws: redundancy, lack of synergy, and questionable relevance to local needs We put forth that a more resilient thinking-based development paradigm is necessary to guide the growing number of environment-oriented development actions, including the African Great Green Wall, for which massive investments are ongoing throughout Ferlo and across the Sahel.
Highlights
In 2014, the Doing Development Differently manifesto painted a rather negative picture of mainstream development when it stated that “too many development initiatives have limited impact ( . . . ) because genuine development progress is complex [and] development initiatives fail to address this complexity, promoting irrelevant interventions” [1]
We define a development project as a temporary organization with human, technical, or financial means to meet its own objectives over a given period of time, a development program being a set of projects with similar objectives [15]
Three major periods were identified, each of which have been triggered by a critical event or situation that significantly altered the ongoing development trajectory (Figure 2)
Summary
The success of development initiatives depends on understanding the complex and entwined dynamics involving, among others, coherent institutional and governance structures [3,9], holistic approaches of human and environment relationships [10], and accountability [11,12,13] Since their independence, many Sahelian countries have invested massively in their own national development programs and projects, while still remaining target countries of the international development agenda [14]. This paper focuses on development trajectories in the Senegalese Sahel, located in the northern part of Senegal This region has undergone significant transformations over the past decades in improved access to healthcare, education, and water as a result of development initiatives led by the Senegalese government and international organizations [16,17], ecological and social vulnerability still run rampant [18,19,20].
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