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

Subject Area Geosciences
Agriculture, Forestry and Veterinary Medicine
Biology
Humanities
Medicine
Social and Behavioural Sciences
Term since 2018
Website Homepage
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 328966760
 
The Collaborative Research Centre aims to understand African futures and how they are “made” by investigating land-use change and social-ecological transformation in rural areas in Kenya, Tanzania and Namibia. Our conceptual framework focuses on future-making as a combination of imaginaries, narratives and social practices that shape future conditions by making them an issue in the present. This is addressed by the CRC’s overarching key question: How are African rural futures made, by whom, and for whom? The question points at the agency, drivers, and consequences of future-making, including the complex relationship between probabilities and possibilities, between different temporalities and time frames, between past, present and future conditions, and between competing actors in their struggle for desirable futures. Throughout its three funding phases, the scientific programme and coherence of the CRC have been guided by a common conceptual framework, while the empirical focus of the participating projects became gradually more diversified based on the progress of research findings and the formulation of additional guiding questions. Accordingly, the CRC activities evolved in a stepwise manner, in the first phase concentrating on foundational research, conceptual framings, and the building of reliable partnerships, in the second phase advancing through in-depth collaborative research, and in the proposed third phase aiming at a consolidation and synthesizing of findings, together with an engagement in policy dialogue and public outreach activities, including an exhibition project. In line with a wider geographical focus, the CRC also broadened its empirical fields of interest. In the first phase, our studies concentrated on conservation and intensification as dominant types of large-scale land-use change in sub-Saharan Africa. The research programme of the second phase started from the observation that land-use change is to a large extent driven by infrastructures like roads, railways, dams, power lines, or fences. We therefore included the concept of infrastructuring to address the planning, negotiating and building of material infrastructures, and how this facilitates land-use change. The third phase will build upon our recent findings, which showed that the processes of land-use change and infrastructuring are heavily influenced by globalized financial flows, international investors, economic and political shifts at different scales and changing international alliances. At the same time government-financed income is also becoming more important in many rural settings. Our research design of the third phase captures these global and domestic influences by foregrounding financing as the basis of a cross-cutting analytical perspective to better understand local capacities, the agency of different social groups, and the dominant drivers of conservation, intensification and infrastructuring.
DFG Programme CRC/Transregios
International Connection Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania

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Completed projects

Co-Applicant Institution Universität zu Köln
Spokespersons Professor Dr. Michael Bollig, from 1/2022 until 12/2025; Professorin Dr. Britta Klagge; Professor Dr. Detlef Müller-Mahn, until 12/2021
 
 

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