Across sub-Saharan Africa, investors are committing unprecedented funds to develop oil, geothermal, hydropower, titanium, iron-ore, agricultural, carbon and other natural resources in the rural margins. While national governments broadly welcome the economic potential of these investments, the benefits of these for local populations, particularly in terms of livelihoods, benefits sharing and governance, are often uncertain.
In fact, large-scale resource development at the margins can intensify long-standing struggles around public authority, community autonomy and environmental justice in these places, in some cases resulting in new and emerging tensions, protests, disputes, and inter and intra-community violence.
A major challenge for researchers and policymakers, and a major contribution of this research, is how to listen, help amplify and respond to the great variety of ways that people navigate the terrains of development and conflict and conceive their own security and insecurities.
This project was a collaborative effort between the Institute of Development Studies, Centre de Documentation et Recherche sur l’Art et les Traditions Orales à Madagascar (CEDRATOM) of the Université de Toliara, Centre Universitaire Régional l’Androy (CURA) of the Université de Toliara, Andry Lalana Tohana (ALT), Madagascar and Friends of Lake Turkana.
Focus and approach
Focussing on rural margins in Kenya and Madagascar, this project engaged with local residents, private sector, civil society and state actors to understand how different actors who are assembled around particular resource developments frame and contest claims to territory and resources.
It employed methods from the social sciences, humanities and community-based participatory research (CBPR) to explore the changing roles of different actors around contested developments, including ‘hidden’ and neglected forms and sources of conflict that emerge among diverse actors, including local community members.
By grounding the research process in the realities of communities, the methodology gives weight to the knowledge, understanding and experiences of those whose voices are not often prioritised in decision-making on these issues.
Working with different stakeholder groups within a community undermines notions that communities are homogenous and can reveal the variances in ‘seeing’ (even at a local level) based on gender, age, religion and social status.
Our research team has used an integrative suite of methods including qualitative and ethnographic as well as participatory methods. Qualitative research involved semi-structured interviews and focus groups segmented by gender and age, as well as oral history interviews with differently positioned stakeholders.
In addition to qualitative techniques such as semi-structured interviews, as well as participatory action research techniques carried out with focus groups, including resource and landscape mapping, historical timelines, livelihood trendline analysis and collaborative network mapping, we used participatory video techniques to generate multi-media case studies.
Participatory video
Participatory video is a facilitated group-based approach, involving:
- participants recording themselves and the world around them
- reflecting on their situation together, after playback
- producing video materials to generate discussion across communities or with wider stakeholders such as government departments, investor agencies, companies and developers, and rights groups and watchdog organisations.
Like other qualitative methods, the purpose of participatory video is to generate subjective knowledge from within a particular situation. This helps us understand how people experience, interpret and respond to their realities.
Video enables participants to show, as well as tell, how they feel. Therefore, it is well suited to revealing the contextual, emotional and dynamic aspects that can be easily missed by other methods. Participatory video prioritises local concerns, and because it is community-driven it generates the trust needed for honest reflection.
We approached participatory video, not only as the means for people to create their own stories, but also to prompt discussions within the groups and across communities.
Participatory video naturally lends itself to action research, as there are inherent action possibilities generated by making and showing videos. Ideally this is a progressive process as participants hone their public communication capacities in different social spaces, such as with their peers, the wider community and external audiences. This in turn can generate further research learning as participants discuss the videos with these different groups. This in itself gives marginalised groups more influence.
Photo Story: Green Dreams, Local Struggles
(Click on the three dots below the photo to find out more)
Video: Beyond Despair
After an energy generation company developed geothermal power in Ol Karia, in Kenya’s Rift Valley, residents were resettled. This short film shows the experiences of people in a newly-built village called RAPland (short for Resettlement Affected Persons-land), some of whom have struggled with their new life.
Content warning: baby loss
Video: Political relations and processes in Ol Karia
This video discusses the role of elders within the Maasai communities, and how geothermal development has affected political relations.
Video: Ol Karia: Youth Role Play
In this video, young people from the RAPland resettlement village enact the difficulties arising from a lack of services, constraints in consultation processes, and experiences of poverty.
Digital story: Precarious Prospects: Oil in Northern Kenya
This digital story tells the story of changing lives and livelihoods in Lokichar, a small town in Turkana County, and surrounding villages that are at the centre of northern Kenya’s oil frontier.
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