TRR 228:  Future Rural Africa: Future-making and social-ecological transformation

• Subject Area: Geosciences ; Agriculture, Forestry and Veterinary Medicine ; Humanities ; Medicine ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: since 2018
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 328966760

The Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) aims at understanding African futures and how they are “made” in rural areas by investigating land-use change and social-ecological transformation. The Universities of Bonn (UoB) and Cologne (UoC) have a track record of collaborations in this regional and thematic field of interest, combining complementary expertise from a wide range of disciplines in natural and social sciences. “Future-making” refers to physical changes as well as social practices that shape future conditions by making the future an issue in the present. The first funding phase of the CRC focused on the two seemingly opposite, yet often mutually constitutive processes of agricultural intensification and conservation. This focus will be widened in the next phase to include infrastructuring as a third essential process. With infrastructuring we refer to the establishment of large-scale infrastructure, which we consider as an additional driver of land-use change and social-ecological transformation. All three processes – intensification, conservation, and infrastructuring – contribute, in often overlapping dynamics, to grand-scale transformations in our research areas with multiple micro-scalar repercussions. The CRC conceptualizes such processes of social-ecological transformation as expressions of “future-making”. Resonating with current debates in the interdisciplinary field of future studies, this builds on the hypothesis that imagined futures and the different ideas about how they can be realized have a decisive impact on current land-use dynamics. The projects of the CRC analyze how different approaches to the future, and also surprises and unintended side-effects, inform the politics and practices of large-scale land-use change, and how they relate to each other. Empirical research continues to focus on the Kenyan Rift Valley, southern Tanzania, and the multi-state Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area of southern Africa. The CRC builds upon profound research experience of the applicants and African counterparts. It amplifies the unique combination of expertise at UoB and UoC in conjunction with the Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC) and the German Development Institute (DIE), fosters partnerships with scholars and scientific institutions in Africa, and aims at consolidating Bonn-Cologne as a leading center of innovative research in the emerging field of futures studies and Political Ecology in Africa.

• DFG Programme: CRC/Transregios

Current projects

• A01 - Synergies and trade-offs of carbon storage along pathways of land transformation (Project Heads Amelung, Wulf ;  Börner, Jan ;  Linstädter, Anja )
• A02 - Micro-histories of rural development in the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (Project Head Anderson, David M. )
• A04 - Towards an African Eden? Shifting bio-cultural frontiers and the (re)coupling of social-ecological relations in the conservation areas of southern and eastern Africa (Project Head Bollig, Michael )
• A05 - Road mediated trade-offs between conservation and development (Project Heads Bareth, Georg ;  Biber-Freudenberger, Lisa ;  Bogner, Christina ;  Börner, Jan )
• B01 - The social ecology of system shifts in savanna environments (Project Heads Becker, Mathias ;  Heckelei, Thomas ;  Mwaura-Kamiri, Hellen )
• B02 - Linking social-ecological transformation and arthropod-borne infections (Project Heads Borgemeister, Christian ;  Junglen, Sandra )
• B03 - Contestations along frontiers in East Africa (Project Heads Grawert, Elke ;  Schetter, Conrad Justus )
• B05 - Between “intensification” and “conservation” discourses on African rural development (Project Heads Brüntrup, Michael ;  Hornidge, Anna-Katharina )
• C01 - Socio-economic impacts of growth corridors (Project Heads Dannenberg, Peter ;  Revilla Diez, Javier )
• C02 - Infrastructures and governance for renewable energies (Project Heads Greiner, Clemens ;  Klagge, Britta )
• C03 - Ecological growth and the politics of land-use change (Project Heads Kioko, Ph.D., Eric ;  Müller-Mahn, Detlef )
• C05 - Temporal frames of reference in land conversions (Project Heads Mitchell, Alice ;  Widlok, Thomas )
• C07 - Welfare-policy planning in Tanzania from the 1960s to the 1980s (Project Head Lindner, Ulrike )
• C08 - Job futures: Agriculture, rural transformation, and employment (Project Head Qaim, Matin )
• Z01 - Central Administrative Project (Project Head Bollig, Michael )
• Z02 - Data Management and Services (INF) (Project Head Bareth, Georg )
• Z03 - Combined Farm / Household Survey (Project Heads Bollig, Michael ;  Börner, Jan ;  Dannenberg, Peter ;  Greiner, Clemens ;  Heckelei, Thomas )
• Z04 - Integrated Research and Training Group (IRTG) (Project Heads Bollig, Michael ;  Borgemeister, Christian )

Completed projects

• A03 - Scales of variability, human-environment interactions, and patterns in agrolandscapes (Project Heads Becker, Mathias ;  Evers, Mariele ;  Heckelei, Thomas )
• B04 - Shifting land use patterns, intergenerational tensions, and competing visions of future-making in Kenya (Project Head Schulz, Ph.D., Dorothea E. )
• C04 - Transforming human-nature relations through mobile information services (Project Head Verne, Julia )
• C06 - Cross-scalar linkages as coping strategies for socioeconomic exclusion (Project Head Zillinger, Martin )

• Applicant Institution: Universität zu Köln
• Co-Applicant Institution: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
• Participating University: Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin; Universität Potsdam
• Participating Institution: Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies (BICC) gGmbH; German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS)
• Spokespersons: Professor Dr. Michael Bollig, since 1/2022; Professor Dr. Detlef Müller-Mahn, until 12/2021