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conditions for sustainable environmental management, so the plan says, is that land
rights give way to a 'modern' freehold tenure system.
The second discourse runs counter to this 'offi cial' discursive formation of West
Africa by way of place-specifi c perceptions of land users. In contrast to the hege-
monic desertifi cation story, this discourse describes how the growing number of
livestock led to a decline in grass cover followed by an extension of trees and shrubs.
Bush fi res were less aggressive due to a changing fi re regime, combining early dry-
season fi res with stronger grazing pressure and an expansion of cropland.
The purpose of mapping these discourses was comparative, not in the conven-
tional deconstructive sense of bringing out silences and gaps, but as a stage in the
process of making accurate scientifi c judgements. Hence, the next step in the research
project: 'To assess whether local perceptions of environmental change were con-
gruent with scientifi c fi ndings, we reviewed the specialist literature on human-induced
modifi cations of savanna vegetation' (Bassett and Koli Bi, 2000, p. 71). This was then
further mapped with an examination of aerial photographs, quantifi cations with the
help of Geographic information systems, and on the ground species inventories.
Somewhat simplifi ed, the fi ndings of virtually all of these analyses supported the
farmer-herder discourse and ran counter to the dominant desertifi cation narrative
guiding current environmental policymaking. Although there was no clear sign of
desertifi cation, 'heavy grazing and early fi res have signifi cantly reduced the quality
of the savanna for livestock raising' (p. 90). Given the government's prioritisation
of livestock development, this would advise policymakers to encourage rangeland
rehabilitation rather than the currently prevailing concern with reforestation.
On the basis of my capsule summary, I think it is interesting to point at ways
in which this project differs methodologically, philosophically and ecopolitically
from Marxist and post-structural approaches. In the hands of Bassett and Koli Bi,
discourse analysis is located in a wider array of multi-scale research methods which
complement each other in order to distinguish actual from imagined environmental
problems. And so, the authors' own research suggests 'that the dominant environ-
mental narrative for the Côte d'Ivoire is misconceived' and that 'environmental
analysts and planners are occupied with an imaginary environmental problem'
(Bassett and Koli Bi, 2000, pp. 69, 90). In line with this, farmers' and herders' dis-
courses are marginalised in planning, while their 'understanding of environmental
change is more nuanced and sophisticated than the dominant narrative' (p. 91).
Post-structuralists would probably be unwilling to arbitrate between discourses in
this way. They would also resolutely reject a grounded, multimethod, materialist
approach, asserting that 'those who embrace constructivist approaches to “nature”
but stop short of accepting the radical undecidability of meaning often end up
making arguments that are too rigorous, or too “clean,” in their separation of
ontology and epistemology' (Braun and Wainwright, 2001, p. 61). From a Marxist
point of view, the turn to natural science and grounded methods will be misguided
as long as researchers fail to unravel the ideological role of discourse in, e.g., the
mode of regulation and capital's search for regime stability in African societies.
I am not merely inclined to agree that these issues are underplayed by Bassett
and Koli Bi's treatment of discourse, but also think that it can be explained with
reference to the academic framework from which it emanates. Their research agenda
seeks to contribute to an increasingly common goal in political ecology: traversing
the sociocultural and biogeophysical processes within human geography by way of
a multimethod triangulation technique (cf. Zimmerer, 1996; Forsyth, 2003). The
