Research Articles

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http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14270/534

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Browsing Research Articles by Subject "Africa"

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    From crisis to context: Reviewing the future of sustainable charcoal in Africa
    (Energy Research & Social Science , ElsevierLtd., 2021-12-08) BranchaJok, Adam; Kwaku, A. Frank; Gai ,Anaic; Laloyo ,A. Stella; Bartlett , Ann; Brownell, Emily; Caravani, Matteo; Cavanagh, Joseph Connor; Fennell, Shailada; Langole, Stephen; Mabele, Bukhi Mathew; Mwampamba , Heita Tuyeni; Njenga, Mary; Owor, Arthur; Phillips, Jon; Tiltimamer, Nhial
    ABSTRACT Is charcoal a sustainable energy source in Africa? This is a crucial question, given charcoal's key importance to urban energy. In today's dominant policy narrative – the charcoal-crisis narrative – charcoal is deemed incom patible with sustainable and modern energy, blamed for looming ecological catastrophe, and demanding replacement. However, an emerging sustainability-through-formalization narrative posits that charcoal can be made sustainable – specifically, through formalization of production, trade, markets, and consumption technologies. This represents an important opportunity to go beyond the crisis narrative and to engage productively with charcoal. However, this ascendent narrative also risks misrepresenting the reality of charcoal on the continent and leading to inappropriate policies. The narrative's designation of the African charcoal sector as unsustainable at present obscures charcoal production's diverse and uncertain impacts across the continent; moreover, the association of informality with unsustainability obscures a similarly complex and diverse social reality as well as the ways that social processes and relations of power and inequality determine charcoal's sustainability. We argue that charcoal needs to be considered within its historical, social, and environmental contexts to better understand its present and the emergent pathways to sustainable energy futures. We draw upon research that is raising questions about both the charcoal-crisis and the sustainability-through-formalization narratives to argue for a new narrative of charcoal in context. This approaches charcoal as a politically, ecologically, and historically embedded resource, entailing significant socio-ecological complexity across diverse historical and geographical conjunctures, and calling for new agendas of interdisciplinary research with an orientation towards sustainability and justice.
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    The gendered postconflict city: Possibilities for more livable urban transformations in Gulu, northern Uganda
    (journal of urban affairs, 2022-08-11) John C.Harris; Komakech Daniel; Monk David; Maria del Guadalupe Davidson
    Scholars acknowledge that postconflict urbanism is undertheorized and underdeveloped for practical governance or sustainable urban management, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, which has unfortunately experienced significant conflict in the post-independence period. We argue that postconflict redevelopment theory and practice under appreciates liminal spaces and the precarious existence of postconflict people, especially postconflict women. We examine the extant literature on Gulu, Uganda, to develop theory and urban management concepts around the notion of the gendered postconflict city as a unique urban identity and re-center the analysis on the everyday experiences, agency, and city building practices of women. We posit three realities for understanding the gendered postconflict city: (1) the postconflict gendered city is a liminal space beyond the notions of contingency and fluidity often assigned to African cities, (2) it is a place of deep and abiding trauma, and (3) it is a place of invisibility and precarity for women who selforganize to reduce precarity. We make a series of recommendations for postconflict urban management based on these realities that include recognizing liminality in postconflict planning and setting aside the impulse to prioritize the global competitiveness of postconflict cities above all else. These have important implications for NGO and national development practices.