An agenda for research

Changing climate, economic shocks, demand for rare-earth elements and food price spikes are crises of our time which are played out on the land of Africa where some of the poorest communities try to make a livelihood in their ancestral landscapes.  These challenges originate in, and are exacerbated by, colonial legacies of expropriation and displacement.  

After training as a soil scientist and statistician I soon realized that these problems must be tackled over a broad front.  This led initially to collaboration with psychologists (how can land-related information be most effectively communicated), nutritionists and specialists in public health.  Later I extended the collaboration to work with historians to consider the colonial historical context of land evaluation and agricultural development.  Most recently I have begun work with a team which includes linguists, as well as soil and crop scientists, and historians of colonial Africa, with a view to understanding how traditional knowledge systems about land and soil,  can be brought back from the margins and recentered in the debate about sustainable land management.  

None of this is a retreat from biophysical and ecological science, and robust statistical methodology.  Rather, it is a recognition that, without historically and culturally-informed understanding of context and community perspectives, just and sustainable use of the land will remain out of reach.  Some of these threads appear in recent research (below), and there is more to come.