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Despite the Rain Living and dealing with climate change in s small West
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FACULTY OF SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN

PhD thesis
Jonas Østergaard Nielsen

Despite the Rain

Living and dealing with climate change in s small West African village

Academic advisor: Anette Reenberg

Submitted: March 2010

Acknowledgement

This PhD project was financed by a Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs research grant (grant
104.Dan.8-914). This study was part of the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis
(AMMA) project. Based on a French initiative, AMMA was built by an international scientific
group and funded by a large number of agencies, especially from France, UK, US and Africa.
It has been the beneficiary of a major financial contribution from the European Community’s
Sixth Framework Research Programme. The fieldwork was carried out with permission of,
and in accordance with, the Ministere des Enseignements Secondaire Superieur et de la
Research Scientifique, research permission N 2007 0089, and Université De Ouagadougou,
Departement de Geographie, Burkina Faso.

This thesis would not have been possible without the patience and support of the people of
Biidi 2. Layya, Mamadou and Moussa your help and friendship was invaluable. Digga, thank
you for the food! In Gorom-Gorom, Abdoulaye and his family made my stay in Burkina Faso
a much better and definitely more pleasant one. Thank you for the use of your electricity, the
cold drinks, a bed, and different food than millet porridge. But most of all: Thank you for your
emotional support. Kalifa your help and emotional support made my few stays in
Ouagadougou very enjoyable. Thyge Christensen, thank you for putting me into contact with
Abdoulaye and Kalifa and for all the helpful tips. You are truly unique. I would also like to
thank Mamadou Kabre, Ibrahim Ouattara and Ahidjo for great and fun company wherever we
found ourselves. Looking forward to next time! All the AMMA partners around West Africa
also deserve to be mentioned. Working with and learning from you all greatly improved my
work and understanding of the region.

In Denmark, a special and big thank you to my supervisor Anette Reenberg. It has been a
pleasure working with you and I look forward to our future collaboration. I would also like to
thank Ole Mertz for many great trips to West Africa and insightful comments. Also thanks to
Kjeld Rasmussen, Andreas Egelund Christensen, Jesper Bosse Jønsson and Ingeborg Vind,
plus the rest of the wonderful colleagues in the E&S research group. I will miss you all.
Thanks also to Prof. Neil Adger and Prof. Eric Lambin for hosting me at their departments
during my PhD tenure. Sarah thank you for everything you have done for me.

i
My parents always told me I was not allowed to work after school as this would interfere with
my homework. I guess that attitude led me to here. I greatly appreciate that. Sharon thanks so
very much for everything. Let us try and install the love of knowledge and education in Jacob,
Thomas and Maya. This thesis is for them.

Jonas Østergaard Nielsen

Copenhagen, March 2010

ii
Contents

Acknowledgement i

List of Illustrations vii

Introduction 1

The Village 5

Introduction 5
Degrading local practices 5
Resourceful but diverse local practices 6
A short history of Biidi 2 7
Ethnic relations 12
Gender, a male world? 15
Generational relations 18
The outside world 19

The Theoretical Setting 22

Introduction 22
Mitigation and adaptation 22
Adaptation to climate change research 25
Livelihood diversifications 27

The Fieldwork 31

Introduction 31
Memories of my arrival 31
At home 32
Participant observation 34
Informants and translators 35
Semi-structured interviews 37
Focus groups 41
Questionnaire interviews 43
Writing notes up 45
Coding 46
My position in the field 47
Belonging to Hamidou 47
Age, gender, personality and ethnicity 48
Ethics 50

iii
Summary of the Papers 53

Conclusion 59

References 61

Paper A. Drought and Marriage: Exploring the Interconnection between

Climate Variability and Social Change through a Livelihood Perspective 77

Introduction 80
Linking environmental and social domains through livelihood studies 82
Study area and methods 84
Analysis 85
Perceptions of climate change and variability 85
Diminishing importance of rain-fed agriculture 87
Circular labour migration 88
Labour migration and bride price 89
Love marriages 90
I can’t wait! 91
Marriage, independence and political power 92
Conclusion 94
Acknowledgement 96
References 96

Paper B. Temporality and the problem with singling out climate as a current 99
driver of change in a small West African village

Introduction 101
The theoretical background 102
The local setting 102
Methods 103
Results 103
Perceptions of climate change and variability 103
Diminishing cereal production 103
Livelihood diversifications 103
Labour migration 104
Development projects 104
Gardens 105
Women’s small-scale commerce 105
Selling livestock 105
Threats to sustained well-being 106

iv
 Health 106
Infrastructure 107
Political-economic structures 107
Human-environmental timelines 107
1950s to the early 1970s 107
Early 1970s to mid-1980s 107
Mid-1980s to 2008 109
Conclusion 109
Acknowledgement 109
References 109

Paper C. Cultural barriers to climate change adaptation: A case study from 113
Northern Burkina Faso

Introduction 115
Methodology 116
Biidi 2 117
Climate 117
Livelihood diversification 118
Labour migration 119
Working for development projects 120
Gardens 121
Women’s work 121
Cultural pathways of adaptation 121
Living in the bush 121
Appropriate work and ethnic identity 122
The most Fulbe of work: transhumance 123
Conclusion 123
Acknowledgement 124
References 124

Paper D. The Outburst. Climate change, gender relations and situational 127
analysis

Introduction 129
The Village of Biidi 2 132
Climate variability in Biidi 2 134
Development Projects and Women’s Work 135
Development Projects 136
Women’s Work 138
The Social Situation 139
Analysis 142
Gender Separation 142

v
 The Desire to Stay Married 143
Negotiating Gender 144
The Potential of Unstructured Contexts 147
Conclusion 149
References 151

Appendices

Co-authorship statements 155

vi
List of Illustrations

Coupled human-environmental timelines of Biidi 2 106

Coupled human-environmental timelines of Biidi 2 split according to
gender and ethnicity 108
Graph showing annual rainfall in Gorom-Gorom 118
Map of Burkina Faso 8, 117
Map of Biidi 2 10
Map of village territory 118
Map of land use and field boundaries in Biidi 2 105
Photo of Modi Mawdo’s hut in Biidi 2 9
Photo of my hut in Biidi 2 33
Photo of two young men at an engagement party and in front of a new
motor bike bought with money earned while on migration 77
Photo of Ally in front of his hut 99
Photo of a Fulbe household on the savannah 113
Photo of the development expert’s visit to Biidi 2 127
Table of methods applied, themes and temporal span covered, and 104,
quantitative density 116
Table of Climate change perception in Biidi 2 104,
119

Cover photo is taken in the village and features two young men posing with a new motor bike
bought with money earned while on migration.

vii
Introduction

”If climate change is indeed global, its consequences are profoundly local”
(Cruikshank 2005: 25)

Human adaptation has become part of the discourse of global climate change and is now
widely recognised alongside mitigation as an important and necessary response to the
threat posed by the accelerating climatic changes that will occur, or are already
occurring, due (mainly) to past and present greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC, 2007;
Steffen et al. 2007; UNFCCC, 2007). Human adaptation to climate change is
understood as a modification of behaviour believed to either alleviate adverse impacts
or to realise new opportunities in response to observed or expected changes in climate
(Adger et al. 2007).

In the Sahel region of West Africa the need for human adaptation to climate change and
variability is no new phenomenon.1 Since the 1950s, the Sahel region has been through
“the most dramatic example worldwide of climate variability that has been directly and
quantitatively measured” (Hulme 2001: 20). Persistent wet years in the 1950s and
1960s were replaced by an equally persistent period of desiccation commencing in the
late 1960s and continuing into the early 1990s, which was associated with severe
drought episodes in the early 1970s and early-mid 1980s (Hulme, 2001; Nicholson,
1978, 2005). An amelioration of the conditions has been observed since the 1990s,
prompting speculations that a ‘greening’ of the Sahel is taking place (Olsson et al. 2005)
due not only to a ‘recovery’ of the rains compared to the dry years (Hutchinson et al.
2005; Nicholson, 2005), but also, perhaps, an actual shift to a wetter period (Ozer et al.

1
The Sahel is a semi-arid transition zone situated between the arid to hyper-arid Sahara and humid
tropical Africa. It is characterised by a strong north-south rainfall gradient with annual rainfall amount
varying from 600-700 mm in the south to 100-200 in the north, and high interannual rainfall variability
(e.g. Nicholson, 1978; Hulme, 2001). Most of the rainfall stems from the northward penetration of the
West African Monson in the boreal summer, with most rainfall occurring in the period July-September.
The strength and the northward movement of the monsoon rains vary on timescales of years to millennia,
meaning that the boundaries of the Sahel as defined in terms of rainfall is not fixed (e.g. Brooks, 2004).
Indeed, the name Sahel means the ‘edge of the desert’ or ‘shore’ in Arabic, indicating that the monsoon,
like a coast line, has moved over time and the Sahel has a long history of climate change and stress
(Agnew and Chappel, 1999; Brooks, 2004; Rain, 1999).

1
2002). Whether the current wetter trend signifies a climatic shift that will continue
throughout the coming decades remains highly contested. The Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report is inconclusive because the
global climate models disagree in their predictions regarding the West African region
(Christensen et al. 2007). Yet, rainfall in the Sahel continues to display a high degree of
variability across the region and over time (Hulme, 2001). This variability is likely to
increase, and both prolonged droughts and extreme rainfall events will probably become
more frequent in African drylands like the Sahel (Adger et al. 2007; Kurukulasuriya et
al. 2006).

Whatever the biophysical causes of the drought and precipitation variability, its impact
on human populations in the region has attracted immense international political and
scholarly interest (Batterbury and Warren, 2001; Dietz et al. 2004; Raynaut, 2001). A
large part of the research has focused on how the rural populations of the Sahel have
adapted to this climate crisis by diversifying their agricultural and non-agricultural
livelihood strategies (e.g. Mortimore and Adams, 2001). This thesis follows that
tradition. It explores how the inhabitants of Biidi 2, a small northern Sahelian village in
Burkina Faso, have adapted to the recent climate change and variability by diversifying
their livelihoods.

By attempting to document the ways in which this community has acted in the face of
climate perturbations, the papers presented in this thesis fall under a type of adaptation
to climate change research which attempts to understand how adaptation in a particular
region or community takes place (see Smit and Wandel, 2006). The focus of this
research is on documenting how communities experience changing climatic conditions,
how they make decisions, the adaptation strategies embraced, and the consequences of
these for various groups of actors. This is done to a large extent by drawing on the
experience and knowledge of community members collected through empirical
research.

The focus on actors and actual processes and consequences of climate change
adaptation in this literature has raised a number of important questions regarding

2
adaptation to climate change and variability among human populations. Is it, for
example, possible to link local decision-making and actions with climate perturbations?
Is the adaptive capacity − i.e. the ability or potential to respond successfully to climate
variability and change − evenly shared among a specific population and/or across a
locality? If not, what causes this heterogeneity? And what, if any, are the socioeconomic
consequences locally, regionally, and/or nationally of the adaptation strategies
embraced at local scale?

These generic questions guide the three overarching research questions explored in this
thesis:

• How do households and individuals in Biidi 2 make a living in the aftermath of the
Sahelian droughts?
• What elements constitute and influence the livelihoods of households and individuals
in Biidi 2? And is climate variability and change one of these?
• What, if any, are the local socioeconomic consequences of the livelihood strategies in
Biidi 2?

The findings of the research are presented in the following four papers:

Paper A:
‘Drought and Marriage: Exploring the Interconnection between Climate Variability and
Social Change through a Livelihood Perspective’, in K, Hastrup (ed, 2009) The
Question of Resilience. Social Responses to Climate Change, Copenhagen: The Royal
Danish Academy of Science and Letters, 159-177.

Paper B:
‘Temporality and the problem with singling out climate as a current driver of change in
a small West African village’, 2010, Journal of Arid Environments, 74, 464-474.

3
Paper C:
‘Cultural barriers to climate change adaptation: A case study from Northern Burkina
Faso’, 2010, Global Environmental Change, 20, 142-152.

Paper D:
‘The Outburst. Climate change, gender relations and situational analysis’, 2010,
accepted for publication in International Journal of Social Analysis, 2010.

The four papers appear in full after the synopsis, which is structured as follows. The
next section introduces the main trends in the research conducted in the Sahel since the
1970s drought along with the village history and socio-spatial composition. The third
section presents the theoretical setting and situates the project within the larger field of
research on adaptation to climate change and livelihoods. The fourth section is on
methodology and provides an account and discussion of the methods applied, fieldwork,
data processing, and ethics. The fifth section summarises and connects the four papers.
It also has a list and abstracts of other papers written during the PhD tenure. And
finally, section six offers an overall conclusion.

4
The Village

Introduction
The Sahelian droughts and their impact on human populations have attracted immense
international research interest (Batterbury and Warren, 2001; Raynaut, 2001). This
chapter traces the main trends in this research from the early explanations of the
droughts in terms of degrading Sahelian land use practices to the focus since the 1990s
on Sahelian populations as resourceful and adaptive. General region-wide descriptions
and explanations of both the impacts and the solutions to the climate variability
experienced in the Sahel are, however, highly problematic due to wide socioeconomic,
biophysical and political variations at the local scale (e.g. Raynaut, 1997, 2001). A
small and relatively confined research site therefore seems an appropriate unit of
analysis with the aim of understanding the consequences of climate variability and
change in the Sahel. Such a site was found in the village of Biidi 2 in northern Burkina
Faso. This presentation starts with the village history, followed by a description of
daily life, focusing on ethnic, gender and generation relations, and finally, the village’s
place in the wider world. It should be noted that since the four papers making up this
thesis all deal with Biidi 2, some aspects of life in the village and in particular the
villagers’ livelihood strategies and perceptions of climate variability as well as the
biophysical setting are left out of this chapter.

Degrading local practices

One of the first explanations of the causes of the recent droughts in the Sahel came from
Charney et al. (1977), who argued that human practices and particularly ‘overgrazing’,
‘overcultivation’, and ‘deforestation’ caused the reduction in rainfall.2 The idea that the
people of the Sahel are victims of their own degrading practices was, however, not new
but “an article of faith to many observers and researchers since the early twentieth
century” (Brooks, 2004: 10). Colonial administrators and early European visitors to the
region misinterpreted variations in annual rainfall amounts and vegetation cover as
2
On the basis of a neo-Malthusian interpretation they argued that these practices caused an increase in the
reflectivity or albedo of the land surface as dark vegetation yielded to bare, sandy, light-coloured soils.
This process reduces the heating of the atmosphere by the ground surface, which in turn results in a
reduction in the convection that is essential for the formation of rainfall generating clouds (Brooks, 2004:
10).

5
evidence of environmental change or the encroachment of the Sahara and located the
cause of this in ‘inappropriate’ indigenous land use practices (Hubert, 1920; Renner,
1926; Stebbing, 1935, cited in Mortimore, 1998). Lamprey (1975) similarly argued that
the advancement of the Sahara he claimed to have observed in northern Sudan was due
to past and current land use practices among the populations living in this area and
concluded that there is a “need to educate the rural population, particularly as many of
the problems are due to traditional and hitherto unquestioned practices” (cited in
Brooks, 2004: 10). The notion of the ‘moving desert’, or ‘desertification’ caught the
imagination of the world and has proved a persistent ‘narrative’, partly because it
“bankrolled decades of development interventions, research and international debate” in
the Sahel and other drylands of the world (Agnew and Chappell, 1999; Batterbury and
Warren, 2001: 3; Swift, 1996).3

The neo-Malthusian ‘desertification narrative’ was finally put to rest in scientific

communities in the 1990s (Agnew and Chappel, 1999; Helldén, 1991; Rasmussen et al.
2001; Reynolds et al. 2007; Swift, 1996; Warren and Olsson, 2003). Remote sensing
studies by Tucker et al. (1991, 1994) of the Sahelian land surface showed that the
‘desert boundary’ is not the result of a systematic expansion of the Sahara as claimed by
Lamprey (1975). Rather, vegetation quickly re-colonises areas that have experienced
‘desertification’ or land degradation when rainfall permits. The state of the land surface,
at least on the spatial scales covered by remote sensing studies, hence appears to be
driven by rainfall variability rather than local human practices (Brooks, 2004: 12).
Indeed, Rasmussen et al. (2001) conclude that an apparent ‘desertification’ between the
1970s and mid-1980s in the region in which Biidi 2 is located has been reversed partly
due to climatic trends but probably also human practices.

Resourceful but diverse local practices

The refutation of the idea that the drought in the Sahel was somehow caused by a
systematic abuse of the land by the region’s inhabitants led to a re-evaluation of local
practices (Agnew and Warren, 1996; Mortimore and Turner, 2005; Swift, 1996;

3
Desertification describes a set of land degradation processes such as a decline in soil fertility, land and wind
erosion, dune formation, hydrological decline, deforestation, and a loss of biodiversity (Reynolds el at. 2007).

6
Warren, 1998). The view of the rural Sahelian population shifted accordingly. No
longer seen as the cause of the food, stocking, and degradation ‘crisis’ in the Sahel,
studies began to view rural populations and their practices as adapted to this ‘crisis’
(Mortimore and Adams, 2001).

A very large part of this literature focuses on how rural populations in the Sahel have
adapted to the drought and the degradation of their biophysical environment through
both agricultural and non-agricultural diversification strategies (e.g. Batterbury and
Warren, 2001; Bolwig, 1999; de Bruijn and van Dijk, 1995; Dietz et al. 2004; Elmqvist
and Olsson, 2006; Mertz et al. 2008; Mortimore 1998; Mortimore and Adams 2001;
Mortimore and Turner, 2005; Rain, 1999; Raynaut 1997; Reenberg et al. 1998;
Reenberg and Paarup-Larsen, 1997; Roncoli et al. 2001). While some of these
strategies, such as circular labour migration (e.g. Cleveland, 1991; Cordell et al. 1996;
David, 1995; De Bruijn and Dijk, 1995; Findley, 1994; Hampshire, 2002, 2006;
Hampshire and Randall, 1999, 2000; Henry et al. 2004; Rain, 1999) and the planting of
short- and long-cycle crop varieties in different types of soil using different methods
(e.g. Lacy et al. 2006; Mertz et al. 2009; Mortimore, 1998), are similar across the Sahel,
great diversity is found due to demographic, historical, land use, socio-cultural, and
political differences (e.g. Raynaut, 1997; 2001). These vast differences have shaped
and continue to shape local responses to the one thing the region has in common: the
climatic development of the last 50 years. In order to explore these responses and their
consequences it thus pays to acknowledge that there are “many Sahels” (Raynaut, 2001:
13); Biidi 2 is one of these.

A short history of Biidi 2

Biidi 2 is a small typical village (pop 585) in northern Burkina Faso (see Map 1) with
no sites of interest except the ruin of Modi Mawdo’s mud brick hut.4 The hut is
relatively frequently visited by outsiders and serves as a shrine at which communication
with the ghost of Modi Mawdo is believed possible. What the visitors ask Modi Mawdo
about is unknown, but it is believed that he can make wishes come true. Each year after

4
The historical data used in this section was collected through interviews and is as such based upon oral
history (e.g. Vansina, 1985).

7
the rains the hut is carefully restored by the villagers. This they do for two reasons.
First, they want to keep the sight attractive and in working order as the visitors bring in
cash and, second, because the hut was the first one to be built in the village.

Map 1. The location of Biidi 2 in Burkina Faso. Source: Institut Geographique du

Burkina Faso. Adapted by Sarah D’haen.

Modi Mawdo was a powerful Fulbe Marabout (Islamic religious leader), who left an
unknown part of Mali some 130 years ago along with a small group of other Fulbe and
their cattle and slaves, the Rimaiibe, in search of better pastures. Walking south they
encountered another Fulbe Marabout. He told Modi Mawdo about a place with ‘old
wells’ or ‘a constant presence of water’ which in Fulfulde, the language spoke by Modi
Mawdo and his entourage, translate as biidi.5 A few months later they found the place.

5
Fulbe and Rimaiibe live in almost all West African states and their main language Fulfulde varies across
this region. However, Fulfulde is more or less mutually comprehensible by speakers from nearly all areas
(Hampshire, 2004).

8
The group was pleasantly surprised as there was a nice breeze and splendid views over
the surrounding savannah atop a sand dune and Modi Mawdo immediately arranged for
his slaves to construct huts for him and themselves on the dune.

The ruin of Modi Mawdo’s hut in Biidi 2

Following the initial settlement the village expanded slowly. Rimaiibe families settled
there by their Fulbe masters provided the main bulk of new inhabitants along with
Wahilbe blacksmiths. Wahilbe provided the tools necessary for Rimaiibe to cultivate
the fields of their Fulbe masters and millet production constituted the economic
mainstay of the village. The potential of the constant presence of groundwater at the
bottom of the dune was soon realised. It is hard to determine exactly when the first
gardens in Biidi 2 were established as the narratives vary on this account, but most
villagers agree that the oldest of the gardens date back 120 years. These gardens
attracted more settlers, and during the first three decades of the twentieth century the
village began to take its present shape with four separate quarters (debeere) organised
according to patrilineal descent and ethnicity (see also Matlon, 1994; Pollet and Winter,
1978; Riesman, 1977). The two largest debeere, Letugal and Gorgal, were occupied by

9
Rimaiibe slaves; Wahilbe occupied the third largest and Fulbe occupied the smallest
debeere as Fulbe prefer to live in the bush (see Paper C). This spatial organisation of
the village is still observed (see Map 2).

Map 2. Biidi 2

The French colonial rule seems to have made no impression on the village. The
colonial administration in Upper Volta, as in many other African countries, was
characterised by a highly centralised state apparatus, functioning mainly in the capital,
Ouagadougou, and other main cities and with only limited authority beyond these

10
(Harsch, 2009). Throughout the colonial era in Upper Volta, local authority in most of
the countryside was thus exercised indirectly through traditional chiefs assisted by a
handful of French commandants de cercle of whom there was one in Dori, some 80
kilometres from Biidi 2 (Harsch, 2009). The villagers knew about his presence and
about some of the colonial policies, especially the illegalisation of slavery. A common
narrative in the village, for example, regards a couple of Rimaiibe men who had gone to
see the anasara, or white person, in Dori just before the end of the colonial era. Their
aim had been to convince him to come to Biidi 2 in order to tell Fulbe that slavery had
been made illegal. This the anasara never did.

Independence in 1960 brought little change to the village as the new post-colonial state
remained institutionally weak, with a relatively small, under-budgeted and over-
stretched bureaucracy that had difficulty carrying out even the most routine functions
(Harsch, 2009: 266). The traditional chiefs remained the de facto authorities and public
administrators maintained a skimpy presence on the ground and “were exceptionally
remote from the world of ordinary citizens” (Harsch, 2009: 267). The post-colonial
political system’s inability to transcend its internal dysfunctions and contradictions
contributed to repeated political crises and a number of coups d’etat, eventually
culminating in the advent of Thomas Sankara in August 1983 (Harsch, 2009; Skinner,
1988; Wilkens, 1989). Sankara proclaimed a revolution, and to symbolise the new
departure, he and his Conseil National de la Révolution (CNR) renamed the country
Burkina Faso. A wide range of political, social, and economic policies were initiated
and because a core aim and result of the revolution was to extend the presence and
authority of the CNR more widely throughout the country some of these policies ─
particularly those regarding land usufruct rights and slavery ─ reached Biidi 2 (see
Paper C).

While extremely charismatic and inventive, Sankara did not manage to rectify the
economic situation in Burkina Faso. When he was eventually killed, under still unclear
circumstances during yet another coup d’etat in 1987, the country was still the third
poorest in the world (Skinner, 1988: 449). There are many reasons for this, but
Sankara’s reluctance to seek external financial aid and obtain loans combined with his

11
ambivalent and sometimes hostile relationship with the West meant that foreign
investments and aid were not easily forthcoming (Skinner, 1988: 449; Wilkins, 1989:
385).

Sankara’s qualms about ‘submitting’ to what he saw as ‘imperialist domination’ was not
shared by the new and still current president Blaise Compaoré. An important reason for
maintaining the local municipals initiated by Sankara was, for example, the acceptance
by the new government in 1991 to adopt its first structural adjustment programme
financed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which demanded ‘good
governance’ including an emphasis on decentralisation (Harsch, 2009: 269). This
opening up to the West and the climate of political stability Compaoré created resulted
in a huge influx of foreign aid in the 1990s (Atampugre, 1997). Whether this influx is
the cause of the relative economic and political stability Burkina Faso has experienced
since Compaoré took over is unclear, but the country is (especially in comparison with
three of its most immediate neighbours Niger, Mali and the Côte d’Ivorie) currently
relatively peaceful ─ something the villagers greatly appreciate (see Paper B).6

Ethnic relations
The ethnic composition of Biidi 2 with three groups, castes or classes of people the
Fulani, Wahilbe, and Rimaiibe is not unique.7 These three groups are found throughout
the entire francophone West African Sahel in close proximity to each other and are
often grouped together under the French term Peulh (Dupire 1970; Hampshire, 2004;
Riesman, 1992). The Peulh constitute a minority of the population in every West
African state including Burkina Faso, but at the same time, they constitute one of West
Africa’s largest ethnic groups (Riesman, 1992). It is estimated that some 9 or 10 million
Peulh lived in West Africa in the early 1990s of whom almost 4.8 million lived in
Nigeria (Hampshire, 2004). It is difficult to calculate how many Peulh currently live in
Oudalan, the province in which Biidi 2 is located. But around 25% of the households in
this region stated in a INSD (Institut National de la Statistique et de la Démographie)

6
At the most recent election in 2005, all the villagers asked in interviews voted for Campaoré. The main
reason given was the current stability of the country, which ensured stable prices, a reliable
infrastructure, and a market for cattle. Moreover, his party, the CDP (Congress for Democracy and
Progress), handed out the best and most generous gifts during the election campaign.
7
Riesman (1992) divides Fulani society into ‘castes’; Hampshire (2004) into ‘classes’.

12
1998 survey that they are Peulh, which seems to correlate with earlier numbers
estimating that about a quarter of the population in this region are Peulh (INSD, 1991,
quoted in Hampshire, 2006).8

Because of the wide geographical dispersion of the Peulh and the multiple political,
economic, historical, cultural and biophysical settings in which they find themselves,
language, beliefs and practices vary from place to place, making generalisations about
Peulh problematic (de Bruijn and van Dijk, 1995; Hampshire, 2006; Riesman, 1992).
The variation between Peulh groups is noticeable even within the Sahelian region of
Burkina Faso. Paper C shows, for example, how Fulbe in Biidi 2 have not engaged
substantially in labour migration, whereas Hampshire (2006), working only some 70
kilometres away, concludes the opposite. The same discrepancy in livelihood strategies
in northern Burkina Faso is found between Paper C and Buhl and Homewood (2001).
Among the Fulbe studied by the latter, the women were heavily engaged in small-scale
commerce whereas the opposite trend is observed in Biidi 2. Moreover, some Peulh in
this region, and in general, are fully nomadic, some semi-sedentary, while others, like
the ones in Biidi 2, have settled permanently and depend largely upon millet agriculture
(Dognin, 1975; Riesman, 1992).

Nevertheless, Fulbe, Rimaiibe and Wahilbe in Biidi 2 speak Fulfulde and they share
indeed many of the cultural characteristics found among Peulh communities across
West Africa.9 Generally, Fulbe in Biidi 2 subscribe broadly to the concept of Pulaanku
(see Paper C). They are proud, value self-control and self-restraint, and do not like to be
shamed. They also see themselves as a free and noble people over which no one has
mastery. Moreover, they maintain they have a particular phenotype being tall and
slender with straight hair and noses and lighter skin. In contrast, Rimaiibe often view
and characterise themselves as being brash, loud and straightforward, with little shame.
They also proudly highlight their stronger, blacker and more heavy-set bodies as these
“are better for working” as it was often claimed.

8
The calculation of household numbers has been made by Sarah D’haen (personal communication).
9
See, for example, Reed (1932), Stenning (1959), Dupire (1962, 1970), Vereecke (1989), Azarya et al.
(1993), who all argue that Fulbe share traits across the Sahel. de Bruijn and van Dijk (1995: 199-200)
critique this view.

13
The actual discrepancies between the stereotypes (particularly regarding the physical
traits) were obvious to all in the village but nevertheless important to maintain for both
groups (see also Riesman, 1992). A large part of everyday life in the village revolves
around maintaining these differences. The three groups do not live or work together,
they have separate graveyards, they do not intermingle very much socially, and they do
not marry each other. While the latter is not impossible there is only one example in the
village of a marriage between a Rimaiibe and a Fulbe, and that couple had to move from
the village.

The endogamous nature of the groups is to a large extent based on historical relations.
As already mentioned, the village was settled by Fulbe, who brought along with them
their slaves, the Rimaiibe.10 The memory of the old master-slave relationship is still
very much alive and accounts for a lot of the social separation observed in the village;
the two groups do not actually like each other very much (see also Riesman, 1992). For
Rimaiibe, the most painful memories regarding the slave period are associated with the
movement of children. Traditionally, a Rimaiibe family belonged to a Fulbe family,
and with no social standing besides that of slave, Rimaiibe were viewed and categorised
alongside other types of wealth like cattle and material goods (see also Bolwig and
Paarup-Laursen, 1999; Riesman, 1977, 1992). This meant that many Rimaiibe children
were removed from their family by their Fulbe ‘owners’ at around the age of 6-8 years.
According to some older Rimaiibe villagers, this practice was still in place in Biidi 2
until the early 1970s. These children were put to work in Fulbe gardens, fields or
households. There they joined older Rimaiibe slaves and suffered the same
“indignities”, as Rimaiibe in the village call it, of eating last (if at all), having no clothes
and no free time.

10
Riesman (1992: 14) notes that the term Rimaiibe refers to the original inhabitants of an area who
continue to live and work in that area after having been conquered by Fulbe. The old Fulbe in Biidi 2 agree
with this and maintain that Maccube is the proper name for the ‘slaves’ in Biidi 2 because this means
“captive” or people either captured in raids or bought at the market. “They were not here when we arrived,
we brought them here” as Ally explained in an interview. The two categories are at any rate
indistinguishable today and since the Rimaiibe call themselves just that, I use that term throughout the
thesis.

14
Riesman (1992) and Lund (1999) trace the changing status between the two groups in
northern Burkina Faso to colonial times. Yet according to Fulbe, Rimaiibe and Wahilbe
informants, Rimaiibe were working for and subjugated by Fulbe in Biidi 2 until the
revolution led by Thomas Sankara in 1983 (see Papers B and C). The changes Sankara
brought along in regard to usufruct rights and slavery were embraced by Rimaiibe and
ignited a major reversal of fortunes between Rimaiibe and Fulbe in the village;
something already in motion due to the adaptations to the drought in the early 1970s and
1980s (see Papers B and C).

Gender, a male world?

Like ethnic relations, gender is a major demarcation and determines much of everyday
life in Biidi 2. The village is structurally organised according to gender as a patrilineal
descent system with patrilocal residence. At its most basic level this system is organised
around households. Households are notoriously difficult to define. Some basic
principles are, however, more or less agreed upon: a locus of production, distribution,
transmission, reproduction and co-residence (Wilk and Netting, 1984). But among
Fulbe and Rimaiibe these units do not necessarily coincide, and there is no single
Fulfulde term that translates as ‘household’ (see also Hampshire, 2006). Moreover,
Fulbe and Rimaiibe households are not isolated entities, but operate within wider
cultural, political and social structures.

Nevertheless, in Biidi 2, there are two major types of households that are organised on
the basis of a system of patrilineages.11 Both these types are called wuro. The term wuro
carries many meanings, but in Biidi 2 it is essentially used to describe the two main
units of domestic and work organisation. The largest of these consists of a large group
of agnatically related men and correlates largely with the distinct debeere Gorgal,
Letugal, Wahilbe and Fulbe observed in the village (see Map 2). In general, however,
the villagers used the term wuro to describe a single household. A single household
consists of a man, his wife and a child living in a separate hut (see Paper A).12 Having
children is important because they are an important future source of economic wealth

11
For details regarding other Fulbe/Rimaiibe groups see Stenning (1959), Riesman (1977), and Hampshire
(2006).
12
Wuro accordingly also means inhabited hut/house.

15
and security (Hampshire and Randall, 1999, 2000), but also because it is very difficult
to become a full social being and to establish an independent (from the man’s father)
household without one (see Hampshire, 2004; Riesman, 1979; Stenning, 1959).
Throughout this thesis, it is this unit consisting of a man and his wife and child that is
referred to when households are mentioned.

Gender also determines the division of labour in the village.13 Men are responsible for
most agro-pastoral production tasks like herding cattle, taking them to pastures and
water, preparing the fields for cultivation, sowing crops, hoeing and harvesting, and the
construction of huts, granaries and other structures. They also look after the gardens,
breaking in the soil, sowing, and harvesting the produce. While the women are also
engaged in agriculture and horticulture and have their own small plots of land, their
tasks revolve largely around childcare, the preparation of food, and other domestic
duties like keeping the hut and the surroundings clean, fetching water, and washing
clothes. Because especially food preparation and child minding is very labour intensive,
the women are − unlike the men − constantly busy.

The division according to gender is also observed in social life (see also Riesman,
1977). For a relatively long period prior to marriage, the young girls begin to take on
roles and behaviour appropriate to adult women (Hampshire, 2004). This means that
children do not only take on gendered work but also gendered roles relatively young.14
In Biidi 2, children over the age of seven or eight therefore rarely play with the opposite
sex. This division becomes more pronounced with age and because Fulbe and Rimaiibe
men marry later than women, they enjoy a more extended period of adolescence.15
Large groups of young men drifting around the village, listening to music on beaten-up
ghetto blasters and smoking cigarettes while their female counterparts are busy

13
This is also observed among other Fulbe populations (Stenning 1959; Dupire 1963, 1970; de Bruijn and
van Dijk 1995; Hampshire 2006).
14
Childhood begins between the ages of five and seven, when children are thought to start developing
hayyillo (or social sense) (de Bruijn and van Dike, 1995; Hampshire, 2004; Riesman, 1992). Because the
children now begin to know how to behave socially and to comply with the demands of their caretakers
they are given small responsibilities. The girls typically help their mothers with food preparation, looking
after small animals and siblings, and fetching water and firewood. The boys look after animals, particularly
cattle.
15
It is estimated that the mean age at first marriage for Fulbe and Rimaiibe men in the northern part of
Burkina Faso is around 24-25 years (Hampshire and Randall, 2000).

16
preparing food or doing other domestic tasks is therefore a common sight. These groups
rarely intermingle, and it is in general extremely difficult to establish who is married to
whom (see also Riesman, 1977: 110). Only late at night when the men and women
return to their huts to sleep is this apparent.

Divorce is more public.16 The patrilineal decent and patrilocal residence system is
interpreted relatively flexibly, and women retain rights in their natal homes, villages and
patrilineages. This means that women often spend time away from their men in their
home village and that in the case of divorce, the women are generally accepted back by
their patrilineage (see also Hampshire and Randall, 2000; Stenning, 1959). The children
belong to the father’s patrilineage, however, and therefore, women are very cautious
and worried about getting divorced (see Paper D). It is moreover hard to get married
again as the men prefer younger brides. The possibility of divorce is nonetheless a
rather popular topic of conversation among the women. Often such conversations are
grounded in the women’s growing engagement in gardening and non-agricultural
diversification strategies (see Paper D).

Women highlight their growing economic independence vis-à-vis the men when asked
about major changes in the village over the last 20 years or so. This they largely
attribute to the arrival of development projects. A large number of these focus
specifically on women, granting them micro-credit loans and/or giving them farm,
garden, or domestic equipment. The women in Biidi 2 have embraced this possibility
and also the development project’s discourse of gender equality. That the combination
of these two factors is changing gender relations in the village is clearly illustrated in
Paper D, where I present the story of Haawa and Asoman.

The power shift towards the women observed in Biidi 2 is, however, severely hindered
by their lack of education. Education is highly valued in Biidi 2. However, most
families in this area cannot afford to let all their children go to school and girls

16
Divorces are not uncommon and I experienced two during my stay.

17
especially are kept home. Fulbe and Rimaiibe girls marry at an early age.17 In Biidi 2,
some are as young as 13. Because Fulbe and Rimaiibe operate on an essentially
patrilineal descent system with patrilocal residence, a woman moves to her husband’s
family and their children become part of his lineage. This means that many families in
and around Biidi 2 see no point in spending money on their daughter’s education as the
girls are effectively lost to the household from a rather early age. “Why pay to sent
Fatimata to school in Gorom-Gorom? Her skills are not going to help our household”,
as Amadou, a middle-aged Rimaiibe man, put it in an interview. Consequently, very
few girls go (only three from Biidi 2 are currently enrolled in secondary education, and
this is because the teachers insisted) and families focus instead on getting one of their
sons through secondary school.

Generational relations
Age, like ethnicity and gender, is very important in Biidi 2 and is reckoned in number of
years and in generations. At birth each individual become a member of an age group
(see also de Bruijn and van Dijk, 1995: 148-149; Riesman, 1977: 31).18 I spent, for
example, most of my time with men my age. We worked, ate and sat together. When
sitting together in the village at night we would be surrounded by the unmarried and
younger men. These would be ordered around and although they took part in our
conversation, they were there only as long as we allowed them to be. A little away from
us, the age group of the elder men would sit. They would sometimes comment on our
conversation and were always offered tea if we had some. Not far from this group, the
women would sit. Again they were split up into these three distinct age groups.

A commanding attribute of age groups is authority (Riesman, 1977). Older generations

have supremacy over younger generations. So, for example, a grandfather has seniority
over a father, who in turn has seniority over his son, and within these generations the
17
The mean average age at first marriage for Fulbe women in Burkina Faso has been found to be around 16
years, with a high proportion of marriages taking place considerably earlier (Hampshire and Randall,
2000).
18
While age groups are present in all Fulbe societies, their importance in everyday life seems to vary. De
Bruijn and van Dijk (1995: 148-149) note that in central Mali, age groups are only really distinctive during
festivities, “when they eat, dance and sing together”. Moreover, it was only the age groups of the young
married men and unmarried girls which that they saw in everyday operation. Riesman, in contrast, calls the
separation of generations and the principles of age groups “an objective social fact” (1977: 76).

18
oldest has authority. Old people are thus generally treated with deference and respect in
Fulbe society (de Bruijn and van Dijk, 1995; Riesman, 1992). This is certainly also the
case in Biidi 2, but it is not without ambiguity.

In Biidi 2, as in many other indigenous societies (Kirsch, 2001), the division of people
into social categories such as age groups is based on knowledge and ownership of land
and natural resources. But since the major droughts of the 1970s and early 1980s and
the continued rainfall variability, the older generations are, for example, no longer
capable of predicting the seasons, the right time to sow, or when a rain storm may turn
nasty. Moreover, they lost a large portion of their material belongings such as cattle
during the droughts.

Particularly the loss of resources among the older generations has resulted in changes.
In order to deal with the drought, most of the young men had to help out their household
─ often through labour migration to Côte d’Ivoire. This gave them a new status within
the household as breadwinners and started a power shift in generational relations that is
most obvious in the changing marriage practices observed in the village. In Paper A, I
explore this change in generational relations by focusing on drought, labour migration,
marriage patterns, the earlier establishment of households and the connection of this
with political/generational power. I also highlight how labour migration has given the
young men a heightened sense of subjective power vis-à-vis the older generations.
Through their travels the young men have learned to communicate and deal with
strangers and interpret the information flow from the increasingly encroaching outside
world, thereby undermining the traditional hierarchy of knowledge based on age. Isa, an
old Wahilbe man, captured this shift in an interview when he told me how “the young
men are clever about the world”. This, he continued, “is important because we depend
upon it”.

The outside world

Despite the general improvement of life in Biidi 2 (at least for Rimaiibe and Wahilbe)
over the last 15 or so years, many of the villagers lament their inability to fully escape
the situation of poverty in which they find themselves. Often they would directly link

19
this position to living in the village: “We are stuck here with nothing to do”; “I dream of
getting out of here, to go somewhere where I can live better”; “If I stay here I will never
become rich”; “If I ever get the chance to go to Europe I will take it”.

None of the villagers (except for two men who have been to Mecca) have ever been
further away than Abidjan and most ─ in particular the women ─ have never left the
area. Yet the outside world is a popular topic of conversation. Many of these
conversations are based upon images gained by watching televisions erected in small
stalls in Gorom-Gorom and listening to the ever growing number of radios in the
village. People watch and listen, talk about what they have seen and heard and discuss
whether it is all true. Especially soap operas from Latin America dubbed into French
capture the imagination. The wealth, beauty, cleanness and the drama give rise to lively
discussions and often dreamy eyes. As the only source of verification I was often asked
about these images: “Are people really that clean?”; “Do some people really live in
completely white houses?”; “Is there grass like that all over that place?”. The questions
often also revolved around prices: “How much does a car like that cost where you come
from?”; “What does a house like that cost?”; “Can everybody where you come from
afford a house like that?”

It seemed to matter very little to the villagers that I told them that only a few people
lived like that in Denmark or anywhere else in the North. Or that I tried to make
comparisons with Abidjan. For the villagers, Abidjan is not a place of wealth, dreams or
possibilities, but rather a place of hardship where one longs for home. Getting wealthy
is possible only “where you are from, Jonas, and not in Abidjan” as I was so often told.

The world outside West Africa, or Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivorie, is thus
loaded with promise for the villagers. It is a place of material goods, wealth, good
health, plenty of food and work, and the fact that such a world exists influence the
demands, dreams and strategies of the villagers. Tired of waiting for politicians more
occupied with “filling their own stomachs” than people’s needs, the villagers seek
immediate relief for their pressing problems and future dreams through their own
actions. Many of the livelihood strategies and in particular the accumulation of wealth

20
and material goods are thus influenced by the villagers’ perception of ‘the good life’
attained by watching television and listening to the radio. Some of the young men also
save up to go to Europe because there “those things we see on television are possible”.
They do not expect to find amazing jobs, but they have noticed that black people in
television series especially from Latin America clean pools, work as chauffeurs and in
the garden. “We could do that”, I was very often told, and this clearly motivated them to
go.

The outside world is, however, not only a place of wonder and wealth, but also
mentioned and understood as a cause of problems, big and small. In Paper B, I highlight
how the villagers’ horizon of worry expanded significantly during the so-called global
food crisis. Suddenly faced with rapidly rising food prices, the villagers began to doubt
whether their many livelihood diversification strategies sufficed. They had adapted to
generate cash in order to buy food no longer available from the fields; now this cash
suddenly did not go as far as it had, and fears about serious hunger surfaced. Despite
their resourcefulness, the villagers were, in other words, once again confronted with
their own vulnerability. A vulnerability that for many of them seemed so unfair in the
light of the wealth the villagers know is ‘out there’.

21
The Theoretical Setting

Introduction
This chapter provides the theoretical setting of the papers presented in this thesis. The
chapter is divided into three parts. Sections one focuses on the two main approaches to
the problem of climate change: mitigation and adaptation. The second section
introduces and discusses the literature on adaptation to climate change. A particular
focus will be the difficulty of singling out climate as a driver of socio-economic change.
In section three it is argued that a livelihood analysis provides a framework for singling
out climate as a driver of change and understanding local adaptation to climate change.

Mitigation and adaptation

The Fourth Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) report was published in
2007. The report summarises and reviews literature published since the last report (2001
in this case) and highlights new results regarding climate change (Liverman, 2008). The
report is unequivocal: it is certain that the world is warming due (mainly) to greenhouse
gas emissions (IPCC, 2007). Indeed, the report is clear enough “to make a serious
response from policymakers almost inevitable”, for the debate is no longer about
whether we believe in climate change, but what we should do about it (Giles, 2007:
578).

Two alternative or complementary responses to the problem of climate change are

considered in academic research and in national and international policy debates:
mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation, which means abatement, moderation or
alleviation, refers to “actions that reduce exposure to changes, for example, through
regulations, location, or technological shifts” (Nelson et al. 2007). As such, it is
considered to be a response that seeks to reduce or stabilise greenhouse gas emissions or
levels, in order to lessen current and future changes in climate (Smit et al. 2000).
Mitigation is, however, insufficient to fully protect or buffer human populations from
climate change already under way (Adger et al. 2005: 77). In response to the increased
awareness of climate change and its observed impacts on physical and ecological
systems around the world, there has hence been a corresponding increase in efforts to

22
ameliorate observed and future risks through adaptation (Adger et al. 2005; Adger et al.
2007; Nelson et al. 2007; UNFCCC, 2007). Adaptation is, in other words, “an essential
part of climate policy alongside greenhouse-gas mitigation” and although it has been
largely overlooked over the last two decades, it is now “firmly back on the agenda”
(Pielke et al. 2007: 597).19

According to dictionaries, ‘adapt’ means to make more suitable by modifying or

altering. ‘Adaptation’ refers to the process of adapting but also the condition of being
adapted (see also Smit et al. 2000). The term has various understandings, applications
and interpretations in the climate change literature (Smit et al. 2000; Smit and Skinner,
2002; Smithers and Smit, 1997; Smit and Wandel, 2006).20 At its most basic level,
adaptation research distinguishes between natural and human systems. Biological
systems respond to climate perturbations in an entirely reactive manner, whereas the
response of humans can be reactive (after impact takes place) and/or anticipatory
(before impact takes place), “incorporating environmental perception and risk
evaluation as important elements of adaptation strategies” (Smithers and Smit, 1997:
133; Adger et al. 2007; Smit and Skinner, 2002). As such, the adaptive response in
social systems is often defined on the basis of intent and purposefulness, emphasising
that adaptation is a process by social actors aimed at negating and/or ameliorating a
concurrent or future situation. These general attributes are summed up by the IPCC
(2007), who define adaptation as an “adjustment in natural or human systems in
response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or
exploits beneficial opportunities”.21

19
The idea of adaptation to climate change was problematic for many of those advocating emission
reductions because it encourages “dangerous experimentation with undesired behaviour” (Thompson et al.,
1998 cited in Pielke et al. 2007: 597). Former US Vice President Al Gore, for example, forcefully declared
his opposition to adaptation in 1992, when he stated that it represented a “kind of laziness, an arrogant faith
in our ability to react in time to save our skins” (cited in Pielke et al. 2007: 597).
20
The concept of adaptation to environmental change has a long history in academic research. The origin of
the concept is found in natural sciences like population biology and evolutionary biology. Here it refers to
how genetic characteristics allow individual organisms or biological systems to survive and reproduce in a
changing environment (Holling, 1973; Kitano, 2002; Smit and Wandel, 2006). The concept of adaptation
has also been widely applied in the social sciences (Jansen et al. 2006; Smithers and Smit, 1997). In this
research, socio-cultural practices are largely equated with genetic characteristics (Smit and Wandel, 2006)
as such practices are perceived as determining the survival or failure of a culture faced with environmental
change (e.g. O’Brien and Holland, 1992; Diamond, 2005; Orlove, 2005).
21
Adaptation is not always successful, however, even though the notion of maladaptation is generally
absent from the IPCC reports, which “seek to offer an optimistic view of humanity’s capacity to respond to

23
This is a relatively useful and straightforward definition and is the one applied in the
papers presented. However, the definition is extremely broad and in research attempting
to understand how both natural and human systems adjust to environmental change
there is a need to “distinguish types, to characterize attributes, and to specify
applications of adaptation” (Smit et al. 2000: 224; Adger et al. 2007; Smit and Skinner,
2002;).

Adaptation practices can be distinguished along several spatial and temporal

dimensions. A crucial first step in climate change research is hence to define and
delineate the scale, subject and boundaries of the unit of analysis (Smit et al. 2000).
While this is often extremely difficult due to the interconnectivity, or inherent panarchy
of socio-ecological systems (a point to which I will return) (Gunderson and Holling,
2002), it is nevertheless necessary to specify both the subject and scale of enquiry: an
individual, a community, a nation, or the entire globe. Is it adaptation in a particular
crop, ecosystem, or species we are studying? Or are we considering an economic
section, a political entity, or a social unit? Adger et al. (2007: 720) categorises, for
example, the adaptive responses among human systems according to spatial scale (local,
regional, national, global), sector (health, agriculture, tourism and so on), type of action
(technological, regulatory, market, for example), climatic zone (dryland, floodplains,
arctic, and so on), baseline income/development level (least-developed countries,
middle-income countries, and developed countries), or by some combination of these
and other categories. Moreover, it is implied that at all these various scales or ‘response
spaces’ (Thomas et al. 2005), adjustments to some climate stimuli take place. In other
words, what climatic ‘stresses’, ‘disturbances’, ‘events’, ‘hazards’ or ‘perturbations’
does the system under scrutiny face? Is it changes such as decadal and inter-annual
variation in precipitation patterns that represent a challenge (as in the Sahel) or heat
waves in, for example, some European countries? The relevant climate characteristics
(e.g. temperature, precipitation, flooding) need to be specified and connected to the
system which (tries to) adapt.

problems” (Orlove, 2005: 590), Diamond (2005), for example, forcefully demonstrates how some human
societies have chosen the ‘wrong’ adaptation strategies.

24
Adaptation to climate change research
Delineating and identifying the spatial and temporal scale, subject, and climate stimuli
allows us to begin determining the characteristics of the system, exploring if, how, and
to what it adapts, as well as the effects of adaptation. The litterature on adaptation to
climate change literature does so, according to Smit and Wandel (2006), in roughly four
different ways.

The first of these usually looks at large scales. It addresses the question of how serious
or dangerous specific scenarios of climate change are in order to estimate the impacts of
such change and the difference adaptation could make (e.g. Dessai et al. 2003).
Adaptation is not empirically investigated and neither are the conditions or drivers that
facilitate or constrain it.

A second body of literature focuses on specific adaptation options a particular system

that is subject to climate change impacts has available. The purpose of this research is to
assess the relative merit or utility of alternative adaptations in order to identify ‘best
practices’ through a process of ranking (e.g. Frankhauser et al. 1999).

A third group of studies focuses on the relative adaptive capacity or vulnerability and
resilience of countries, regions or communities to climate change and variability (e.g.
Adger, 2006; Eakin, 2005; Eakin and Luers, 2006; O’Brien et al. 2004; Reid and Vogel,
2006). Adaptive capacity is understood to be the “preconditions necessary to enable
adaptation, including social and physical elements, and the ability to mobilize these
elements” (Nelson et al. 2007: 397); vulnerability to be the “degree to which a system is
susceptible to, and unable to cope with, adverse effects of climate change, including
climate variability and extremes” (IPCC 2007); and resilience to be the amount of
disturbance (of any kind) an ecological system can absorb without shifting into a
different regime or type of system (Folke, 2006; Holling, 1973; Walker and Salt,
2006).22 In this sense, adaptive capacity is determined by the vulnerability and

22
The resilience perspective emerged out of ecology in the 1960s and 1970s (Holling 1973). A crucial
attribute of resilience thinking, as with vulnerability studies, is the explicit focus on the coupling of the
social and ecological domains (Walker and Salt 2006: 31; Berkes and Folke, 1998; Gunderson and Holling,
2002). It follows that a loss of resilience in the ecological domain (for example by way of drought as in the
Sahel) influences the resilience of the social system. While resilience studies focus on identifying the

25
resilience of the system (Adger et al. 2007; Jones, 2001; Kelly and Adger, 2000;
O’Brien et al. 2004; Smit and Wandel, 2006; Turner et al. 2003; Yohe and Tol, 2002).
This helps explain why climate change and variability often affects poor and
marginalised countries and within these, resource-dependent livelihood groups (like the
ones in Biidi 2) more severely than similar climatic events do in the developed world
(Thomas et al. 2007).

The fourth type of analysis (into which the papers presented in this thesis fit) attempts to
understand actual practices and processes of adaptation in a particular region or
community. In order to do so, this research tends not to presume any pre-existing
sensitivities (like, for example, vulnerability or resilience), but seeks to identify these
empirically from the community by focusing on conditions that are important to the
community (e.g. Coulthard, 2008). Focus is on documenting the ways in which the
system or community experiences changing conditions, the processes of decision-
making, the actual strategies carried out, and the consequences of these for the actors,
by employing the experience and knowledge of community members (e.g. Ford and
Smit, 2004; Vásquez-Leon et al. 2003).23 As such, this research is actor based and place
specific and the work is not designed to be ‘scaled up’ in the sense of generating
regional or global definitions or valuations of vulnerability, resilience or adaptation
(Adger et al. 2007; Smit and Wandel, 2006). The problem with scaling up this type of
research is also closely related to the fact that individuals, households, and communities
even within regions exist in a multiplicity of social, economic and physical

ability of a system to withstand shocks and disturbances, the framework is thus not only about the
persistence and robustness of socio-ecological systems (Folke, 2006; Nelson et al. 2007). Socio-ecological
systems exhibit thresholds that, when exceeded, cause the systems to change function and structure, to
undergo a regime shift (e.g. Scheffer et al. 2001). Such shifts may be reversible or irreversible, but, and this
is where the framework has a contrasting and more positive focus than vulnerability studies, the more
resilient a system, the larger the shocks and disturbances it can absorb, or the better its adaptive capacity.
23
Nelson et al. (2007) present an interesting ’critique’ of this type of adaptation research. They argue that
the actor-based analysis could benefit from a more systemic approach (in their case, a resilience
framework) as this would force the researcher to look at the relationship between system components rather
than focusing on individual components in isolation. The main ‘problem’ with actor-based analysis
according to the authors is, in other words, that it does not look at feedbacks and the connectedness of
system components, and therefore neglects to ask what the implications of the actions observed are for the
rest of the system. This is problematic, they argue, because actor-based adaptation literature cannot
evaluate current adaptation in terms of how it will affect future flexibility as such actions are not
reconnected to the overall system in which they take place. The actual sustainability of the adaptations
observed can therefore not be determined. Indeed this is very true, but the point of a large part of actor-
based research is neither to develop ‘best practices’ nor to determine the sustainability of the ones
observed. In the papers presented in this thesis, for example, no claims in these regards is ever made.

26
environments, creating a plethora of different pressures and opportunities, which makes
comparisons across communities extremely difficult. The multiplicity of pressures and
opportunities observed in local communities have, however, resulted in one
fundamental generic conclusion of this work, namely, that it is very unlikely that any
type of adaptive action is taken in light of climate change and variability alone.24

A major point of the work on actual adaptive processes in communities across the world
is hence to associate and/or disassociate decision-making and actions with/from climate
perturbations, and a relatively large body of literature revolves around the issue of
singling out climate as a driver of change (e.g. Adger, 1999; Adger et al. 2009;
Belliveau et al. 2006; Eakin, 2000; 2005; Leichenko and O’Brien, 2008; Mertz et al.
2009; O’Brien and Leichenko, 2000; Reid and Vogel, 2006; Roncoli et al. 2001;
Thomas et al. 2007; Tschakert, 2007). Evidence from the Sahel, for example, points out
that although households are aware of climate variability and change, they often assign
economic, political and social rather than climate factors as the major reasons for
change (Mertz et al. 2009; Tschakert, 2007). The complexity and intertwinement of
drivers of change is also found in Southern Africa (Reid and Vogel, 2006; Thomas et al.
2007; Ziervogel et al. 2006), Asia (Adger, 1999; Coulthard, 2008), and Latin America
(Eakin, 2000; 2005). In Paper B it is argued that in the Sahel, this may be due to a lack
of a temporal perspective as the major climate perturbations took place in the early
1970s and 1980s, but a major claim in the papers presented in this thesis is that a
livelihood strategies analysis approach focusing on livelihood diversification offers a
way to disaggregate and identify climate as a driver of change in local communities
around the world.

Livelihood diversifications 25
The concept of livelihood diversification is normally used to describe the process
whereby households construct their livelihood from a range of activities and assets in

24
That adaptation measures are seldom undertaken solely in response to climate change and variability is in the
most recent IPCC report (Adger et al. 2007: 719) claimed with “very high confidence”.
25
Recent livelihood studies found their intellectual inspiration in an IDS discussion paper by Robert
Chambers and Gordon Conway published in 1992. In their interpretation, livelihood refers to individuals
or groups striving to gain a living, attempting to meet their various consumption and economic necessities,
coping with uncertainties, and responding to new opportunities (1992: 9-12). The concept of livelihood is
treated in Paper A.

27
order to survive or improve their standard of living (Ellis, 2000). Diversification
strategies can include diversification within farm activities (across crops/soils/livestock,
for example) or from farm activities to non-farm activities (across sectors).26
Diversification within farm activities is an important livelihood strategy for households
all over rural Africa including the Sahel (e.g. Lacy et al. 2007; Ponte, 2001; Reenberg
and Fog, 1995; Reenberg et al. 1998; Thomas et al. 2007; Yaro, 2006), but
diversification across sectors is widespread (e.g. Bah et al. 2003; Barret et al. 2001;
Ellies, 1998, 2000; Roncoli et al. 2001; Rasquez and Lambin, 2006).

The high prevalence of rural households engaged in non-farm activities is linked in sub-
Saharan Africa to a crisis in agriculture (Bryceson, 1996, 2002), and to rural African
livelihoods being increasingly divorced from land and thereby farming (Rigg, 2006).
Bryceson (1996: 99) describes these processes as ‘deagrarianization’, which she defines
as a long-term process of “(i) economic activity reorientation (livelihood), (ii)
occupational adjustment (work activity), and (iii) spatial realignment of human
settlement (residence) away from agrarian patterns”. Deagrarianization can of course be
a voluntary response to new opportunities, but the existence of processes of
deagrarianization in rural sub-Sahara Africa, Bryceson argues, is closely linked to
declining opportunities for sustainable livelihoods within agriculture due mainly to the
influence of structural adjustment programmes (Bryceson, 1996, 2002).27 Bryceson and
Jamal (1997) also highlight rural population growth, urbanisation processes, higher
education levels among the rural youth, which make them leave agriculture, and global
climate change as driving the process of deagrarianization.

The correlation between climate parameters and livelihood diversification in rural sub-
Saharan Africa is highlighted in a number of studies mainly from South Africa

26
There is a rather large and often confusing use of terminology in the literature on diversified rural
livelihoods. Concepts like ‘non-farm’, ‘non-agricultural’, ‘non-rural’, ‘off-farm’, and ‘non-traditional’ are
often applied interchangeably to describe activities taking place outside the agricultural sector (Barret et al.
2001).
27
Bryceson (1996, 2002) argues that the dismantling of marketing boards through the structural adjustment
programmes throughout Africa from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s resulted in a drastic undermining of
most smallholders commercialised production as single channel marketing facilities, commodity standards,
controlled prices and market outlets in remote areas disappeared along with the boards. Global trade
liberalisation and the removal of subsidies also affected the farmers negatively by making it difficult for
them to compete on both national and international markets.

28
(Bahrwani et al. 2005; Reid and Vogel, 2006; Thomas et al. 2007; Ziervogel et al.
2006), but also from the Sahel (Roncoli et al. 2001; Rasquez and Lambin, 2006).
Communities like Biidi 2 and the ones studied in South Africa pursue rain-fed
agricultural strategies and are therefore affected by periods of climatic stress, including
drought periods, flooding, and frost. Such events usually accentuate local-scale
vulnerabilities, but individuals and communities in rural sub-Sahara Africa do not, it
seems, get trapped in “perennial cycles of destitution and impoverishment at the mercy
of climatic events” (Sokona and Denton, 2001: 120). Recognising even subtle changes
in climate parameters they respond, often by diversifying their livelihoods.28

In Biidi 2, the livelihood strategies embraced are all embedded in pressures and
opportunities provided by many non-climatic variables operating at a range of scales
(see Paper B). Nevertheless, these strategies all aim at negating the negative impact that
drought and rainfall variability has had on rain-fed agriculture in the village.
Diversifying their way out of rain-fed agriculture as a result of climate variability, the
villagers of Biidi 2 have, in other words, made “adjustment in natural or human systems
in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm
or exploits beneficial opportunities” (IPCC 2007).29 The capacity and/or willingness to
adapt to climate change is, however, not evenly distributed in Biidi 2, or within other
communities at various regional, national and global scales (Dow et al. 2006; Leichenko
and O’Brien, 2002; Smit and Wandel, 2006; Ziervogel et al. 2006). There are
individuals and groups within all societies that have insufficient capacity or willingness
to adapt to climate change and it has been argued that human capital and social capital
are key determinants of adaptive capacity at all spatial scales (Adger et al. 2007; Adger
et al. 2009; Belliveau et al. 2006; Leichenko and O’Brien, 2002; Schröter et al. 2005).
Much new research therefore emphasises that adaptive capacity can be highly
heterogeneous within a society or locality, and differentiated by socio-cultural attributes
28
That local-scale communities across the globe act in the face of climatic changes is empirically
exemplified in Hastrup (2009).
29
The adaptive capacity of Biidi 2 is not surprising. Rural communities in the Sahelian zone of West Africa
have always managed their resources and livelihoods in the face of challenging socio-economic and
environmental conditions (Brook, 1993; Mertz et al. 2009; Mortimore and Adams, 2001; Rain, 1999).
Considering the numerous other factors influencing livelihood strategies in relatively poor and vulnerable
communities of the African drylands (e.g. Elmqvist and Olsson, 2006; Mertz et al. 2009; Reynolds et al.
2007; Tschakert, 2007), the close connection between climate and livelihood diversifications in Biidi 2
established in the papers presented in this thesis is, however, surprisingly clear.

29
such as class, health and social status (e.g. Adger et al. 2009; Berkhout et al. 2006;
Brooks and Adger, 2005; Coulthard, 2008; Klein and Smith, 2003; Næss et al. 2005;
Tompkins, 2005). The research presented in this thesis adds to this new adaptation
research by highlighting how ethnicity (Paper C), gender (Paper D), and age (Paper A)
play major roles in the choice of livelihood strategies in Biidi 2. Moreover, the papers
also show how this adaptive heterogeneity creates new or accentuates already existing
social demarcations and schisms within the village and illustrate how adaptation to
climate change can have wide-reaching social consequences such as changing marriage
patterns, generational power structures, gender relations and ethnic relations.

30
The Fieldwork

Introduction
This chapter focuses on the research approach and methods adopted. It starts by
situating me in the village and continues with a presentation of the methods used.
Particular emphasis is placed upon participant observation, the use of informants and
translators, and semi-structured, focus group and questionnaire interviews. The chapter
then presents how the data collected was treated, focusing on the process of writing
field notes and coding them. The final sections focus on positionality and fieldwork
ethics.

Memories of my arrival
Getting to Biidi 2 from Gorom-Gorom in late August is not easy. August is the wettest
month of the year and swollen rivers makes for dangerous and sometimes impossible
travel. Determined to begin fieldwork I nevertheless managed to convince Abdoulaye
to go.30 We stocked up at the market and found the muddy dirt road towards Djibo. A
few hundred metres later we had to stop. A river had swollen and become too deep to
cross. Abdoulaye smiled and told me to be patient; “It goes down quickly”, he said.

Beyond the river the bare Sahelian landscape stretched out endlessly. I felt anxious.
Was the village a friendly place? Would they want me to live there? Where was I to
stay? Abdoulaye reassured me that the villagers would welcome me; he told me how he
had already spoken to some of them, alerting them to my arrival, and, as he put it, my
rather strange desire to live there for six months.

Soon the river was passable and a couple of young men carried my moped across. Half
an hour later we arrived below the village. Again a river made driving impossible and
we had to walk through waist-high water to get across. Leaving the river, soaked by a
mixture of sweat and water, we were greeted by Kadiri, Layya and Fatimata. Kadiri and

30
I had been put into contact with Abdoulaye prior to fieldwork by Thyge Christensen. Thyge has known
Abdoulaye for almost 30 years.

31
Layya spoke French, Fatimata only Fulani. After a short conversation with Abdulaye in
Fulani, Kadiri turned to me, said that I was welcome and told us to follow.

We passed through a small clearing between lush gardens and started to walk up the
sand dune towards the village. The walk to the village was short but the heat and the
loose sand made it tiring. The village seemed empty except for some women washing
clothes at a water pump.

We entered the village at its far left end and were welcomed by Hamidou, who turned
out to be Layya’s dad. Hamidou guided us over to a hard straw mat where we sat down.
The mat was placed almost in the middle of what appeared to be a kind of courtyard
encircled by nine clay huts of various sizes. Abdulaye and Hamidou spoke for a few
minutes in Fulani while glancing at me. “Get the present”, Abdulaye said and I found
the tea and the sugar I had bought that morning in Gorom-Gorom. Hamidou smiled and
passed it on to Layya who immediately began preparing the tea. We sat in silence for a
while, listening to kids’ voices drifting up from the river and the constant thump-thump
coming from women pounding millet elsewhere in the village.

At home
My new home turned out to be the hut I was looking directly at. Its owner was away on
migration and not expected back for some time. Made of clay with a wooden roof it
consisted of one room with a tiny widow, a small door and a little patio, which I moved
the bed out on to. During my first days I arranged for a couple of chairs and a table
made out of small wooden branches, and I felt set.

Dalsgaard (2004: 47) describes ethnographic fieldwork as a process from “‘home’ to

‘not-home’ in the initial phase, but as the process progresses, from ‘not-home’ to
‘home’ in a new setting”. After a few weeks I knew the village layout, the people living
immediately around me, the food I was to eat, where to wash, the darkness of the nights,
the heat of the day. I learned how to behave in the bush, in the village, among women,
to always bring drinking water, and to make sure my mosquito net was attached
properly at night.

32
 My hut in Biidi 2

As my competency in small, daily tasks grew I realised, however, that I was constantly
aware of how these actions were new to me. That I was in-between worlds; gaining
competence while remaining foreign. But it is exactly by not being like the other, but
opening oneself to the existence and experiences of another that understanding is
arrived at. It is in the transitions and in the negotiations between different values and
cultural habits that we end up recognising our habituatedness as a shared human
condition. As Dalsgaard (2004: 48) writes, following Ardener (1989), it is the
experience of this sharing of the common condition of existence that is the grounds on
which anthropological methods gain their particular strength and which make long-term
fieldwork worthwhile. The boredom during the long hours at midday, the daily
struggles to fit in and be considerate, and all the embarrassing failures to do so, become
moments where true relationships feel meaningful. This is so because ethnographic
fieldwork at such moments “brings us into direct dialogue with others, affording us
opportunities to explore knowledge not as something that grasps inherent and hidden
truths but as an intersubjective process of sharing experience, comparing notes,
exchanging ideas, and finding common ground” (Jackson 1996: 8). Ethnographic
fieldwork is thus a question of social gumption and social skills as it is in the
intersubjective encounter that ethnographic knowledge is gained. But put bluntly,
ethnographic fieldwork and particularly the method of participant observation is

33
designed to allow the researcher to get close to people in order to observe and record
information about their lives.

Participant observation
Participant observation produces the kind of experiential knowledge that lets you talk
convincingly about what it feels like to weed millet fields, to get up at five in the
morning to milk cows, to talk all night at a wedding, or to get your eyes filled with sand
when the wind picks up; in short, to live somewhere like a small village in northern
Burkina Faso. It puts you where the action is and makes it possible to collect stories,
numbers, observations of daily life and routines; indeed any kind of data you want.
This is so, because being around all the time, observing everyday life, jotting things
down, asking questions, and being interested, leads, if done well, to a situation in which
the fieldworker gets accepted as part of life. While the researcher obviously remains a
‘stranger’, the rapport it is possible to establish with the people studied is the greatest
strength of participant observation (Agar, 1996). Aside from the fact that I learnt when
to laugh, be quiet, to leave, or to help, the normality of my presence meant that people
often went about their daily life and practices without paying particular attention to me.
They stopped holding the garden gates, pointing out the thorns on the ground or
fetching my water at the pump. By asking me about my work, family, life in Denmark,
my wealth, my preferences in girls, cattle and horses, and laughing at my habits and my
way of eating, they also got to know me. They learned when not to ask for money, when
not to barge into my hut for a tea party, when they could pull out my laptop, or ask me
personal questions, and through this process they, albeit slowly, began to understand
that I was not working for a development project or a government agency. This greatly
shifted the stories I was told, the events I was invited to, and the questions I could ask
(see also Agar, 1996). After a few months I felt comfortable asking about sensitive
topics such as gender relations, slavery, and love affairs and I felt a great sense of trust
in the narratives I heard and the things I observed.

Such narratives and observation were jotted down as field notes (Sanjek, 1990). My
notebooks (seven in total) are full of observations of things I heard, saw, and
participated in during my six months in the village. Nothing, particularly in the initial

34
and very explorative first three or so months of the fieldwork, was too small or too
insignificant to be written down. The contents of people’s houses, who is at the water
pump, kids’ games, the smell in the garden, and how to make bricks mingle with tales,
jokes, rituals, arguments, and life histories. Love affairs, household structures, gender
roles, intergenerational relations, perceptions of weather, consequences of droughts and
flooding, strategies to survive, stories about development projects and the hardship of
migration also found their way into these books as the papers in this thesis so amply
testify.

As the fieldwork progressed, my notes became more focused as I began to test

hypotheses, to ask more specific questions, and to be more selective about what to
participate in. I tried, for example, to participate in as many weddings and engagement
parties as possible, in political meetings, to observe gender, intergenerational, and
ethnic relations carefully, and to establish who participated in what livelihood strategies.
Indeed, participant observation, to be of value, must lead to insights, “the noticing of
apparently insignificant points, the making of connections” (Cohen, 1984: 220). Often
this happens because details, slight as they might at first appear, add up over time,
pointing the way to other elements, other details, which might otherwise go unobserved.
After having attended a number of engagement parties I noticed, for example, how
narratives revolving around bride price and migration were often told by the young
men. Connecting these stories with drought, ‘love marriages’, the age at which young
men get married, and power structures within the village, as I do in Paper A, was
possible because I began to see connections across a diverse range of settings and
contexts. Similarly, my presence at the inspection of a newly established garden project
by a garden ‘expert’ provided an opportunity to experience a conflict, but it was
participant observation which made it possible to analyse and contextualise the
significance of this event for gender relations in the village as I do in Paper D. In this
sense, participant observation facilitates insights revealing ‘the figure in the carpet’.

Informants and translators

Arriving at such insights does not depend solely upon being there, participant
observation ethnography requires that a few key informants provide adequate

35
information about the place, events, people, rules, and practices − i.e. act as a kind of
guide (Bernard, 2002: 187). Key informants are local people who know a lot about the
place, are articulate, and are, for various reasons of their own, willing to help you
throughout the period of your stay. As such they are not chosen for their statistical
representativeness, but for their general cultural competences and accessibility.
Moreover, good key informants are often people with whom you get along personally
and talk easily and who understand the information you need and who can get it for you.

Choosing key informants is, however, not easy. In fact, the first informants, or local
people willing to help you in the field are likely to be “deviant” members of their
society, or simply not very reliable (Agar, 1996: 135). Bernard (2002: 190) thus writes
that one should not choose key informants too quickly. Time is needed to establish their
motives for working with you, their roles and statuses within the society, and, in turn,
whether or not they prevent access to other important informants and thus knowledge.

In my case, the number of potential key informants was relatively limited. Few of the
villagers spoke French, and the fact that Abdoulaye had established contact with the
village meant that he had already ‘chosen’ whom I was to work with. Abdoulaye knows
Hamidou well, as he is the village chief, and it was Hamidou’s son, Layya, and son-in-
law, Kadiri, who had been lined up to work with me. Initially this was not a problem,
but I quickly realised that Kadiri’s French was very poor, he did not understand my
questions, and he seemed to have his own agenda regarding my stay. After the first
month I therefore began to work solely with Layya, who spoke good French, was well
connected, and very quick to understand the gist of my questions.

Layya was, however, often away working in the fields and his position as the chief’s
son sometimes prevented opened-ended conversations and interviews; some people
worried about the repercussions of, for example, voicing political opinions when Layya
was present. I therefore needed more key informants and translators. Because I by then
knew most of the villagers, their status, role, ethnicity, place of residence, abilities in
French, and ability to grasp my questions, the choice was not hard.

36
Moussa, a young Wahilbe man, was not only very trustworthy, likeable, observant,
reflective, and articulate, but his age and ethnicity made him very suitable as a translator
in interview situations. Being Wahilbe, he was not involved in slavery relations, and his
age meant that he could relatively freely ask about gender roles, household structures,
and intergenerational relations as he was too young to be caught up in any of these
issues. Mamadou was selected because he had the same personal qualities as Moussa,
but was much older and Rimaiibe. He was, however, in contrast with Layya, not a very
important person in the village. He was poor and often relegated to a marginal position,
never eating first, and never speaking out on political issues or other matters of
importance. This made him very ‘neutral’ and people therefore opened up to him,
telling him things they would not tell either Layya or Moussa.

My choice of Moussa and Mamadou as informants and translators was thus very
deliberate. I needed someone different from Layya to give me access to knowledge he
could not, but also someone capable of asking more specific and often rather sensitive
questions. These questions were not defined prior to my arrival in the village but arose
from my observations of and participation in everyday life. I wondered, for example,
about the projects that arrived in the village, the stories at night regarding migration, the
banter between the sexes, the social hierarchy played out at tea serving, Rimaiibe
disregard of requests for work by their ‘masters’ the Fulbe, about the differences
between living out on the savannah vis-à-vis the village, and why they spoke so much
about the gardens. I noted who was outspoken regarding such matters, and who seemed
quiet. While participant observation in this manner gave me a lot of background
information and topics to explore, it was through semi-structured interviews that I
gained much of the specific knowledge upon which the papers are based.

Semi-structured interviews
Semi-structured interviews are always initially non-directive, non-standardised, open-
ended, and directed towards understanding informants’ perspectives on their lives,
experiences or situations in their own words (Kvale, 2000; Spradley, 1979). To get
people to talk ‘openly’ about their lives it is crucial not to direct the interview by overly
structuring the conversation because this might prevent people from telling you what

37
really matters to them. This may hinder surprising insights and connections not possible
to conceive a priori (Tayler and Bogdan, 1998: 99; Kvale, 2000).

Letting people talk, not interrupting, and paying attention requires patience as
informants may talk at length about topics in which you have no interest. This is
especially so early on in the interviews and while it is important to not interrupt an
informant, it is often necessary to get the informant back on track. I heard, for example,
long stories about a particular cow’s health problems, how to make houses, where to get
the cheapest mobile phones, and various other things not directly relevant to my
research. In those situations I would gently refrain from nodding my head, from taking
notes, or change the subject during a break in the conversation, saying, for example, “I
would like to go back to something you said earlier”. Thus it is best to think of the
semi-structured interview as a friendly conversation “into which the researcher slowly
introduces new elements to assist informants to respond as informants” (Spradley, 1979:
58). Or as Kvale (1996: 34) puts it, to lead “the subject toward certain themes, but not
to certain opinions about these themes”.

I did my first semi-structured interview four weeks after I arrived in the village. In total
I conducted 64 interviews. I recorded all my interviews with a small digital recorder
with Layya, Moussa or Mamadou or a combination of the three translating, depending
upon the topic, the context and the person interviewed. Over time my Fulani skills
improved and I became able to follow a normal conversation, understand the questions
asked, and the answers given. I seldom found that the presence of the recorder hindered
a good conversation − rather the contrary. In general, the villagers that I approached
were willing, even eager, to talk to me, to give me “my story”, and they appreciated the
presence of the recorder because “none of my words will then be forgotten”, as an old
lady told me after I had asked her permission to record the interview. Moreover, doing
interviews without needing to take notes allowed me to relax and explore and
understand more.

In general, I tried to keep the number of people present during my interviews to a bare
minimum. Often large crowds would gather together and listen to me interviewing as

38
there was not much else happening during the hot hours at midday or at night when a lot
of my interviews were conducted. While this gave a large variety of opinions and often
provided for great and illuminating arguments, it was not conducive to the more
personal and sensitive knowledge I was seeking in the interviews. I therefore made it
clear that I wanted privacy during interviews and all the interviewees appreciated this.

The interviewees were selected according to age, gender, socio-economic status,

knowledge, ethnicity and place of residence, thus covering all the major differentiations
that I had found within the village. Age groups formed the basic dividing line regarding
the selection according to age. The village is divided into five age groups: Children,
teenagers, young, middle-aged, and old people. I did no interviews with children, but
approximately the same number of interviews with individuals belonging to the rest of
the groups except my own as I spent most of my time with them anyway. Selecting
according to gender was simple, but I did most interviews with women as the village is
demarcated according to gender and thus participant observation and informal
conversation with women is difficult. Determining and selecting according to the socio-
economic status of individuals was more problematic. Living in the village gave me,
however, a clear impression of the relative material wealth of individual households.
Moreover, I asked members of each of the age groups and across ethnicity and gender to
define wealth in the village and to place individuals and households in the four
categories defined by the villagers: rich, well-to-do, poor, and very poor. I subsequently
conducted interviews with people falling into each of these categories. A large
knowledge discrepancy is also present in the village. Some villagers have been to
school and can read and write, but most cannot. I interviewed individuals belonging to
both groups. Knowledge in the village is, however, not merely connected to schooling.
Some villagers know about the savannah, others about the gardens, and others again
about historical developments. I determined relatively late which kind of knowledge I
was interested in and consequently interviewed the people I and the villagers deemed to
be experts regarding, for example, climate change and variability. The selection of
interviewees according to ethnicity was simple and I did interviews with members of all
three groups: Rimaiibe, Fulbe and Wahilbe. I furthermore interviewed people living in

39
the savannah, in the village, and in Gorom-Gorom (mainly teenage school children),
thus covering the three major places of residence observed in Biidi 2.

The interview often took place at the residence of the interviewee in a shaded, sheltered,
and quiet place and was always accompanied by tea. Particularly the women, however,
liked to go to my hut for interviews, because “my husband and children are not listening
there”. The process of making tea is slow and therefore interview sessions frequently
went on for hours. Indeed, it was often after the recorder had been turned off that the
interviewee opened up and told me things that I had not explored in the interview itself
(Kvale, 2000: 133). In a number of cases interviews therefore developed into structured
conversations and as such they provided me with a wealth of informations (Spradley,
1979).

The first three or so months I was extremely careful not to give any indication of my
focus on climate in order to minimise biases. Over time, however, my interviews
became more structured and I began to introduce specific questions. These often
followed a question guide exploring the current situation (e.g. household composition;
main income sources; material possession; etc.); the main changes (if any) to these over
the past 50 years; and the main causes of these changes (if any). As my theoretical
focus on understanding adaptation to climate change and variability by looking at
livelihood diversification strategies began to sharpen, I started to explore these more
systematically in my interviews. I asked about how people had survived in the past,
changes over time in livelihood strategies, when these changes took place and why, the
involvement of women, and why Fulbe were not participating in the strategies to the
same extent as Rimaiibe. I also asked how money earned through livelihood
diversification strategies was used, who decided what it was used for, and whether there
had been changes in this regard over the last 50 years; data which later formed the
backbone of Papers A and D.

Towards the last two months of my stay, the villagers had unavoidably grasped my
research interests. Spradley (1979: 25) notes that in the course of fieldwork “ordinary
people become excellent informants”, and I was accordingly inundated with information

40
and interpretations regarding the nexus of climate variability, livelihood strategies, and
social change. Often people would come to my hut to tell me about their experiences
with drought, how they managed to deal with it, and the social consequences of this.
Moreover, memories and perceptions of changes in the weather became prominent
topics of conversations in the village and when we visited neighbouring villages, I
began to be introduced as someone “interested in the weather”. Consequently, my
hypotheses were explored and tested in other villages, adding new insights.

Focus groups
Focus group interviews were made with 14 groups (six-eight persons in each). Four of
the focus group interviews, consisting of older (>70 years of age) men and women
differentiated by ethnicity, were repeated in time. Like the semi-structured interviews,
the focus group interviews were digitally recorded and conducted by me and a
translator.

Focus groups are formally constituted, structured groups of people brought together to
address and discuss a specific issue and they can provide a wealth of data on the range
of a community’s beliefs, ideas or opinions as the participants are able to talk to and
challenge each other (Dawson et al. 1992; Macun and Posel, 1998). In order to create a
discussion, participants usually must have some characteristic in common, as this
encourages the group to speak more freely without “fear of being judged by others
thought to be superior, more expert of more conservative” (Dawson et al. 1992: 3).

The focused nature of this method requires that social differentiations and the topics to
be discussed are known a priori by the researcher using the method. Consequently, I
conducted the 14 focus group interviews towards the end of my fieldwork. By then I
had learned how the village was segregated by age, gender, ethnicity and social
standing, and I formed the groups according to these differentiations. This turned out to
be a very good move and all the focus group interviews were characterised by lively
discussions in which none of the participants appeared to dominate.

41
It was relatively easy to get groups of Rimaiibe together as they live in the village.
Unfortunately getting homogenous groups of Fulbe together required more planning as
they live scattered around the savannah (see Paper C). On more than one occasion,
afternoons were spent trying to get a group together, walking from household to
household. In two cases (involving young Fulbe women and middle-aged Fulbe men) I
did not manage to get a group together, and in the groups consisting of young Rimaiibe
women and middle-aged Fulbe women there were only four participants. While this
limited the range of opinions in some ways, there was a sense of intimacy that was
lacking in the larger group discussions.

I was, however, not looking for intimacy or private memories and experiences (these
were collected in semi-structured interviews), but collective stories and the range of
opinions about a number of specific topics like climate events, variability and change,
village developments like the arrival of projects and the end of slavery, and when and
why certain livelihood strategies like migration became prominent. Moreover, the
reasons behind social changes like, for example, young men paying bride prices in the
village, were also explored.

After I had finished the initial round of focus group interviews, it became clear that the
groups consisting of older Fulbe and Wahilbe men and women provided me with
valuable historical insights into climate variability and change, the choice of livelihood
strategies, and general developments in the village, and I therefore repeated these (see
also McIntosh, 2000). As I had reached the last two weeks of my stay, I was very keen
to establish and confirm the links that I felt there were between climate variability and
change, livelihood diversification strategies, and social changes. In the final interviews,
these groups therefore focused specifically on covering historical developments through
the use of timelines (e.g. Reenberg et al. 2008; Reid et al. 2000).

Prior to the interviews I made a timeline going back to 1950 on the x-axis and wrote
down 65 things that I considered important for the village on the y-axis. The point was
to get the groups to tell me when, for example, rain was ‘bad’ in the village or when
there was enough food. The participants would then draw a line. The timelines thus

42
primarily addressed the temporal evolution of biophysical, cultural and socio-economic
conditions with the aim to uncover the links between general events, the initiation of
certain livelihood strategies, and certain climate events in the village. The results are
presented in Paper B.

Questionnaire interviews
I also conducted a questionnaire interview with 50 out of a total of 104 heads of
households. I had not initially planned to use quantitative data in my study other than
simple counts of the population, numbers of households, people involved in the
different livelihood strategies, and GPS measurements. But I got involved in the
AMMA project and in connection with this, we developed a questionnaire.31 This has
since been applied at sites all over West Africa and Biidi 2 is one of them.

The questionnaire is rather general and consists of 108 questions covering developments
since the 1970s in household composition, revenues and expenses; field sizes, harvests
results and irrigation practices; material possessions; pastoral practices; numbers of
animals; the use of forest and non-forest products; perceived changes in precipitation,
temperatures and the wind; and the impact of these climatic changes on a number of
variables including agriculture, household income, animals, and water resources.

Households were selected according to the same social differentiations within the
village as the focus groups. The interviews were conducted with the head of the
household but very often he or she (in four cases) was joined by other household
members and bystanders. Due to the large number of questions, each interview lasted
approximately an hour and a half. I did the first 25 interviews with Moussa, but he did
the rest alone. The length of the interviews and the level of detail often tired the

31
Based on a French initiative, AMMA (African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis) was built by an
international scientific group and is currently funded by a large number of agencies, especially from
France, the UK, the US and Africa. It has been the beneficiary of a major financial contribution from the
European Community's Sixth Framework Research Programme. Detailed information on scientific
coordination and funding is available on the AMMA International web site: http://www.amma-
international.org. My specific involvement in AMMA is related to the impact the variability of the West
African Monsoon has on human groups in the region and on the development of methods like question
guides and a questionnaire (see Nielsen, 2008).

43
respondents and on a number of occasions we conducted the questionnaires over two
days.

A relatively large number (13) of the households surveyed were headed by a person
younger than 30 who had very limited knowledge of historical developments. I am
consequently very cautious about the results regarding developments over time obtained
through the questionnaires. Moreover, the questionnaire covers sensitive issues such as
the number of cattle, children, and material wealth and the respondent often either
refrained from answering or gave false information (see Bernard, 2002: 190-191). One
late afternoon, for example, we were sitting in front of Isa’s hut conducting the
questionnaire. When we got to the question regarding the number of cows Isa owns, he
told us seven. The late afternoon is the time when the cows return from the savannah to
rest in the village and all 37 of Isa’s cows were lying directly behind us (I had by then
become familiar with the mark on the cattle and could distinguish which cattle belonged
to whom). Regarding the number of children in the household we had the same
problem.

The reason behind this is not malice, but the fact that the villagers believe that voicing
the actual number endangers both cattle and children. Word travels from person to
person and eventually reach the wrong person, someone who might bear a grudge
against you. Such a person, it is believed, will then use the information to make your
animals and children sick. By telling the wrong number, you can foil a person with a
malicious intent. Moreover, jealousy and future demands for help in terms of food and
money are also seen as a negative side effect of revealing your actual wealth, and people
in the village are very secretive about how much they have earned on, for example,
migration. Thus the information obtained through the questionnaire regarding cash
income, material possessions, harvests results, and numbers of small domestic animals
is also to be treated with caution.

Hence, some of the data turned out to be irrelevant as the questionnaire was rather
general and some directly unreliable; nonetheless some became part of the knowledge
on which some of the analyses’ are based. The questionnaires confirmed the general

44
picture regarding the importance of livelihood diversification as a reaction to climatic
changes, which increased confidence in the validity of the data.32 However, as many of
the questions were quite qualitative, asking for example why something has changed, it
has been virtually impossible to turn large parts of the questionnaire into quantitative
data (see, however, Mertz et al. 2008). Only in the case of perceived changes to rain,
temperature and wind, have I therefore ventured into a quantitative table and this only
because it by and large reflects and supports the data collected through participant
observation and semi-structured and focus group interviews.

Writing up notes
Every fourth or fifth day, I would pack a small bag with my current field notebook and
digital recorder and drive to Abdoulaye’s house in Gorom-Gorom. There I would stay
for a couple of days to write up my notes on my laptop (he had electricity during the
day) and transcribe the interviews I had done during the last four or five days.
Throughout my fieldwork this trip offered a welcome relief from the monotony of
village life, the chance to get a cold drink, and something else to eat than millet
porridge. But I quickly realised that the sojourn in Gorom-Gorom had a significant
impact on the progression of my fieldwork.

Taylor and Bogdan (1998: 141) note that data analysis is an “ongoing discovery” during
which it is possible and necessary to identify themes and develop concepts and
propositions. If you arrive back from the field with the “1000-page question”, trying to
find a way a posteriori to analyse and make sense of all your qualitative data, you will
be in trouble (Kvale 1996: 176). In qualitative research, data collection and analysis
therefore go hand in hand.

It was through turning recollections and jottings into detailed written accounts that this
process took place. Being momentarily out of the field, transcribing and writing up my
notes made it possible to take a step back, to get out of the whirlpool of events and look
at what I had experienced and been told in the field. During the long hot days at

32
Validating data through a mixed-method approach is referred to as triangulation, which in the context of
research means “the cross-referencing of one piece of evidence with another in order to better determine what the
actual position is” (Kesby et al. 2005: 157).

45
Abdoulaye’s house, I had time to think about why the things I had observed had
unfolded the way they did and why people said the things they did. Moreover, writing
and reading my notes made me see connections across events and time, which helped
me develop hypotheses to be tested back in the field. I always returned to the village
with follow-up questions about things that had been said and done. This process
confirmed or rejected my initial findings or resulted in further investigations of
developing hypotheses, all of which greatly enhanced the validity of the analyses.

Coding
The process of coding my data began immediately after I returned from the field in
February 2008. I spent two months coding my field notes and transcribing interviews
and questionnaires using Nvivo7 software. Basically, Nvivo7 is an advanced copy and
paste program that makes it possible to code imported Word files. Users can make up
the codes as they read their Word files and in that way develop a very large number of
‘free nodes’. One sentence might, for example, contain information about the recent
harvest outcome, the lack of rain, and problems with pests. This sentence is then copied
into three different ‘free nodes’ developed on the spot: harvest, outcome; rain, lack of;
and pest, problems with. Over time other information fits the same ‘free nodes’ and are
copied into these. Moreover, ‘free nodes’ resembling each other can be merged.

Relatively quickly patterns begin to emerge and the development of ‘tree nodes’ takes
place. This is a hierarchical sorting of nodes, starting with a major category under which
a number of sub-categories or ‘free nodes’ are placed. In total I developed 35 major
‘tree node’ categories, each with a large number of sub-categories. A main ‘tree node’
is, for example, ‘Adaptation’ under which 19 other ‘free nodes’ exist, like ‘Migration’.
Migration is then divided into 20 sub-categories such as ‘Reasons to migrate’ and ‘More
important in the 1970s’. Coding helped me organise my data and made the large
material easy to handle and find; it also helped me develop further and refine
interpretations of the data (Taylor and Bogdan, 1998). Listing all the major themes,
developing typologies, concepts and propositions by refining, adding, collapsing or
expanding my code categories made me aware of what analysis I could make and what

46
my data was actually telling me. The empirical gist of my papers was thereafter not
(too) hard to develop.

My position in the field

The role of the ‘self’ in the field has been the subject of a long and tortured discussion
in anthropology (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Crapanzano, 1977) and human geography
(Gregory, 1994; Soja, 1989; Ley, 2003; Massey, 1991). As all fieldwork data was
collected, written down, transcribed, coded and analysed by me, I in a sense became the
‘method’ through which everything passed and thus my age, gender, ethnicity, and
personality influenced the findings (Cohen, 1984: 221-222).

As human beings we are always somewhere, perceiving the world from a particular
position and giving expression to a particular and necessarily incomplete worldview
(Shweder, 1991: 18-19). Our knowledge is always situated (Haraway, 1991: 196). For a
researcher reflecting on his fieldwork, the crucial question will therefore be: what was
my position while I was conducting fieldwork and collecting my data? And next: how
did that position allow or hinder my understanding of the field?

Belonging to Hamidou
I lived in the part of the village know as debeere Letugal (see Map 2). The reason for
this was Abdoulaye. He had made the initial contact with the village through his friend
Hamidou. Hamidou was the jooro or chief of debeere Letugal and the village in general,
and he decided that I was to live with him.

Most of the time spent in the village is spent in one’s debeere, or quarter. Visiting other
quarters is normal, but particularly during the long evenings and afternoons people stay
around their own debeere. It took me about a month to realise this, and initially I did
not see it as a problem. However, as time passed I began to wonder whether staying
only in debeere Letugal gave me a biased and one-dimensional view of life in the
village. “Do people do and talk about the same things in other quarters?” I wondered,
and I therefore asked Hamidou if I could move somewhere else. He shook his head
emphatically and told me “not possible”, and I had to stay. Compensating, I began to

47
do more visits, but the reason he gave worried me: “Why leave, you are a part of our
debeere, people in the village and in the bush know you belong here, that you are with
me.”

Generally, long-term fieldworkers are aware of how growing into a locally understood
role both limits and enlarges one’s opportunities (Cohen, 1984: 222; Hasse, 1995).
Hamidou had opened up his debeere to me, giving me a place to live and food to eat,
and ensured that I was free of troubles like any other member of his family. I
wondered, however, how this association influenced my data. Did people speak
honestly to me or did my ‘familiar’ relation with the village chief influence their
narratives? I therefore had to be aware of establishing my independence in relation to
him, something I did by constantly emphasising my ‘independence’ as a researcher.

Introducing the motives and aims of my stay became second nature. Often people
wondered what I was doing and what I hoped to get out of my stay (see also Taylor and
Bogdan, 1984: 86). Some clearly feared that the information was going back to
Hamidou or to some public administrative office like the local tax department, or that I
would retell the stories widely in the village. I explained about anonymity, about not
revealing my sources, and about my general interest being of an academic and not
applied nature. Aided by the private setting, I managed to create interview situations
that relaxed people, but it was only after a few months that people started to trust me
because, as Habib told me one afternoon, “I have not heard my story retold in the
village although it is a good one”. I therefore began to feel more confident that my
belonging to debeere Letugal did not have too major an influence on my research, but it
remained an issue throughout my stay.

Age, gender, personality and ethnicity

Age, sex and indeed the personality of the researcher can also influence the data
(Clifford and Marcus, 1986). Village life is sharply demarcated according to age groups
and people spend by far the greatest part of their day with members of their own age
group; I, for example, always ate and worked in the fields with men my age. I
compensated by doing more interviews with people belonging to other age groups, and

48
by spending a lot of time with older and younger men on the occasions where this was
possible. I would, for example, always try to walk to the market, a wedding, or another
social event with the old men. During such walks I would often try to get them to talk
about issues pertaining to their age group. I also sat up at night with the young men
during baptisms, engagement parties, and weddings, trying my best to ignore the
extremely loud ghetto blaster and my own tiredness. My choice of translators and
informants was also done with age groups in mind, as Moussa, Layya and Hamidou all
belonged to different age groups.

While it was thus relatively easy to negate the age group problem, escaping the social
confines of my gender was difficult and access to women was a problem throughout my
fieldwork. By enrolling Moussa as a translator I managed to transcend some of these
issues, but questions regarding marriage and the power of men vis-à-vis women were,
for example, always difficult.

Participant observation among women was also difficult as village life is sharply
demarcated according to gender and I never managed to be alone with a group of
women. I did, however, by living in the village see how their day was structured, and
during market days, weddings or other social events where the gender separation is less
pronounced, I tried to be among the women as much as possible. Targeting women in
interviews (most of my interviews are with women) also helped, and so did my wife’s
six-week stay in the village. Every morning I would ask her to look out for particular
things and to ask a number of questions in order to confirm hypotheses. While her
position also had an influence on the things she noted, she greatly expanded my notes
on the life of women in the village.

Finally, my personality played a role regarding the information I obtained. I preferred,

for example, to stay in the village and be in the vicinity of my hut due mainly to the
heat. But this preference probably resulted in the emphasis in many of my papers on
Rimaiibe rather than Fulbe as Rimaiibe live in the village (see Paper C). Similarly, I
would often try to ignore the people in the village that ‘bugged’ me, often because these
people never stopped asking for money.

49
I initially found that everybody was willing to talk to me, but often they wanted money
in return, to become my ‘best friend’, or to gain some other advantage by being with
me, and I remember telling my wife on the phone that I sometimes felt caught up in
falseness (see also Dalsgaard, 2004: 60-61). Constantly being asked for money
moreover reminded me that I was white and by definition rich European and the
position of power this entails, and I spent a lot of time considering the influence these
factors had on my data and my life in the village. In such situations I felt ‘objectified’,
but over time this feeling diminished and I did make friends who managed to put
themselves in my shoes (Dalsgaard, 2004: 63; Hastrup, 1995: 55; Ridler, 1996).
Personally this was a valuable but difficult process because friendships foster hard
questions. As Dalsgaard (2004: 61) writes, “[c]onscience is such a strange factor in
human life” and mine was tested when I continued to ask questions and ‘demand’
answers from my friends and the villagers. For who in this process was false? Who was
demanding? Who was really using whom?

Ethics
Geertz (1968 cited in Ridler, 1996: 245) notes that

“Usually the sense of being members, however temporarily, insecurely, and

incompletely, of a single moral community, can be maintained even in the
face of wider social realities which press in at almost every moment to deny
it. It is fiction − fiction, not falsehood − that lies at the very heart of
successful anthropological field research. However, the fiction is never
completely convincing for any of the participants: at one point or another it
will reveal its true self”.

Calling some of my informants friends is to claim that an equality in positions was

somehow achieved, but as Patai (1991: 142) writes, the relationship between researcher
and research subject is always one of inequality, as the former can leave the field at any
time and much freer than the latter, without leaving anything behind in exchange for the
‘data’ he carried away with him. This is the ‘true self’ or the ‘symbolic violence’ of

50
fieldwork, for the moments shared and the relationships developed between informants
and the ethnographer “are ultimately data − grist for the ethnographic mill” (Stacey,
1991: 113 cited in Dalsgaard, 2004: 62; Hastrup, 1995).

The question of asymmetry is therefore a pressing concern among ethnographers and

geographers dealing with the “other” in the field (Barnett and Land, 2007; Pels 1999;
Scherper-Hughes, 1992). Because I was carrying out research among very poor people,
the dissonance between me and my research subjects seemed immense, and while it
could be pushed aside, it was never forgotten (Desai and Potter, 2006; Punch, 1994). I
remember being told one afternoon that I was “black inside”, that I was like ‘them’,
only to be immediately reminded of my true position when Mamdou added “with a little
more money”. Actually I never tried to be like ‘them’. I tried to live the same way, to
eat the same things, to do the same work, and to live in the same place in an attempt to
understand what life there was like, but I was always very conscious to point out and be
honest about the reason behind my stay.

Indeed, the researcher’s presentation of self, motives, intentions, and aims of the
research to the research subject is, as already discussed, an important methodological
move but also a crucial ethical one (Agar, 1996: 104-111). It does not negate the
asymmetrical position (nothing really can), but people had a right to know who I was
and why I was there. While I remained an “improbable kind of creature”, by presenting
myself and my motives, I gave them the possibility of judging me, working with me,
or befriending me on honest terms (Agar, 1996: 110). Eventually, most people in the
village therefore came to accept me for what I was, namely a strange person asking
questions, writing things down, and recording interviews. In fact, I was quite pleased
when I noticed that a few of the villagers largely avoided me because, I was told, “they
do not really want to talk to you”. This confirmed that my data was not “merely
“extracted” from naïve informants who are unaware of the hidden agendas coming from
the outsider” (Scherper-Hughes, 1992: 25).

The asymmetry between me and my closest informants (Layya, Kadiri, Mamadou, and
Moussa) and Digga (the woman who cooked my food) was reinforced almost daily.

51
Kadiri and Layya actually stayed home from migration because of me, and Digga added
more millet to the porridge. Hence I paid Layya, Kadiri, Mamadou and Moussa around
US$3 a day (when they worked for me) and Digga around US$1 a day (when I ate in
the village) (see also Bernard, 2002: 200-202). In regard to interviews, I always
donated a box of tea and a little sack of sugar, and I paid the owner of the hut I had
borrowed rent when he returned from Abidjan.

Paying informants and giving out gifts might ‘spoil’ a research site and it needs to be
done carefully. I clearly set out the terms for working with me, what I was paying for,
and what I expected from them. This made it easy for me to explain when approached
by other villagers seeking ‘employment’ why I was paying Layya, Kadiri, Mamadou
and Moussa. This explanation was always accepted and even encouraged because I in
that way “helped the village” as it was often expressed. I, in other words, became a
livelihood diversification strategy.

52
Summary of the Papers
The core of this thesis consists of a collection of four papers. While the papers
unavoidably include reiterations of the biophysical and socioeconomic features of Biidi
2, the livelihood diversification strategies pursued there, and the connection between
these and the diminishing importance of rain-fed agriculture in the village, each
illuminates different aspects of life and adaptation in the village. The papers are
presented in the form in which they have been published (Papers A, B, C) or accepted
for publication (Paper D). Thus, they are tailored to the format requirements of each of
the journals (Papers B, C, D) and book (Paper A). The papers have all been peer
reviewed. The spread of the publication avenues is (more or less) deliberate, covering
multidisciplinary journals (Papers B, C), a regional journal (Paper C), an
anthropological journal (Paper D) and a book anthology (Paper A).

The logic behind the order in which the papers appear in the thesis is as follows:

Paper A introduces the concept of livelihood and argues that a livelihood analysis
approach offers a way to explore and understand the link between climate change and
variability and human actions. Taking its point of departure in the recent drought and
rainfall variability in the Sahel, it traces the intertwined trajectory of climate
perturbations, the demise of rain-fed agriculture, circular labour migration, and social
change in Biidi 2. As such, it sets the scene for why and how a livelihood analysis
approach is useful when the aim is to understand the feedbacks and interconnections
between the social and biophysical domain.

Linking the social and biophysical domain represents a major challenge in climate
change adaptation literature. The adaptive capacity of human actors is shaped by
multiple non-environmental factors and singling out climate as a driver of change is
extremely difficult. While all the papers in this thesis argue and show that a livelihood
analysis approach offers a potential solution to this, Paper B takes this idea a bit
further. In this paper it is argued that in order to understand the link between climate
and human actions in the Sahel a temporal perspective is required as the populations
there, at least in Biidi 2, are currently ‘beyond climate’. A number of recent studies

53
(including Paper B) from this region have argued convincingly that climate does not
figure as a major current concern among people in the Sahel. By employing human-
environmental timelines we show, however, that a historical correlation exists in Biidi 2
between current livelihood strategies and climate perturbations.

A major emerging point in the adaptation to climate change literature is that the ability
of human actors to embrace strategies that moderate or exploit actual or expected
climatic stimuli seems unevenly distributed. New studies dealing with real-world
adaptation practices have shown that the adaptive capacity is influenced not only by
economic and technological development but also by social norms, values and rules,
and it appears that adaptive capacity is highly heterogeneous within a society or locality.
Papers A and B establish that the livelihood diversification strategies in Biidi 2 can be
viewed as adaptations to climate change and variability; Paper C illustrates how
ethnicity and culture play a major role when these are either embraced or rejected. In
Biidi 2, the approaches to adaptation have been very heterogeneous between Rimaiibe
and Fulbe. The paper shows how contemporary Fulbe cultural values such as their
preference for living in the bush, their notion of personal freedom and integrity, and
their occupational specialisation have acted as cultural barriers to their engagement in
the current and most successful livelihood strategies present in the village.

This emphasis on adaptive heterogeneity is also a major point of Paper D. Taking its
point of theoretical departure in situational analysis, the paper explores how the outburst
of Asoman during a visit to the village by a development expert created an unstructured
context in which the women of Biidi 2 could negotiate gender roles.33 The paper shows
how working for international development projects has become an important
livelihood strategy in the village particularly among the women. In Biidi 2, women have
used this work and the gender equality discourses of the projects to better their position
within the household and the village vis-à-vis the men. Indeed, an important point of
Papers A, C and D is that the heterogeneous adaptive capacity of actors has resulted in
changes in the three most important social categories in the village: in Paper A, the

33
Situational analysis is a theoretical school within social anthropology going back to the 1940s and with a
particularly influential period in the 1960s. In the 2000s the school has experienced a renaissance. Paper D is
written to the journal of this theoretical school.

54
focus is on changing generational relations, in Paper C, on changing ethnic relations,
and in Paper D, on changing gender relations.

Besides the papers making up this thesis, I have co-authored the following papers during
my PhD tenure:

Nielsen, J.Ø. Mertz, O. Mbow, C. 2008. Joint field work design: developing methods
for understanding adaptation to climate variability and change in West Africa. AMMA
AFRIK Newsletter 1: 9-10.

Abstract
A short article illuminating the process through which a common question guide and
questionnaire were developed. The focus of these was on how to understand farmers’
perceptions of climate change, what, if anything, they have done to adapt to it, and
household composition. The question guide and questionnaire were to be applied at all
AMMA research sites in West Africa.

Mertz, O. Mbow, C. Nielsen, J.Ø, et al. 2008. Perceptions of environmental stress by

rural communities in the Sudan-Sahel zone of West Africa. Report on assessment of
environmental stress for case study sites. Paris: AMMA-EU. 36 Pages

Abstract
Environmental change in the Sahel has been much debated since the droughts of the
1970s and there is not much agreement on whether climate change or human activities
are the main causes of observed degradation. Indeed, there is not even agreement on
whether there is degradation or not. This paper outlines local perceptions of
environmental stress in the region. We interviewed 1354 households in 16 sites in
Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Nigeria distributed across a rainfall gradient
divided into three zones: 400-500 mm, 500-700 mm, and 700-900 mm. Group
interviews were also carried out with three-five groups in each site. Households
generally perceive climate factors to have developed unfavourably over the past 20
years. More than 80% of all households found that rainfall has decreased, and the wetter

55
the area, the more pronounced this perception. Increases in wind speeds and
temperatures were also perceived by 60-80% of households.

Mertz, O. Mbow, C. Nielsen, J.Ø, et al. 2008. Linking climate factors and adaptation
strategies in the rural Sahel-Sudan zone of West Africa. Report on field surveys in
Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Nigeria, including assessment of adaptation
strategies at household and national level in the Sahel. Paris: AMMA-EU. 41 Pages

Abstract
Although there is an increasing realisation of the interplay between different driving
forces for rural development and environmental change in developing countries,
understanding the relative impact of climate factors on land use change and local
livelihoods is still not straight forward. However, without a better knowledge of these
relationships it becomes difficult to devise specific and well-targeted adaptation
strategies to climate change and variability – at best, adaptation becomes a collection of
‘no regret’ actions, which in any case would have benefited development; in worst case
scenarios, adaptation could become counter-productive if based on the wrong
assumptions. In this paper we aim to estimate the relative weight of climate factors in
the decision-making process of rural household in the Sahel-Sudan zone of West Africa
over the past 20 years and compare these with strategies described in National
Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPA). We interviewed 1354 households in 16
sites in Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Nigeria distributed across a rainfall
gradient divided into three zones: 400-500 mm, 500-700 mm, and 700-900 mm. Group
interviews were also carried out with three-five groups in each site.

56
The following three papers have been submitted for publication:

Lambin, E, Mertz, O, Rasmussen, K, Reenberg, A, D’haen, S, Nielsen, J, Ø. 2010.

Scenarios on the future of the African Sahel. Submitted to Global Environmental
Change.

Abstract
We developed scenarios of the future of drylands of West Africa based on the scenario
framework proposed by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Inputs to this scenario
development exercise came from a land use change model, longitudinal household-level
survey data for Burkina Faso, ‘what if’ questions submitted to a large sample of
households in the region, a set of local case studies in the region, and climate model
projections. Four scenarios were developed: 1) ‘downward spiral’, characterised by
rapid climate change, expansion of agriculture and chaotic urban growth; 2) ‘integrated
economy’, with integrated land management, food production for local markets and
rural-urban exchanges; 3) ‘open doors’, characterised by large-scale out-migrations,
land grabbing by foreign companies and development aid; and 4) ‘climate change
mitigation’, with an increase in biofuel crops, land management for carbon capture and
development of off-farm activities. The study concludes that the Sahel region is most
likely moving away from being a highly climate dependent region based on agriculture
towards a more open and diversified economy. West African countries have to find a
balance between the new opportunities and risks created by economic
globalisation.

Mertz, O. Mbow, C. Nielsen, J.Ø, et al. 2010. Climate factors play a limited role for
past adaptation strategies in West Africa. Submitted to Ecology and Society.

Abstract
The Sudano-Sahelian zone of West Africa has experienced recurrent droughts since the
mid-1970s and today there is considerable concern about how this region will be able to
adapt to future climate change. In order to develop well targeted adaptation strategies,

57
the relative importance of climate factors as drivers of land use and livelihood change
need to be better described. On the basis of the perceptions of 1249 households in five
countries across an annual rainfall gradient of 400-900 mm, we provide an estimate of
the relative weight of climate factors as drivers of changes in rural households over the
past 20 years. Climate factors – mainly rainfall – are perceived by about 50% of
households to be a cause of decreasing rain-fed crop production, whereas climate
factors are much less important for decreasing livestock production and pasture areas.
Increases in pasture are also observed and caused by improved tenure in the driest zone.
Adaptation strategies to declining crop production include ‘prayer’ and migration (400-
500 mm zone); reforestation, migration and government support (500-700 mm zone);
and soil improvement (700-900 mm zone). Declining livestock is countered by
improved fodder resources and veterinary services. It is concluded that while rain-fed
crop production is mainly constrained by climate factors, livestock and pasture is in all
zones less climate sensitive and need to be more strongly reflected in the NAPAs
developed by countries in the region.

Mertz, O, Mbow, C, Reenberg, A, Genesio, L, Lambin, E, D’haen, S, Zorom, M,

Rasmussen, K, Diallo, D, Barbier, B, Moussa, I, Diouf, A, Nielsen, J. Ø, Sandholt, I.
2010. Adaptation strategies and climate vulnerability in the Sudano-Sahelian region of
West Africa. Submitted to Atmospheric Science Letters.

Abstract
Meta-studies and a vulnerability framework provided input to an analysis of household
strategies over the past 20-30 years and development of scenarios for Sudano-Sahelian
futures. Households have generally increased their wealth, especially when they have
diversified out of agriculture. Rain-fed crop cultivation is more sensitive to climate
factors than livestock rearing but generally climate factors play a small role in
household decision-making. Local strategies and national adaptation plans are not
congruent, and the agricultural sector needs strong support to play a role in the future.
Otherwise, off-farm work and migration will continue to increase and may indeed be the
most beneficial developments as they increase wealth and decrease vulnerability.

58
Conclusion

The research presented in this thesis falls into a category of adaptation to climate change
and variability research that attempts to understand actual practices and processes of
adaptation in a particular community. Focusing on the village of Biidi 2 in northern
Burkina Faso, the research documents via ethnographic fieldwork the ways in which
this community has adapted to the most recent of recurrent droughts in the Sahel by way
of a livelihood strategies analysis approach. Particular emphasis has been placed on
understanding how households and individuals in Biidi 2 make a living in the aftermath
of the droughts, what elements constitute and influence livelihood strategies, and
whether these strategies have any socioeconomic consequences.

Non-agricultural livelihood strategies such as circular labour migration, gardening,

working for development projects and small-scale commerce were found to constitute
the main sources of income in the village, but rain-fed agriculture and livestock rearing
are still practised. Diversification of livelihoods generally takes place across sectors into
a variety of non-farm activities while diversification within agriculture is minimal. This
move out of rain-fed agriculture is connected to the lack of and variability of the rain.
Even the best of fields in the best of years cannot provide enough food for even the
smallest households in the village. Rain-fed agriculture is thus for many households
simply not a very important livelihood strategy and food is obtained through other
means. The non-farm livelihood activities observed in the village all focus on
generating cash, which is mainly used to buy millet no longer available from the fields.

By diversifying across sectors, the villagers have adapted to the negative impact of
drought and precipitation variability on agriculture. Climate variability and change do
not concern them very much. Rather, what currently constitutes and influences their
livelihood strategies are local, national and global connections and disconnections.
Circular labour migration depends upon the availability of work in the Côte d’Ivoire,
while working for development projects depends on the continued presence of these in
Burkina Faso, for example. Separately, but often in combination, all these factors (plus
many others) constitute and influence the livelihood strategies present and worth

59
pursuing in the village. The importance of regional, national and international
perforations for livelihood choices is matched by social rules, roles and norms in the
village. The village is not a homogenous social unit and a large internal heterogeneity in
regard to the engagement in livelihood strategies is observed. Age, gender and ethnicity
appear the most important social demarcations.

The villagers that have diversified their livelihood have in general managed to deal with
the climate change and variability experienced in the village quite well, and it is worth
noting that the village has doubled its population since 1995 without expanding or
intensifying agricultural practices. The wealth generated through livelihood
diversification is not, however, evenly distributed due to the heterogeneous engagement
in these. This has resulted in either the breakdown or accentuation of some of the
existing social relations. The engagement of young men in labour migrations has, for
example, resulted in a shift in traditional power relations between the generations.

The main findings presented in the papers that follow are specific to Biidi 2 and not
directly applicable to other communities even within the region. Nevertheless, much of
the current understanding of human adaptation to climate change comes from studies
such as this one (e.g. Adger et al. 2007). The findings add in general to the weight of
new studies establishing broad lessons on the adaptive capacity of individuals and
communities, and are particularly relevant to researchers who argue that adaptive
capacity is highly heterogeneous within a society or locality, is differentiated by social
norms, statuses and rules, and can have social consequences. Moreover, since a major
issue in all adaptation research is the difficulty of singling out climate as a driver of
change, the theoretical and methodological use of a livelihood framework in this thesis
might provide inspiration. Above all, this thesis shows how the people of Biidi 2 are
living and dealing with climate change and that many of them have managed despite the
variability of rainfall.

60
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 Paper A

Drought and Marriage: Exploring the Interconnection between Climate

Variability and Social Change through a Livelihood Persepctive’, in K,
Hastrup (ed, 2009) The Question of Resilience. Social Responses to Climate
Change, Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters,
159-177.

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The Question of Resilience

Social Responses to Climate Change

Kirsten Hastrup, ed.

Historisk-filosofiske Meddelelser 106

det kongelige danske videnskabernes selskab

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CHAPTER 8
Drought and Marriage:
Exploring the Interconnection between
Climate Variability and Social Change
through a Livelihood Perspective
Jonas Østergaard Nielsen

Abstract
Understanding the feedbacks and interconnections be-
the royal danish academy of science s and letters · 2009
hfm 106 · the question of resilience. social responses to climate change

tween the social and ecological domains is a key aspect

in studies of resilience, adaptation, and vulnerability to
climate change. The ability of human actors to respond
to environmental stimuli, like climate change, is, how-
ever, shaped by multiple non-environmental factors. A
key challenge is thus how to understand the link be-
tween climate change and human actions. The present
chapter suggests that a livelihood analysis approach of-
fers a way to explore this link. Taking as its point of de-
parture the recent drought in the West African Sahel,
this chapter traces the intertwined trajectory of drought,
the demise of rain-fed agriculture, circular labour mi-
gration, and social change in a small Sahelian village in
northern Burkina Faso.

This volume seeks to understand how local communities meet new

environmental challenges, often rooted in climatic changes that will
occur, or are already occurring, due to past and present carbon emis-
sions (IPCC 2007; UNFCCC 2007). Human adaptation to a chang-
ing environment is not a new phenomenon, but a sense of urgency
has entered the scene, and researchers, policy makers, and civil soci-

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jonas østergaard nielsen hfm 106

ety have engaged in a race against time to understand how these

challenges can be met in societies at risk from climate change im-
pacts (Coulthard 2008).
Over the last decade, the concepts of resilience, adaptation, and
vulnerability to climate change have taken centre stage in academic
discourses and are widely recognized as fundamental aspects of how
human societies meet the threat of current and future climate change
(Adger 2000, 2006; Adger et al. 2007; Folke 2006; Smit & Wandel
2006). While diverse in scope and aim, these studies all focus on the
coupling of socio-ecological systems, as ‘it is not possible to mean-
ingfully understand the dynamics of one of the domains in isolation
from the other’ (Walker & Salt 2006: 31; Berkes & Folke 1998; Gun-
derson & Holling 2002). While the emphasis is on understanding
feedbacks and interconnections between social and ecological do-
mains, resilience, adaptation, and vulnerability to climate change lit-
erature stresses that the ability of human actors to respond to specific
environmental stimuli like climate change is shaped by multiple his-
torical, political, and economic contexts. Thus, environmental chan-
ges might not be a significant driver of human actions in societies
around the world. A pivotal point in much of this literature is there-
fore how to single out, or simply understand, the link between cli-
mate change and real-world decisions taken by individuals or groups
living in places affected by climate variability and change. This chap-
ter suggests that a livelihood strategies analysis approach may con-
stitute a way to explore this connection by looking at the relation-
ship between drought, the demise of rain-fed agriculture, circular
labour migration, and social change in a small Sahelian village, Biidi
2, in northern Burkina Faso.
The chapter will begin with a brief theoretical review linking
livelihood studies and the concepts of resilience, adaptation, and
vulnerability to climate change research. It will then introduce the
setting and the methodology. The analysis’ point of departure is the
recent drought in the Sahel and the negative consequences of this
on rain-fed agriculture in the village. Circular labour migration by
young men to Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, is shown to be a key livelihood
strategy negating this. Having presented the relationship between

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hfm 106 drought and marriage: exploring the interconnection …

drought, the demise of rain-fed agriculture and labour migration,

the chapter argues that this livelihood strategy is also connected to
the payment of bride price. Finally, I explore how this link has re-
sulted in a number of other social changes in the village, focusing
primarily on changes in marriage practices and power structures.

Linking environmental and social domains

through livelihood studies
Recent livelihood studies found their intellectual inspiration in an
IDS discussion paper by Robert Chambers and Gordon Conway
published in 1992. In their interpretation, a livelihood refers to in-
dividuals or groups striving to gain a living, attempting to meet their
various consumption and economic necessities, coping with uncer-
tainties, and responding to new opportunities (1992: 9-12). This
actor-oriented perspective led to a keen interest in the world of lived
human experience, and a micro-orientation became predominant,
often focusing on the household (Johnston 1993). In these studies,
attention was increasingly paid to household livelihood strategies as
a means of capturing the behaviour of low-income people (de Haan
& Zoomers 2005).
Household studies and, more specifically, the concept of house-
hold livelihood strategies, emphasize the active or even proactive
role played by the poor in ‘providing for their own sustenance des -
pite their lack of access to services and to an adequate income’
(Schmick 1984 cited in de Haan & Zoomers 2005: 28). Thus, poor
people are shown to be able to adapt to or cope with changing cir-
cumstances and different types of crisis, such as market instability,
famines, and droughts, by evolving or changing their livelihood
strategies. Scoones (1998: 6) accordingly highlights how livelihood
adaptation, vulnerability and resilience is closely connected to the
ability of a livelihood ‘to cope with and recover from stresses and
shocks’. The idea that households have a veneer of free choice and
a capacity to act in the face of change is hence heavily embedded in
these studies. However, many have also shown that household de -
cisions are often made within the ‘confines of limiting structural con-

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jonas østergaard nielsen hfm 106

straints, although families nevertheless operate with a degree of rel-

ative autonomy’ (Humphries 1982, quoted in de Haan & Zoomers
2005: 29).
The livelihood strategies analysis approach focuses, in other
words, on many of the same issues as resilience, adaptation, and vul-
nerability to climate change studies. Like these studies, it emphasizes
that human beings act in the face of positive or negative stimuli, but
these acts are not strictly autonomous: they take place within hier-
archical structures and are constrained by institutional, political,
economic, and historical processes. In a study from Mexico, for
example, Eakin (2005) illustrates how a focus on four livelihood stra-
tegies opens up for an exploration of how globalization, market
liberalization, and climatic risk simultaneously structure the liveli-
hood strategies embraced by local farmers. Eakin shows that eco-
nomic uncertainty is more important for household decisions than
environmental risk. Coulthard (2008) similarly investigates the
adaptive capacity, vulnerability, and resilience of Indian fishermen
through a focus on livelihood diversification, which is analyzed as a
key adaptive strategy to environmental change at the household
level, showing how caste and traditions along with climatic changes
play a mayor role in livelihood decisions. In the Pacific, Reenberg
et al. (2008) also deal with human-environmental interaction by ex-
ploring livelihood strategies, arguing that they provide a useful
framework for analysing the link between humans and their bio-
physical environment. Again, climatic events are assessed in conjunc-
tion with wider political, economic, and historical issues, showing
how all of these contexts play a part in household livelihood strate-
gies decisions.
In all three studies, and in the analysis that follows, livelihood
strategies are thus used as a means to explore what people do in the
face of external stimuli. While connecting climate change to liveli-
hood strategies remains difficult, the focus on livelihood strategies
makes it possible to explore what people perceive as the driving
forces behind these, and, in turn, to establish whether or not climate
is one of these. In the following analysis based on ethnographic field-
work I will focus on labour migration as a livelihood strategy aimed

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hfm 106 drought and marriage: exploring the interconnection …

at negating the negative impact of drought on rain-fed agriculture.

Simultaneously, I will argue that the continued practice of this strat-
egy is closely related to the need for young men to pay bride price.

Study area and methods

Biidi 2 was founded some 125 years ago by Fulbe herdsmen and is
located approximately 14 km south-west of Gorom-Gorom, the pro-
vincial capital of Oudalan Province.1 Oudalan belongs to the Sahel -
ian zone of Burkina Faso, which receives around 400 mm of pre-
cipitation annually. Biidi 2 is surrounded by more or less continuous
fields. The fields are mainly located on the pediplain and millet,
sorghum, and cowpeas are grown (Rasmussen & Reenberg 1992;
Reenberg & Paarup-Laursen 1997). The dune, on top of which the
village is situated, is rimmed on its southern side by gardens. Agri-
culture, pastoralism, gardening, development project work, small-
scale commerce, and labour migration constitute the economic
mainstays of the village. Three ethnic groups live in Biidi 2: Rimaiibe,
numbering 302 individuals, Fulbe, 167, and Wahilbe, 116 (as of January
2008). Of these, 246 are under the age of 15, constituting 42% of the
total population. Wahilbe, who are blacksmiths, constitute a kind of
professional ‘caste’, which separates them from the two other groups
(see also Riesman 1977).
The data presented in this chapter come from six months of in-
tensive fieldwork carried out between August 2007 and February
2008. Participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and focus
group interviews were the main methods used. A household liveli-
hood strategies analysis approach focusing on household composi-
tion, income sources, and material possessions was used in the study
to explicitly explore household decisions and how they are related
to broader contexts (Bebbington 1999; Eakin 2005). The fieldwork

1. See Reenberg (chapter 7, this volume) for more details on the Sahel region and
the village.

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was hence designed to explore and assess how households in the vil-
lage construct their subsistence and risk management strategies. In
the semi-structured interviews and the focus group interviews re-
spondents were asked to describe these strategies and the main
changes (if any) to these over the past 50 years and to assess the main
causes of these changes (if any). No indication of the focus on cli-
mate was presented for respondents at this stage in order to mini-
mize biases in the answers. At the end of the interviews and the focus
group discussions, the respondents were asked to assess their per-
ception of climate change generally and the perceived impacts of cli-
mate change on chosen livelihood strategies, natural resources, and
social aspects. When impacts were assessed as negative, the respon-
dents were asked to explain their adaptive actions to reduce these
impacts.
Besides exploring livelihood strategies, the fieldwork focused
specifically on the socio-cultural consequences of livelihood diver-
sification. Various questions were addressed, such as: what happens
to life in the village when most of the young men migrate; what hap-
pens with the money earned on migration; and does migration
change household structures and power relations? Often the data
needed to answer these questions and explore sensitive topics such
as changing marriage patterns and political issues were collected
during informal conversations and observations of life in the village.
Participating in a number of marriage negotiations, engagement par-
ties, and marriages offered great insight into the practices surround-
ing these events and an arena in which to ask about marriage
practices in the past. Similarly, observing how political decisions
were made provided insight into the workings of political power and
changes in this over time.

Analysis

Perceptions of climate change and variability

Drought in the Sahel is not a new phenomenon, and drought peri-

ods lasting one or two decades have been a persistent feature of this
region over the past 500 years (Nicholson 1978; Rain 1999; Watts

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hfm 106 drought and marriage: exploring the interconnection …

1983; Webb 1995). Concern about climate and its impact on human
populations in the Sahel was, however, an immediate response to
the most recent of these drought periods commencing in the early
1970s (MaCann 1999). Averaged over thirty-year intervals, annual
rainfall in the Sahel fell by between 20 and 30% between the 1930s
and the 1950s and the three decades following the 1960s (Hulme
2001). This dramatic climate change caused a ‘horrifying famine’
and the ‘death of several hundred thousand cattle’ and provided the
first evidence of a ‘huge ecological crisis in the Sahel’ (Raynaut 2001:
9). This change in rainfall had major consequences for the popula-
tions of the Sahel, who were already under stress from deteriorating
political and economic conditions (Warren 1995).
No rainfall record exists for Biidi 2, but the meteorological sta-
tion in Gorom-Gorom has collected monthly rainfall data since 1955.
This dataset indicates a rainfall trend similar to the general develop-
ment in the Sahel: the wet 1950s and 1960s were followed by a pro-
longed dry spell, lasting from the early 1970s until the 1990s,
aggravated by major droughts in the early 1970s and early-mid-1980s.
The high degree of interannual variability and an increasing trend
in the yearly rainfall average since the mid-late 1990s have likewise
been observed.
While rainfall in the Sahel is spatially highly differentiated even
within small areas, people in Biidi 2 agree about the similarity be -
tween rainfall in Gorom-Gorom and Biidi 2. The 1950s and 1960s are
uniformly cited as very wet and ‘good years’, whereas the 1970s and
1980s are cited as very dry and ‘bad years’. The high interannual vari-
ability of the rain over the last 10 or so years has also been observed
by the villagers, who often argue that ‘the normal no longer exists;
one year the rain is good, the next bad’. Moreover, the villagers per-
ceive that a number of other negative climate trends have taken place
over the last fifty years. The rainy season is perceived to be shorter
now than in the 1950s and 1960s, with periods of more intensive rain
often resulting in flooding or with long breaks resulting in drought.
They also perceive it to have a larger number of ‘false starts’, which
makes it very difficult to know when to sow. Temperatures during
the cold as well as the hot season are said to have increased and both
seasons to have become longer. The wind is perceived to have be-

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come stronger, causing more wind erosion with the result that sand
is filling up river beds and destroying crops. Degradation of the soil,
the disappearance of wild fauna, plants, trees, and watering holes,
and growing problems with pests are also mentioned by the villagers
as consequences of the changed climate; all these aspects have made
rain-fed agriculture difficult, and livelihood diversification increas-
ingly important.

Diminishing importance of rain-fed agriculture

In the wet 1950s and 1960s, millet (the staple crop in the region) pro-
duction ‘was easy’, as it was often expressed, because of ‘good rains’.
But the prolonged drought commencing in the early 1970s and la-
sting well into the 1980s, followed by interannual rainfall variability
in the 1990s, made rain-fed agriculture extremely difficult and un-
reliable. Even in the best of years, the harvest today meets only be -
tween seven and nine months’ requirement for food, and this only
for the largest and most efficient households. In 2007 and 2008, for
example, the household with the largest fields and the best access to
labour only produced enough cereal to meet the household’s needs
for seven months and two months, respectively. The low yield com-
bined with the intensive demand for labour (sowing, weeding and
harvesting) has resulted in households giving up rain-fed agriculture
altogether because ‘it is simply not worth the effort’, as I was often
told.
The villagers, in particular the Rimaiibe, have responded to this
situation by diversifying their livelihoods, and today off-farm liveli-
hood strategies represent the mainstay of their income. It is difficult
to assess the actual income generated by engaging in off-farm liveli-
hood strategies, but most households earn enough money to buy
food to last the whole year.2 The money is mainly earned through
development project work, gardening, and small-scale commerce,

2. Most households buy millet immediately after the harvest from more fertile re-
gions of Burkina Faso and store it in granaries next to their huts. Well-off house-
holds often buy enough to donate to less fortunate households.

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hfm 106 drought and marriage: exploring the interconnection …

but it is circular labour migration − going away in the agricultural

off-season to make money − that generates the most income.

Circular labour migration

Circular labour migration has a long history in Biidi 2. Migration in

the 1950s and 1960s was mainly directed towards Ghana where 7 of
the now elder men had gone either to fish on the coast or work in
the large plantations. However, the drought in the beginning of the
1970s and its prolonged aftermath played a significant role in the in-
creased labour migration seen in Biidi 2 and the rest of Sahel over
the last 30-40 years (Hampshire 2006; Henry et al. 2004; Mortimore
and Adams 2001; Rain 1999). Almost all young Rimaiibe men left to
earn money, primarily for food, as the ‘harvests failed and the cattle
died’ as it was often expressed, and labour migration mainly to Abid-
jan became very important for household survival ‘because of the
drought’.
The importance of circular labour migration has continued. Each
year, after the agricultural activities have ended in November and
December, a large proportion of mainly young Rimaiibe men leave.
In December 2008, 10 youths between 15 and 25 years left, followed
in the beginning of January by three more, for a total of 36% of this
age group. Among the men aged between 25 and 35, seven out of 25
left, or 28%. And among the men older than 35 years, eight out of 50
left, or 16%. Two other Rimaiibe aged 24 and 28 were already in Abid-
jan, living in a small rented room. The value of this accommodation
is closely related to its location near a marketplace where all the men
from the village work loading and off-loading trucks and buses dur-
ing the day. At night, they all work as private security guards. During
this 24-hour working day, only interrupted by slow periods in the
marketplace, during which they return to the room to sleep, the men
earn between US$5 and US$30. The average amount the men bring
home to the village after all expenses such as food and transport
have been paid is between US$200 and US$300 for six months of
work. A large proportion of this money is used to buy millet and
other goods, but bride price is also an important motivation behind
the circular labour migration.

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Labour migration and bride price

Biidi 2 is made up of virilocal households. The women thus always

live with the family of their husbands. As in most virilocal societies,
the family of the woman is ‘compensated’ through a bride price.
Prior to the 1970s, bride prices in Biidi 2 were always paid by the
father or another older male relative of the young man (see also Ries-
man 1992: 76). The bride price depends, then as now, on a number
of factors, such as how closely related to the young man the woman
is, her ethnicity, her social standing, and how far away she lives, but
it is normally around US$300.
Prior to the 1970s, the bride price was raised through the sale of
millet and cattle, but due to the drought many of the fathers lost the
means to pay.3 Losing consecutive harvests and whole herds of cattle
was a very common experience in Biidi 2 in the 1970s and early 1980s.
The now older men and women often told stories about carcases of
cattle lying along the roadside and fields devoid of any crops because
the ‘rain had stopped’. Such narratives were always followed by
others stressing economic hardship, hunger, and large-scale migra-
tion. Abdoulaye, a now middle-aged man, explains:

It used to be the father that had money. But when the rain stayed away
the millet disappeared and the cattle died. Everything was gone due
to drought and I remember that for many of us [young men] migrat-
ing, earning money to get married was almost as important as earning
money to buy food.

Today, earning money to pay bride prices remains an important mo-

tivation behind labour migration. Like their fathers who left in the
1970s, the young men leaving in 2007/08 uniformly told me that
labour migration provides them with more than just money for food,

3. Only in two cases was I told that the father had paid part of the bride price in the
years following the 1973-74 drought. The 1983-84 drought reinforced this trend and
during the late 1980s and early 1990s I know of only three young men whose fathers
partly paid. During the last 15 or so years this trend has continued. Only one young
man in the village has during the last 5 years had his marriage completely paid by
his father, while three more has had part of the bride price covered by their father.

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a chance to get away from the boredom of village life, and a taste of
adventure. ‘Why am I leaving? Because I need money to get mar-
ried’, as Layya expressed it one afternoon.4
While Layya and the other young men in the village would not
have had to shoulder this expense before the onset of drought, they
never really complained. In fact, they seemed quite content with this
new arrangement. The reasons behind this revolve around choice,
the age at which they can get married, independence, and power.

Love marriages

Prior to the major drought in the early 1970s, marriage was not only
paid for by the parents, particularly the father or uncle of the young
man, but also arranged entirely by them. Children were either prom-
ised to each other at birth, or marriage was arranged during a pro-
longed process of gift giving known as ‘asking’. During ‘asking’,
presents were sent by the boy’s parents to the parents of the girl. If
these and the family of the boy were deemed suitable, a marriage
was arranged by the parents and the final bride price settled upon.
None of the now older men and women who got married in the
1960s remembers having had any say in the matter of marriage.
Walking home from a marriage in a neighbouring village with a
group of older men, I was thus told that ‘We did not choose. Our
fathers did. We grew up knowing who we were to marry. We never
questioned that’. This they contrasted to the situation in the village
today: ‘Now the young men choose their wife; or at least they have
a say.’
Because daily life in the village is sharply demarcated according
to gender, young people have very few opportunities to mingle so-
cially. Love therefore develops during social occasions such as bap-
tisms, religious ceremonies, engagement parties and weddings where
the gender separation is less pronounced. Markets are also good

4. See Cleveland (1986; 1991), Francis (1995; 2002), Hampshere & Randall (1999),
Hampshire (2006), Timaeus & Graham (1989), and Rain (1999: 207-214) for similar
examples from across Africa.

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jonas østergaard nielsen hfm 106

places to meet as the young couple can disappear together in the

crowds. When the relationship becomes serious the young couple
may decide to get married. If the young man has the money he will
approach his father and ask him to make contact with the uncle of
the girl. At this time negotiations between father and son always
takes place. The father, if he disagrees, might try to persuade his son
not to marry the girl, and in some cases he might even succeed. If
so, the young man will break of the relationship with the girl. This
happened once during my fieldwork but the young man dismissed
the situation telling me that ‘he did not really love the girl anyway’.
But in most cases the fathers agree. There are two major reasons for
this. Either the father is content with his son’s choice, or he has no
say. With regard to the latter situation, the fathers unanimously men-
tioned their lack of power in the matter since ‘my son pays the bride
price’. The young men are equally blunt and I was often told that
‘my father is not going to decide who I am going to marry when I
am paying for it myself’. Such statements were nearly always follow-
ed by observations regarding arranged vis-à-vis ‘love marriages’. Ma-
madou, a young man soon to be married to Fatimata, captures the
opinion of many in the village when he told me that ‘love marriages’
last longer than arranged ones. The older men agree, and their rela-
tively relaxed attitude towards losing the power to decide whom
their sons are to marry is related to this as well as to the fact that they
do not have the money.

I can’t wait!

Another important reason why the young men are relatively positive
about paying bride price is related to the age at which they can
marry. Prior to the drought, bride price was paid by selling cattle or
millet. This was not a fast way to raise cash and it often took the fa-
ther years to save up for his son’s wedding. Only a little millet and
very few cattle could be spared for sale, and there was often more
than just one son in the household. Thus before the early 1970s, the
men in Biidi 2 were normally between 30 and 40 years of age before
they got married. Today the money for bride price can be earned
during three or four seasons in Abidjan. The young men typically

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hfm 106 drought and marriage: exploring the interconnection …

make their first trip when they are 18-20 years old, and consequently
they can marry when in their early twenties, which all of them do.
In a very frank discussion with me and his two best friends,
Moussa revealed how he planned to marry Digga soon and why he
thought this was a good thing:

I am off next year. On the truck to Abidjan. Imagine being more than

thirty years old when you marry, or even older! It is a long time to wait
for the girls. I like Digga now and would like to have a house where I
could take her at night.

Moussa was 17 years old and clearly sexuality played a part in his de-
sire to marry soon, but as Moussa continued his narrative, other fac-
tors were expressed:

It is not just that! If I had a house, a wife, and a child I would be free
to make decisions. I would make a garden, have a field, and claim the
cattle my father and my future wife’s father are looking after now. I
would be a man.

Marriage, independence and political power

Getting married soon was important for Moussa for various reasons,
but noticeably he associated marriage with independence and
power. A man in Biidi 2 has a complex potpourri of traits, but crucial
among these is being head of a household. A household consists of
a man, his wife and their child/ren; thus in order to be head of a
household, marriage is essential.
A newly established household gains access to part of the fields
and garden belonging to the father of the male. Moreover, the young
man and woman are given the offspring of the cattle that their grand-
parents gave to them when they were born and which was subse-
quently taken care of by their fathers. Money earned by working for
development projects, participating in small-scale commerce, or
through labour migration is furthermore often kept exclusively by
the young men after marriage.
This status as an independent man in charge of his own house-
hold and resources is transferred to the political stage in the village.
In order to have a political voice in the village, a man needs to be

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jonas østergaard nielsen hfm 106

head of his own household. When decisions are made regarding, for
example, the village’s participation in a development project, the
male heads of households get together. While age and rank play an
important role in the discussions, the final decision is often based
on votes. Because the men now marry at an earlier age than their
fathers and grandfathers, they become heads of households earlier.
This means they enter the political sphere earlier than their fathers,
giving them access to power earlier. Because the village population
is growing (since 1995 there has been a growth rate of 3.3%) and the
younger men marry earlier, the number of households in the village
is expanding. In 1995 there were 43 households in Biidi 2 (Reenberg
& Paarup-Laursen 1997); in 2008 this number had grown to 104. Of
the 61 new households, 55 have young (<35 years of age) heads of
household.
This development has shifted the political power base within the
village downwards and the younger men now wield significant po-
litical power. This trend is obviously not bemoaned among the
younger men, but the older men in the village are worried: ‘The
young men have too much of a say. How can they make good deci-
sions? They do not know about life’. The young men dismiss this,
and again labour migration plays a part:

Know about life! What life? Life here in the village, or life outside the
village? It is us [the young men] that speak French with the authori-
ties; we have learned that while on migration. Migration has taught
us how things are done today. We depend on the outside; the village
is no longer enough.

Knowledge gained on migration has, in other words, given the

young men a sense of subjective importance. ‘We know about life
in the city’; ‘We know how to speak with white people’, ‘We know
how to uses mobile phones’; ‘We know what things should cost’;
‘We are not cheated by traders from the South’ were statements often
heard when the young men were asked to contrast their knowledge
with that of their parents and grandparents. These, in turn, largely
accept this state of affairs. I was often told by older men and women
that the young men ‘speak the language of the outside world better
than we do’. The older generations therefore let the younger men

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hfm 106 drought and marriage: exploring the interconnection …

negotiate with development projects organizers, cattle buyers, or of-

ficial authorities, heightening the young men’s sense of themselves
and their importance and influence over life in the village.
To sum up, the young men’s contentment with having to pay for
their own marriage is related to love, sexuality, independence,
knowledge, and power, and all the young men I spoke to mentioned
these aspects as a good side effect of labour migration and, although
always said with a smile, the drought.

Conclusion
Considering the growing need to understand how local communities
around the world at risk from current and future climate change
meet this challenge, focusing on how people adapt or cope with
changing circumstances through livelihood strategies seems parti-
cularly relevant. While the livelihood strategies analysis approach
often reveals how household or community adaptations to a chang-
ing environment are influenced by multiple external stimuli, focus-
ing on actual observed livelihood strategies makes it possible to
explore what local people perceive as the driving forces behind
these. Understanding what people do and why, opens up, in turn,
for an exploration of how, and if, such actions reduce or enhance
vulnerability or resilience to external stimuli like climate change. In
this vein, I have suggested that for resilience, adaptation, and vulner-
ability to climate change studies, analyzing livelihood strategies
might contribute to an understanding of the drivers behind human
actions and lived consequences of these.
Analyzing the intertwined trajectory in Biidi 2 of drought, dimin-
ishing agriculture, circular labour migration, bride price, and social
change, the chapter has focused on social consequences of drought.
It has illustrated how changing marriage patterns and power struc-
tures were triggered by the most recent of Sahelian droughts. The
drought in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by climate variability in the
1990s and 2000s had a large impact on rain-fed agriculture in Biidi
2. Enough food could no longer be obtained through agriculture
and the villagers responded by engaging in various livelihood diver-
sification strategies. Of these, circular labour migration by the

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jonas østergaard nielsen hfm 106

younger men is the most efficient in terms of cash earnings. Conse-

quently, a large proportion of young men migrates each year to earn
money for food no longer available from the fields.
Right from the start the young men had, however, another incen-
tive to migrate. Their fathers, who traditionally paid the bride price,
had lost the means to do so. Bride prices were normally paid by sel-
ling millet and cattle, but the millet had withered away and the cattle
died due to the drought. For many of the young men labour migra-
tion provided the opportunity to earn money for a bride price, and
this remains a very important reason for the continued scale and im-
portance of this strategy in the village.
Paying the bride price has resulted in a number of social changes
for the young men. Arranged marriages have largely been replaced
by ‘love marriages’, and marriage is entered into at an earlier age.
This development has shifted power relations in the village toward
the younger men. They now establish households earlier than their
older male relatives, and political decisions are to a large extent
based on votes cast by heads of households. Moreover, knowledge
gained through migration is valued and the younger men use this
knowledge to further cement their position. Consequently the young
men often have a large say in political decisions.
How this development influences the village’s vulnerability and
resilience to future climate change is an open question. But con-
sidering growing evidence that future climate change will strongly
affect the African continent and particularly the dryer regions
(Adger et al. 2007), continued emphasis on off-farm livelihood di-
versifications is likely to remain necessary. As many of these, like cir-
cular labour migration, depend upon the ability to navigate in the
world beyond the village, the skills the young men return home with
will probably maintain a significant degree of importance. In this
light, the growing power of the young men might not simply be a
consequence of, but also an adaptation to current and future climate
variability.

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hfm 106 drought and marriage: exploring the interconnection …

acknowledgements
The field research was funded by a Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs Re-
search Grant (Grant 104.Dan.8-914). Helpful comments from Anette Reen-
berg and two anonymous referees are gratefully acknowledged. I would like
to extend my thanks to the villagers of Biidi 2.

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 Paper B

Temporality and the problem with singling out climate as a current driver
of change in a small West African village, 2010, Journal of Arid
Environments, 74, 464-474.

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100
 Journal of Arid Environments 74 (2010) 464–474

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Arid Environments

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jaridenv

Temporality and the problem with singling out climate as a current driver
of change in a small West African village
J.Ø. Nielsen*, A. Reenberg
Department of Geography and Geology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Concern about climate and its impact on human populations in the Sahel since the 1970s was an
Received 30 April 2009 immediate response to the most recent of recurrent drought periods. Understanding the relative impact
Received in revised form of this drought on rural life in the Sahel is, however, not straightforward. This is due to the fact that
15 September 2009
climate is only one of many factors influencing local adaptation strategies to environmental changes.
Accepted 16 September 2009
Another explanation could be that climate in many rural communities in the Sahel is simply no longer
Available online 30 October 2009
the primary worry. The argument presented in this paper, supported by data from a small village in
northern Burkina Faso, is that the villagers there are ‘beyond climate’ as their current livelihood strat-
Keywords:
Burkina Faso egies are increasingly climate independent. People have over the past decades engaged in livelihood
Climate change diversification in order to negate the negative impact of climate variability on agriculture. In order to
Livelihood diversification analyse the temporal perspective of climate–livelihood interaction, the paper employs human–envi-
Sahel ronmental timelines. The results document the multiplicity of exposures shaping decisions in the village.
Temporality While significant correlation exists between recent livelihood diversifications and major climatic events,
it is equally obvious that recent political developments and the economic flow of project activities are
crucial factors of change.
Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
In the West African Sahel, rainfall is regarded as the most
significant climate parameter affecting people’s lives (Brooks,
2004; Hulme, 2001).1 The concern about climate and its impact on
human populations and the natural resource base in Sahel was an
immediate response to the most recent of recurrent drought
periods commencing in the early 1970s (Brook, 1993; Nicholson,
1978; Rain, 1999; Watts, 1983; Webb, 1995). Following very wet
years in the 1950s and 1960s, annual rainfall in the Sahel fell by
between 20 and 30% in the three decades following the 1960s,
prompting Hulme (2001, p. 20) to state that ‘‘[t]he African Sahel
therefore provides the most dramatic example worldwide of
climatic variability that has been directly and quantitatively
measured’’. In recent years some amelioration of the dry conditions
has been observed as annual rainfall totals have increased (Nich-
olson, 2005; OECD, 2006). However, rainfall in the Sahel fluctuates
* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ45 35 32 25 00; fax: þ45 35 32 25 01.
E-mail addresses: jon@geo.ku.dk (J.Ø. Nielsen), ar@geo.ku.dk (A. Reenberg).
1
The Sahel region is normally characterized by a strong north–south rainfall
gradient and high interannual rainfall variability. The annual rainfall varyies from
600 to 700 mm in the south to 100–200 mm in the north (e.g. Nicholson, 1978) and
is concentrated in one distinct rainy season (approximately June–September).
across the region and over time ‘‘leaving some areas in some years
well supplied, yet other regions and other years dry and parched’’
(Hulme, 2001, p. 19). What characterizes the region is thus not some
general annual rainfall total average, but a high degree of spatial
and temporal variability in precipitation. It is to these dynamic
climatic conditions that most environmental and social systems
have to adapt (Dessai and Hulme, 2003; Hulme, 2003; Smit et al.,
2001; Thomas et al., 2007; Usman and Reason, 2004).
Understanding the relative impact and importance of climate
change and variability on contemporary rural life in the Sahel and
elsewhere in dryland Africa is, however, not straightforward
(Barbier et al., 2009; Elmqvist and Olsson, 2006; Mertz et al., 2008a,
b; Mortimore et al., 2005; Reenberg, 2001; Reid and Vogel, 2006;
Reynolds et al., 2007; Thomas et al., 2005, 2007; Tschakert, 2007;
Wardell et al., 2003; Ziervogel et al., 2006). On a very general level
this is due to the fact that climate is often, if not always, only one of
many factors influencing coping and adaptation strategies to
environmental changes (Adger, 1999; Eakin, 2000, 2006) as these
are always played out within the context of multiple pressures on
and disturbances to livelihoods (Belliveau et al., 2006; Leichenko
and O’Brien, 2008). Poor health and infrastructure, no access to
markets and education, and lack of work and political stability are
often mentioned by villagers across the Sahel as more serious and
immediate constraints to survival than climate variability and

0140-1963/$ – see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jaridenv.2009.09.019

101
 J.Ø. Nielsen, A. Reenberg / Journal of Arid Environments 74 (2010) 464–474
change, despite the severity of the droughts they have experienced
(Mbow et al., 2008; Mertz et al., 2008a, b; Tschakert, 2007).
Based on data from a small village in northern Burkina Faso, this
paper will explore the difficulty of singling out climate as a driver of
local livelihood change. It is hypothesized that climate is simply no
longer a primary worry as local people have moved ‘beyond
climate’ by use of a number of livelihood diversifications strategies.
We start with a brief reference to the theoretical context, which
combines the livelihood perspective with coupled human-envi-
ronmental timelines in order to grasp the temporal dynamics of
diversification strategies that are ‘beyond climate’. Then the local
setting and the methodology are presented. The analytical results
are organized around two perspectives. First, we present the
villagers’ perception of the climate, highlighting specifically the
local perception of the changes that have occurred over the last
50 years. Second, we look into how these changes have made rain-
fed millet and sorghum cropping difficult, and identify the temporal
evolution of successful livelihood diversification strategies
employed in the village, such as labour migration, working for
development projects, horticulture, small-scale commerce, and
buying and selling livestock. In the discussion we take our point of
departure in local people’s contemporary worries and their inter-
pretation of major changes, and show how these are related to the
livelihood strategies and how they pivot around health, infrastruc-
ture and political–economic structures. Turning to the coupled
human-environmental timelines, we then show that, while
contemporary livelihood strategies are ‘beyond climate’, they are
not climate unrelated.
2. The theoretical background
The changing nature of environmental changes and climatic risk
represents an unprecedented challenge to human adaptability
(Eakin, 2005) and it is also widely acknowledged that economic,
cultural, and political processes have a large influence on vulner-
ability, risks and the adaptive capacity of human groups to such
future challenges. Hence, the concept of adaptive capacity (Yohe
and Tol, 2001) describes those characteristics of an individual,
household or population group which enable it to alter and struc-
turally reorganize its activities to diminish present threats to
survival while enhancing its ability to address new risks such as
climate change. The system’s adaptive capacity has been associated
with factors such as institutional structures, flexibilities in norms
and legal frameworks, resource distribution inequities or, on a more
local scale, with access to various forms of assets (capital, service,
knowledge, technology), perception of risk and impacts, and
freedom to use resources to mitigate future risks (Eakin et al.,
2006). The ‘room for maneuver’ for individual households or
household members – their access to livelihood assets – deter-
mines the options available as well as the barriers to adaptation.
There is thus an obvious scope for addressing the ‘double exposure’
(O’Brien and Leichenko, 2000), i.e. investigating how political and
economic changes interact simultaneously with environmental or
climatic risks to affect the livelihoods and vulnerability of people.
Such changes are crucial because, by understanding their nature
and timing, more can be learned about the processes connecting
the two (Nunn et al., 2007).
Recently, advances have been made in understanding the
dynamics of coupled human–environmental systems, including the
interaction between environmental factors, social factors and feed-
backs at different levels of spatial and temporal scales (e.g. Fox et al.,
2003; GLP, 2005; Haberl et al., 2006; Lambin and Geist, 2006;
Marcussen and Reenberg, 1999; Scoones, 1999; Walker et al., 2006;
Zimmerer and Bassett, 2003). Likewise, the livelihood analysis
approach has successfully contributed to conceptualizing how rural
102
465
communities respond to environmental and social change
(e.g. Chambers and Conway, 1992; Scoones, 1998; http://www.
livelihoods.org) and it has provided insight into the dynamics of
social and environmental change, which are closely linked to local-
level decision making (Batterbury, 2001; Eakin and Luers, 2006). The
livelihood approach conceptualizes, for example, how societies are
expected to be directed by structural changes in the international
market and the socio-economic community at large, as well as by
changes in the physical environment caused by climatic and envi-
ronmental changes. More specifically related to dryland regions,
Smith et al. (2009; see also Smith, 2008) portray the complexity of
the development of the human–environmental system as the
outcome of cross-scale effects coupled with inherently low adaptive
capacity. For these regions, they suggest, the problem is to increase
transformability in order to enable a transformation from the current
type of system to another kind of system. This may entail changing
the ways people make a living, developing new ‘goods and services’
and operating at different scales. Hence, transformation and trans-
formability emerge as critical areas of discussion for areas that have
a very low level of material living standards under current conditions.
Moreover, the livelihood literature increasingly emphasizes that
understanding why people prioritize certain livelihood strategies
over others is not only related to structural constraints or possibil-
ities imposed by geography, political economy or a biophysical
reality. It is also determined by the historical events and relations in
which these are embedded (Nooteboom, 2003). Thus, livelihood
choices and the reasons behind these may best be grasped by
incorporating temporality into the analysis in order to understand
the ‘historical routes’ of particular livelihood ‘pathways’ or ‘trajec-
tories’ (de Bruijn et al., 2005; de Haan and Zoomers, 2005; Reenberg
et al., 2008; Scoones and Wolmer, 2002; Zoomers, 1999). Trajecto-
ries of change in such systems may be best understood by looking at
the temporal and/or spatial co-evolution of different driving forces.
In this vein, it has been proposed that the heuristic method called
‘ecological timelines’ (Reid et al., 2000) or ‘coupled human–envi-
ronmental timelines’ (Reenberg et al., 2008) be employed as
a means to explore the temporal co-evolution of driving forces and
livelihood strategies in coupled human–environmental systems.
To understand the impact of climate on livelihood diversifica-
tion in the Sahelian setting, we take our point of departure in the
theoretical perspectives above. Specifically, we frame our descrip-
tion of the local livelihood system as an exploration of the temporal
dynamics of the coupled human–environmental system in which
the villagers of Biidi 2 find themselves.
3. The local setting
The study took place in the Sahelian village Biidi 2 (population
586), located approximately 14 km south-west of Gorom-Gorom, the
provincial capital of Oudalan, the northernmost province of Burkina
Faso. By comparing present-day population figures with a similar
census conducted in the village in 1995, the annual population
growth rate since 1995 is estimated to be 3.8% (Reenberg and
Paarup-Laursen, 1997). Of these, 246 are under the age of 15,
constituting 42% of the total population. The village population
consists of Fulbe, Rimaiibe and Wahilbe, which is a typical ethnic mix
for the region. Health is a major problem as visits to the hospital in
Gorom-Gorom and medication cost money. The level of education in
the village is also very poor. Almost none of the adults over 30 have
attended school and, although many of them are now engaged in
alphabetization programs, their ability to read is extremely limited.
Biidi 2 is, as many other villages in the region, situated on one of
two longitudinal E–W oriented dune systems superimposed on the
pediplain. It is surrounded by more or less continuous fields cultivated
with millet, sorghum and cowpeas (Rasmussen and Reenberg, 1992;
466 J.Ø. Nielsen, A. Reenberg / Journal of Arid Environments 74 (2010) 464–474
Reenberg and Fog, 1995; Reenberg and Paarup-Laursen, 1997). The
dune is rimmed at its southern and northern sides by gardens watered
by small shallow wells. The gardens are suited for horticulture with
a number of vegetables, such as sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and
aubergines. The garden products are, together with livestock, the only
products that are sold. There is, however, no strong market potential
for the village, as population density in the region is low and markets
relatively few. Hence, the economic system is best described as
a subsistence and agropastoral economy in which migration, horti-
culture, small-scale commerce and working for development projects
is becoming increasingly important.
4. Methods
The data that support the following analysis were collected
between August 2007 and February 2008 and scrutinized using five
main methods: ethnographic participant observation, semi-struc-
tured interviews, a questionnaire survey, focus group interviews,
and coupled human–environmental timelines.
Participant observation was chosen to facilitate rapport with the
people being studied and thereby the collection of data regarding
sensitive topics, and to gain insight into daily activities (Bernard,
2002). The basic insights gained through participant observation
were explored further in semi-structured interviews. Sixty-five
such interviews were conducted. The interviewees were selected
according to age, gender, socio-economic status, ethnicity, and
place of residence, thus covering all major differentiations within
the village. A questionnaire interview with 50 out of a total of 104
heads of households was also conducted. Households were selected
according to the above-mentioned social groupings within the
village. Focus group interviews were made with 12 groups (6–8
persons in each) differentiated by age, gender, ethnicity and social
standing. Four of the focus group interviews, consisting of older
(>70 years of age) men and women differentiated by ethnicity,
were repeated in time. These in-depth enquiries primarily
addressed the temporal evolution of biophysical, cultural and
socio-economic livelihood conditions in the village with the aim of
obtaining data for establishing coupled human–environmental
timelines going back to 1950, i.e. to uncover, (a) general events in
the village, (b) when certain livelihood strategies were initiated,
and (c) when certain climate events took place.
The semi-structured interviews, the questionnaire, and the
focus group interviews were structured so that for each category of
questions, the respondents were asked to: (1) assess the current
situation (e.g. household composition, main income source, mate-
rial possessions, number of animals, field size; etc.); (2) describe
the main changes (if any) to these over the past 50 years; and (3)
assess the main causes of these changes (if any). No indication of
the focus on climate was presented for respondents at this stage in
order to minimize biases in the answers. At the end of the inter-
views, the questionnaire, and the focus group discussions, the
respondents were asked to assess their perception of climate
change generally and the perceived impacts of this on a range of
livelihood parameters, natural resources, and social aspects. When
impacts were assessed as negative, the respondents were asked to
explain their adaptive actions to reduce these impacts. All inter-
views were conducted in Fulani, the local language, with the help of
interpreters, and digitally recorded.
5. Results
5.1. Perceptions of climate change and variability
There are no rainfall records from Biidi 2, but the meteorological
station in Gorom-Gorom (located approximately 14 km from the
103
village) has collected monthly rainfall data since 1955 (see
Appendix 1, electronic version only). While rainfall in the Sahel is
spatially highly differentiated even within small areas, the villagers
of Biidi 2 generally agree about the similarity between rainfall in
Gorom-Gorom and Biidi 2, especially with regard to longer term
trends and extreme events. The Gorom-Gorom dataset indicates
a rainfall trend similar to the general development in the Sahel: the
wet 1950s and 1960s were followed by a prolonged dry spell lasting
from the early 1970s until the 1990s, aggravated by major droughts
in the early 1970s and early–mid-1980s. The high degree of inter-
annual variability and an increasing trend in the yearly rainfall
average since the mid–late 1990s is likewise observed.
The villagers perceive a number of negative trends to the climate
to have taken place over the last 50 years (Table 1,Table 2). The rainy
season is perceived to be shorter than in the 1950s and 1960s, with
periods of more intensive rain often resulting in flooding, or with
long breaks resulting in drought. They also perceive there to have
been a larger number of ‘false starts’, making it very difficult to know
when to sow. Temperatures during the cold as well as the hot season
are said to have increased and both seasons to have become longer.
The wind is perceived to have become stronger, causing more wind
erosion, with the result that sand is filling up river beds and
destroying crops. Degradation of the soil, the disappearance of wild
fauna, plants, trees, and watering holes, and growing problems with
pests are also mentioned by the villagers as consequences of the
changed climate; all these aspects have made rain-fed agriculture
difficult and livelihood diversification increasingly important.
5.2. Diminishing cereal production
While the villagers nearly all cultivate land, the yield is negli-
gible. Even in the best of years, the harvest meets only between 7
and 9 months’ requirement for food, and this only for the largest
and most efficient households. In the two most recent campaigns
(2007 and 2008), the household with best access to labour power
and the largest fields only produced enough cereals to cover the
households’ need for 7 months and 2 months respectively. The low
yield combined with the intensive demand for labour (sowing,
weeding and harvesting) has resulted in four households giving up
cereal cultivation altogether. Many more are thinking about doing
the same because ‘‘it is simply not worth the effort’’, as it was often
expressed. The diminishing role of cereal cultivation in the village is
also reflected in land use mapping (supported by GPS measure-
ments in 1995 and again in 2007), which shows that the total field
acreage has only grown marginally in spite of significant population
growth (Fig. 1).
5.3. Livelihood diversifications
Over the last 30 years the villagers have responded to unreliable
rain-fed cropping by diversifying their livelihoods. Ethnic differ-
ences exist in regard to engagement in livelihood diversification,
for mainly cultural reasons, but for most of the villagers in Biidi 2,
off-farm livelihood strategies represent the mainstay of their
income. It is hard to assess the precise income generated by
engaging in off-farm livelihood strategies due to a lack of
accounting and secrecy of earnings, but most households earn
enough money to buy food to last the whole year. The money is
mainly earned through labour migration, working for development
projects, horticulture, small-scale commerce– especially by the
women– and selling livestock. In addition to food, the money is
used for clothing, medicine, tools, animals, commercial activities
and to meet social obligations like marriage, baptisms and funerals.
It should be noted that, although most households in the village
have managed to successfully diversify their livelihoods, some
 J.Ø. Nielsen, A. Reenberg / Journal of Arid Environments 74 (2010) 464–474 467

Table 1
Synthesis of methods applied, themes and temporal span covered, and quantitative density.

Methods Themes covered Data acquisition time Temporal span covered Quantitative density
Participant observation Daily life August 2007 until Contemporary issues Constant presence in the village
Livelihood diversification February 2008
Household composition, earnings
and practices
Socio-cultural differences
Threats to well-being
Role of agriculture
Impact of projects
Semi-structured Economic, cultural, biophysical August 2007 until Pre-1950 65 conducted
interviews changes overtime February 2008
Cause of changes Past 50 years Differentiated according to age,
Adaptive response to changes over time Contemporary issues gender, social status, ethnicity,
Climate Perceptions place of residence
Threats to well-being
Questionnaire Biophysical, agricultural, and December 2007 and Past 40 years 50 out of 104 heads of households
survey livelihood changes overtime January 2008 interviewed
Causes of changes Contemporary issues
Adaptive response to changes over time
Climate Perceptions
Household composition, earnings and practices
Focus group interviews Economic, cultural, biophysical changes December 2007 and Past 50 years 12 conducted
overtime January 2008
Causes of changes Contemporary issues Differentiated according to age,
Adaptive response to changes over time gender, social status, and ethnicity
Climate Perceptions
Human–environmental Biophysical, agricultural, and livelihood December 2007 and Past 50 years 4 focus groups conducted
timelines changes overtime January 2008
Socio-economic-cultural events in the village Differentiated according to age,
Climatic events in the village gender, and ethnicity

struggle to do so. This is often due to household composition or rest of Sahel the last 30–40 years (e.g. Cordell et al., 1996; Hamp-
merely bad luck. The lack of a husband and/or children, and shire, 2006; Henry et al., 2004; Mortimore and Adams, 2001; Rain,
particularly sons, severely limits a household’s potential to engage 1999). Migration in the 1950s and 1960s was mainly oriented
in the above-mentioned strategies. Small households, households towards Ghana where seven of the now elder men had gone either
hit by diseases, and female-headed households thus often rely on to fish on the coast or work in the large plantations. In the 1970s,
others (mainly members of their wider linage) to give them food. Côte d’Ivoire, and particularly Abidjan, increasingly substituted
Ghana as the major migration destination and it has remained so
5.3.1. Labour migration ever since, despite recent unrest initiated by an insurgence in the
Labour migration is not a new phenomenon in the northern part northern half of Côte d’Ivoire in 2002.
of Burkina Faso (Bolwig, 1999; Breusers, 2004). But the drought in After the end of crop harvest in November and December, a large
the beginning of the 1970s, and its prolonged aftermath, played proportion of Rimaiibe men, in particular, depart for Abidjan to work
a significant role in the increased migration from Biidi 2 as in the loading and off-loading trucks and as security guards. In December
2007, 10 youths between 15 and 25 years old left, followed in the
Table 2 beginning of January by three more, for a total of 36% of this age
Perception of climate change in Biidi 2 over the last 40 years based on household group. Among the men aged between 25 and 35 years, seven out of
questionnaire interviews. N ¼ 50.
25 left, or 28%. Among the men older than 35 years, eight out of 50
More/ Stable Less/ Do not left, or 16%. Two other Rimaiibe aged 24 and 28 years were already in
longer (%) shorter know (%) Abidjan on a more permanent basis. The numbers from 2008 were
(%) (%)
very similar. In other words, migration provides a very important
Rainfall Rainfall during rainy season 16 (32) 3 (6) 31 (62) 0 (0) input to Biidi 2’s economy. Hence, the commonly reported amount of
Length of rainy season 13 (26) 3 (6) 30 (60) 4 (8)
money that the men return with is around US$200–300 for 6 months
Break between rainfalls in 37 (74) 0 (0) 7 (14) 6 (12)
rainy season of work after all expenses such as food and transport have been
Rainfall intensity 18 (36) 0 (0) 30 (60) 2 (4) paid.2 In only one account was there more than one male member of
Inundations 31 (62) 1 (2) 15 (30) 3 (6) the same household away on migration.
Strong winds during rainy 38 (76) 3 (6) 2 (4) 7 (14)
season
Length (time) of strong 36 (72) 3 (6) 3 (6) 8 (16) 5.3.2. Development projects
winds during rainy season In the aftermath of the drought and famine of the 1970s and
Wind Strong winds during dry 38 (76) 4 (8) 4 (8) 4 (8) early 1980s, a number of NGOs, a majority of which owed their
season existence to international aid, entered Burkina Faso, and in partic-
Length (time) of strong 34 (68) 3 (6) 3 (6) 10 (20)
ular the northern part, as this was perceived to be the most
winds during dry season
Movement of sand due 45 (90) 0 (0) 5 (10) 0 (0) vulnerable to food shortage (Atampugre, 1997). In Biidi 2, NGOs
to wind began arriving around 1992–1993 and there have since been at
Temperature During the dry season 46 (92) 2 (4) 2 (4) 0 (0)
During the rainy season 35 (70) 6 (12) 9 (18) 0 (0)
During the hot season 48 (96) 0 (0) 2 (4) 0 (0) 2
Throughout the paper we have converted the local currency (F CFA) to US$
During the cold season 36 (72) 0 (0) 14 (28) 0 (0)
(1 US$ equals approximately 500 F CFA).

104
468 J.Ø. Nielsen, A. Reenberg / Journal of Arid Environments 74 (2010) 464–474
Fig. 1. Land use pattern of Biidi 2 in 1995 and 2007. Each individual field boundary was
recorded in 1995, while only the outer limit (bordering the non-cultivated land) was
recorded in 2007. The data have been superimposed on a geometrically corrected
aerial photo. Boundaries were mapped by GPS in the course of a field survey in 1995
(Reenberg and Fog, 1995) and in 2007.
least 20 projects in the village. The projects arrive each year at the
end of the main agricultural season. The lengths of time they stay in
the village depend on their scale and aims. The larger projects work
in the village over many years and are often involved in major
activities such as planting trees and bushes to fixate the sand or
constructing dikes in the fields against surface water and soil
runoff. Other projects stay a short time, providing ‘only’ advice or
small goods like garden equipment.
In general, the villagers attribute enormous importance to
projects, which is closely related to the fact that many of them
provide salaried work for the local people involved. The income
a household can make working for projects during a year is closely
related to the duration of the project in the village and the number
of projects offering salaried work. On average the projects pay
around US$3 for 1 day’s work and employ local people for around
30 days a year. As the projects provide work at the same time of the
year as migration, school and transhumance, it is often only two or
a maximum of three household members that work on a project
during a given year. An average household with two members
working on the projects for 30 days a year thus earns around
US$150 a year. All but three Rimaiibe households engaged in this
activity in 2007 and 2008.
5.3.3. Gardens
Due to the constant presence of groundwater just below the
surface of the land, the gardens are full of small wells from which
105
the owners (68 out of a 104 households in Biidi 2 have a garden)
fetch water for crops like tomatoes, potatoes, mint, watermelon and
onion, sold at the nearby markets in Tassmakat and Gorom-
Gorom.3 During the last 10 years, many new gardens have been
established and many villagers are thinking of giving up rain-fed
agriculture altogether in order to concentrate full time on the
gardens because, as we were constantly told, ‘‘they don’t depend on
the rain’’. Many of the development projects also focus on the
gardens due to their independence from the rain, and this has
further encouraged the villagers to engage in horticulture as seeds,
gardening tools and ‘expert’ advice are available from projects.
Except for the four full-time gardeners in Biidi 2 who attend nearly
every market day, most villagers go to the market sporadically, but
they generally try to go to one of the markets every week, partic-
ularly during the agricultural off-season where most garden prod-
ucts are produced. Normally, only one person represents the
household at the market and, on an average market day, she (it is
often the women that go) makes between US$3 and US$4, averaging
around US$100 a year a household.4 The importance of the gardens
is thus not primarily the production of produce for consumption,
but, like migration and development projects, the cash income the
selling of this produce generates for the household.
5.3.4. Women’s small-scale commerce
The role of women constitutes another important change in
livelihood strategy. Particularly Rimaiibe women have become
economically very active since the mid-1980s. During the 1950s,
1960s and 1970s women only rarely engaged in commercial
activities, while today women participate in the cash economy in
54 out of the 60 Rimaiibe households in Biidi 2; the few exceptions
were due to old age. This development is closely linked to growing
opportunities for salaried work particularly for development
projects, but mats, food, horticulture produce and small domestic
animals are increasingly produced and sold by the women in order
to reduce the household’s vulnerability to food shortage as the cash
earned is mainly used to buy millet. The importance of women’s
economic activities for the individual households varies, but in
some Rimaiibe households, women now contribute more than half
the income. In general, both men and women emphasize that the
cash earned by women constitutes a crucial contribution to the
overall household economy.
5.3.5. Selling livestock
Some of the income generated through migration, working for
development projects and gardening is invested in livestock;
among the women poultry, goats and sheep are preferred, whereas
the men mainly invest in cattle. While many animals were sold
throughout the 1970s and 1980s in order to buy millet, this trend
has halted, and more animals are produced than sold, as cash can be
obtained through other means (migration, horticulture, projects,
and commercial activities) than selling animals. Moreover, the
surplus cash not used for food is very often invested in animals. The
women look to cash in their investment relatively quickly, for
example by buying the animals young in order to fatten them up
and sell within 3 to 4 months; the men, on the other hand, hope to
hold onto their cattle as long as possible. This is done in order to
build up the herd, providing the household with a form of insur-
ance against a particularly bad harvest or the failure of one of the
other livelihood strategies, as cattle can always be sold. Another
reason behind the increasing number of animals, and particularly
3
The word Biidi means in Fulani ‘old wells’ or ‘constant presence of water’.
4
This estimate is based on interviews with women and men regularly attending
the market.
 J.Ø. Nielsen, A. Reenberg / Journal of Arid Environments 74 (2010) 464–474
Fig. 2. Coupled human–environmental timelines of Biidi 2, 1950–2008, based on focus group interviews. Selected features averaged out across the focus groups.
cattle, is the rain. While the rain is generally unpredictable, it nearly
always falls heavily in August, a trend the villagers perceive to have
become more pronounced over the last 20 years or so. The heavy
rainfall in August makes the bush ‘green’ very quickly and at
a crucial stage at which many animals previously suffered from feed
shortage. This has led to an increased survival rate among the
younger and weaker cattle.
5.4. Threats to sustained well-being
The importance attached to income generated through the
relatively climate independent off-farm diversification strategies
manifests itself clearly in the perceived threats to sustained well-
being in Biidi 2 as articulated by the villagers in semi-structured
interviews. These findings can be looked at through the theoretical
lenses proposed by de Bruijn et al. (2005), who argue that individual
and collective decision making in the Sahel is a process in which
pre-set goals are hard to attain due to the inherently unstable socio-
economic and biophysical environment. Thus, individuals depend
more upon their past experiences, or the ‘pathways’ they have fol-
lowed, than on a conscious weighing up of ‘‘actor’s preferences’’ (de
Bruijn et al., 2005, p. 9). In this sense, the threats to well-being
presented below must be understood as something the inhabitants
in Biidi 2 feel endangers the pathways they have chosen to pursue,
rather than something they feel they can plan their way out of. These
threats can be clustered in three major categories: (1) health, (2)
infrastructure, and (3) political–economic structures.
106
469
5.4.1. Health
Hunger, lack of clothing, the cost of medical care and sanitary
products like soap concern the villagers a great deal as they
associate the lack of these amenities with poor health. Poor health
is perceived as the major problem in Biidi 2 (59 out of 65 inter-
viewees rated health as his or her major concern) as in other
Sahelian villagers (Mertz et al., 2008b; Tschakert, 2007), first and
foremost because being sick is, of course, very disagreeable and
often extremely dangerous, but also because it takes the villagers
out of action, as a strong and relatively healthy body is needed to
engage in income generating labour. Falling sick thus equates with
a direct and tangible loss of income. In 2007, for example, one
particular household was severely hit by sickness. The father
suffered from a simple infection in his foot that, despite treatment,
became progressively worse and resulted in him missing out on
migration, project work and work in his garden. His wife tried to
work harder, in particular by increasing the production of straw
mats, often sitting up late at night, but her work was hampered by
her constant care of an infant son who was very weak and
eventually died. Initially the family dealt with their predicament
by selling animals, but these were quickly sold to cover the cost of
visits to the hospital and medicine and the wider family began
giving them food. A year later, the mother and their three other
children had left the village to live with her family, and the father
was left depending upon others for survival as he remained
unable to engage in income generating activities due to his poor
health.
470 J.Ø. Nielsen, A. Reenberg / Journal of Arid Environments 74 (2010) 464–474
5.4.2. Infrastructure
Second to health related worries, the villagers are very con-
cerned about the physical infrastructure in the region, like roads (51
out of 65 interviewees mentioned infrastructure as the second most
pressing concern). The presence of good roads is crucial for
a number of reasons. In order to sell the garden produce, mats,
prepared food and animals produced in the village, the villagers
need to be able to get to the markets in Gorom-Gorom and
Tassmakat, some 14 and 18 km away. Biidi 2 has always been con-
nected by road and paths to these towns but the opening of a better
dirt road some 15 years ago has greatly facilitated the ability to get
to and from the markets within the same day, and, in turn,
encouraged their growing engagement in small-scale commerce.
Equally important is the sealed road between the capital city Oua-
gadougou and the major town in the north, Dori, which opened in
2003. This road made transport between the northern region and
the capital 3 days shorter and resulted in a number of very positive
developments for people in Biidi 2. Chief among these were the
price drop and availability of food coming from the more fertile
regions in Burkina Faso or from overseas, especially in the rainy
season when transport to the north was previously extremely
difficult. The road has also made the journey to Abidjan and other
labour migration destinations in the south faster, cheaper, safer and
more reliable. This has also meant that buyers from those regions
visit the markets in Gorom-Gorom and Tassmakat more frequently
to buy cattle, pushing the prices upwards. Many income generating
activities are, in other words, connected to good roads as well as to
access to markets, goods and labour. Consequently, a lot of worries
in the village pivot around the future development of these issues.
5.4.3. Political–economic structures
One of the most talked about topics in the village during the
fieldwork was the recent turmoil in the Côte d’Ivoire. While the
background and the politics behind the crisis were relatively unclear
among the villages, its effects were intimately felt. The conflict made
travel to, and staying in, Abidjan extremely dangerous, and caused
a severe blow to the economy of Côte d’Ivoire, resulting in less work,
particularly for foreign migrant workers like the villagers of Biidi 2.
The situation in Côte d’Ivoire has improved since then, but it is no
longer as profitable to work there as before the crisis, and this has
made people in Biidi 2 extremely aware of the devastating effects
political and economic instability can have on their well-being. A
major concern among the villagers is thus that the current political
stability of Burkina Faso will somehow disintegrate, stopping traders,
buyers and development projects from coming to the region, and
thereby halting the villagers’ ability to earn money (in 49 interviews
one or a combination of these factors were mentioned as a concern).
While the villagers thus appreciate the stability of the national
political context, many also worry about corruption and inefficient
and complicated bureaucratic rules, particularly with regard to
migration and having a stall at the market. Police harassment of the
trucks on which the migrants return is a cause of great annoyance,
as bribes are often required, whereas the problem with the stalls is
more concerned with complicated rules and regulations, but there
is also a tax on having one.
These regional, national and local concerns have recently been
joined by one of a more global nature. The villagers watched in
a state of growing despair as the prices on rice, millet and other
essential food products continued to rise from January 2008 until
they stabilized in September and October. While the underlying
causes of the so-called ‘food crisis’ remained relatively obscured to
the villagers, the global nature of the crisis was grasped and the
villagers subsequently greatly expanded their horizon of worry to
include far-away places like India and the United States, and
intangibles like the price of oil.
107
6. Human–environmental timelines
Temporal and spatial variability of rainfall constitutes ,in
general, a major challenge to reliable food provision and stable
living conditions in the Sahel. Yet climate is hard to single out as
a possible driver of livelihood change in Biidi 2 because so many
other factors play a role, as discussed above. Climate variability
does not feature directly in people’s risk assessments when these
are addressed in the interviews. Their immediate concerns reflect
some of the many other factors of importance for their current
livelihood conditions, the majority of which are not directly
dependent upon climate. Many livelihood strategies have, however,
been created with the intention of negating climate uncertainties
by providing the villagers with the cash needed to buy the food that
can no longer be produced locally due to drought and the variability
of the rain since the 1970s. The current livelihood strategies are
therefore rooted in, and developed in response to, climate condi-
tions. On the other hand, the villagers can be seen as having
gradually ‘moved beyond’ climate being perceived as the major
driver of change and the major concern. To understand the impact
of climate on livelihood diversification in Biidi 2, a temporal
perspective is therefore required.
The coupled human–environmental timelines presented in
Fig. 2 and Fig. 3 use general information from the fieldwork and,
most importantly, from the focus group interviews. They serve to
summarize the main events and trends of the last 50 years from the
perspectives of exposure to political, sociocultural and climatic
events as perceived by the villagers and the strategies enacted by
the villagers with regard to these. While they indicate a variety of
correspondences between livelihood strategies and non-climatic
events, the timelines also illustrate how climate initially has been
an important driver of change. The shift away from agriculture to
a broader livelihood diversification was, for example, triggered by
the major drought from the early 1970s until the mid-1980s, and
partly maintained as a result of the unreliable precipitation of the
last 20 years.
The timelines can be divided into three major time periods: (1)
the wet 1950s and 1960s, (2) the drought years from the early 1970s
to mid-1980s, and (3) the variable mid-1980s to the present. For
each period, the villagers’ perceptions of climate, agricultural
developments, livelihood diversifications, and more general events
having an influence on livelihood diversification strategies are
considered.
6.1. 1950s to the early 1970s
As in the rest of Sahel, the 1950s and 1960s were very wet years
in Biidi 2 and the period was described by all the focus groups as
good in regards to the rain. No other climate related constraints
were mentioned. Due to the good rains, agricultural productivity
was unusually high, and cultivation as well as livestock production
had favourable conditions. None of the villagers associated hunger
with the period because lack of food was not a major problem; as
was often stated: ‘‘the fields and the bush were good.’’ Although
migration, gardening and the selling of animals did take place
during the period, these were not mentioned during the focus
group interviews because they did not constitute a major contri-
bution to the household economy at this time. French colonial rule
ended in 1960, but neither this or any other political or economic
events were mentioned as having influenced life in the village.
6.2. Early 1970s to mid-1980s
In the early 1970s, a prolonged period of drought and ‘no rain’
began, continuing until the mid- to late 1980s. The drought
 J.Ø. Nielsen, A. Reenberg / Journal of Arid Environments 74 (2010) 464–474 471

Fig. 3. Coupled human–environmental timelines of Biidi 2, 1950–2008, based on focus group interviews. Timelines spilt according to gender and ethnicity. Selected features.

experienced all over Sahel was said by the focus groups to have
commenced around 1972 and continued until 1974, followed by
a slight improvement of the rain until around 1983–1984 when
another major drought hit the village as well as the rest of the Sahel.
No other climatic conditions were said to have taken place during
this period. Drought and the general lack of rain in this period had
an impact on agriculture. From around 1973–1974, crop cultivation,
and in particular millet, began to fail, and in the early to mid-1980s
108
agriculture was no longer seen as ‘important’ in the village due to
the low yields. People began to abandon fields. This failure of the
harvest resulted in the need to buy food, a circumstance mentioned
by all the focus groups to commence around the time of the first
drought.
The timeline indicates that the cash needed to buy food was
initially gained through the selling of animals from herds built up
during the favourable 1950s and 1960s and large-scale labour
472 J.Ø. Nielsen, A. Reenberg / Journal of Arid Environments 74 (2010) 464–474
migration commencing around the time of the first drought.
Towards the end of this period a third livelihood strategy, namely
gardening, was mentioned as becoming increasingly important.
This latter development may be connected to the end of slavery
in the village in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which strongly
encouraged the former slaves, the Rimaiibe, to expand and intensify
their work in the gardens as they were now able to keep the fruits of
their labour rather than handing everything over to the former
masters, the Fulbe (Faura, 1995; Lund, 1999; McCauley, 2003). In this
period labour migration was likewise connected to non-climate
factors, and especially the growing need for young men to pay bride
prices. Previously it was the father’s role to pay, but, since many had
lost most of their cattle during the drought, they could no longer
raise the cash needed for the bride price. Labour migration became
the most efficient way for young men to earn the money needed to
get married, and the continued large incentive to migrate among
young men in the village is closely connected to this development.
The growing commonality of two wives in the village also plays
a part in the continued engagement in labour migration, as cash is
needed to feed the often large households.
6.3. Mid-1980s to 2008
The extreme drought of the 1970s and early 1980s was replaced
in the mid- to late 1980s by a phase of ‘OK rain’. Although rain in
this period fell more abundantly than during the previous 15 years,
OK rain does not indicate a return to the rainfall pattern of the
1950s and 1960s. The rainy season was described by all the focus
groups as becoming increasingly unpredictable. It was said to start
late, have more ‘false’ starts, no continuity, and to end earlier, while
single rainfall events were described as often either insufficient,
causing drought, or extremely heavy, causing flooding. The
unpredictability of the rain was accompanied by a perceived
increase in wind speed and in temperatures, often breaking the
cereal or ‘baking’ the seeds. Although wetter, the climatic condi-
tions were thus not in favour of a return to previous levels of cereal
cropping, and, throughout the period, fields were abandoned and
the millet yields remained low. This explains why the need to buy
food did not diminish despite the ‘better’ rain.
In this period, the villagers expanded their means of earning
cash to buy food to compensate for what the fields could not
provide. Selling animals, gardening and labour migration remain
important livelihood strategies but, since the late 1980s, the
women have become increasingly involved in commercial activi-
ties while salary work became a possible livelihood strategy in the
mid- to late 1990s. Both these latter strategies are connected to
the arrival of development projects. Most of the development
projects passing through Biidi 2 focus on issues of gender and aim
to empower women by making them more economically inde-
pendent of their husbands. Many of the women in the village have
clearly embraced this discourse, using it to negotiate and obtain
new roles (such as breadwinners) within the household. The
increasing economic importance of women is also connected to
the fact that many of the development projects hire and pay local
workers, including women and children, to work for them. The
presence of development projects is thus the reason behind the
availability of wage labour in the village. The increased partici-
pation in small-scale commerce and the selling of livestock can
similarly be related to non-climatic events, and particularly the
opening up of roads, which have facilitated commercial activities
and expanded the group of potential buyers. Despite the economic
downturn in Côte d’Ivoire, migration to Abidjan is also connected
to better roads; the loss of earning potential is compensated for by
the ease of travelling to and from Abidjan. Another persistent
major driver behind the continued need to engage in livelihood
109
diversification strategies is population growth, which puts further
pressure on the need to earn money for food.
7. Conclusion
In recent literature dealing with the impact of social, cultural,
political and environmental components of local livelihoods, the
importance of a temporal perspective is emphasized. Terms such as
‘pathways’ (de Bruijn et al. 2005; Scoones and Wolmer, 2002) and
‘trajectories’ (de Haan and Zoomers, 2005), which indicate move-
ment through time, are increasingly finding their way into the
discourse as they are understood to reflect both ‘‘long-term
practices and institutions on the one hand and individual strategies
on the other’’ (Nooteboom, 2003, p. 55). Focusing on pathways and
trajectories moves, in other words, the livelihood framework away
from either an overly structural or neo-liberal stance, or uninten-
tional–intentional discussion of livelihood strategies, towards one
in which individual agency is acknowledged but also embedded in
wider structural constraints and history (de Haan and Zoomers,
2005). Scoones and Wolmer (2002, p. 183), for example, argue that
livelihoods ‘‘emerge out of past actions and [that] decisions are
made within specific historical and agro-ecological conditions, and
are constantly shaped by institutions and social arrangements’’. It is
through the unravelling of such factors that the ‘historical route’ or
temporality of particular livelihood strategies can be discerned (de
Haan and Zoomers, 2005, p. 44).
In this paper, we suggest that ‘coupled human–environmental
timelines’ provide a simple methodological tool by which such
‘historical routes’ can be traced and delineated. The overall picture
emerging from the study of Biidi 2 is that the current livelihood
strategies are enabled and reinforced by a context of multiple non-
climatic pressures, disturbances and possibilities. While these non-
climatic factors are inevitable to explain the presence and success
of the particular livelihood strategies, climate explains both the
initial and the continued need for them: money for food is simply
necessary, because a sufficient amount can no longer be produced
locally as the rain has decreased and become extremely variable.
The importance of migration, small-scale commerce, gardens,
projects and livestock has thus coevolved with the diminishing
importance of rain-fed cereal production due to a change in
climate, and the villagers now find themselves in a situation in
which only a small proportion of their food supply and income is
hinged upon the rain. The move out of cereal cropping is, in other
words, a move away from a climate dependent livelihood.
This situation clearly manifests itself in the things the villagers
worry about. They worry very little about climate, as migration,
gardens and their other livelihood strategies are not climate
dependent. Health, infrastructure, and the political–economic situ-
ation concern the villagers a great deal more because a detrimental
development in any of these poses a potential threat to the strategies
embraced. This, in turn, equals a tangible loss of income, once again
forcing them to reorient their livelihoods in order to avoid hunger.
By showing how the villagers in Biidi 2 have ‘moved beyond
climate’ as it does not currently constitute a major potential driver
of change and thus concern, the paper shows that the difficulty in
understanding the relative impact and potential of climate varia-
tions on contemporary rural life in the Sahel is not only connected
to the many factors influencing coping and adaptation strategies to
environmental changes (as is often argued), but also time. In the
Sahel, but probably also elsewhere (Reenberg et al., 2008; Reid
et al., 2000), livelihood changes in human–environmental systems
may therefore be best understood by looking at co-evolution of
different driving forces over time. Only then will the livelihood
routes of local actors navigating environmental conditions, polit-
ical–economic structures and social actions become clear.
 J.Ø. Nielsen, A. Reenberg / Journal of Arid Environments 74 (2010) 464–474
Acknowledgements
The field research was funded by a Danish Ministry of Foreign
Affairs research grant (grant 104.Dan.8-914). This study was part of
the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis (AMMA) project.
Based on a French initiative, AMMA was built by an international
scientific group and is currently funded by a large number of
agencies, especially from France, UK, US and Africa. It has been the
beneficiary of a major financial contribution from the European
Community’s Sixth Framework Research Programme. Detailed
information on scientific coordination and funding is available on
the AMMA International web site: http://www.amma-
international.org. We would like to extend our thanks to the
villagers of Biidi 2. The fieldwork was carried out with permission
of, and in accordance with, the Ministere des Enseignements Sec-
ondaire Superieur et de la Research Scientifique research permis-
sion N 2007 0089, and Université De Ouagadougou, Departement
de Géographie, Burkina Faso.
Appendix. Supplemental material
Supplementary information for this manuscript can be down-
loaded at doi:10.1016/j.jaridenv.2009.09.019.
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 Paper C

Cultural barriers to climate change adaptation: A case study from

Northern Burkina Faso, 2010, Global Environmental Change, 20, 142-152.

113
114
 Global Environmental Change 20 (2010) 142–152

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Global Environmental Change

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/gloenvcha

Cultural barriers to climate change adaptation: A case study from Northern

Burkina Faso
Jonas Østergaard Nielsen *, Anette Reenberg
Department of Geography and Geology, University of Copenhagen, Øster Voldgade 10, DK-1350 Copenhagen K, Denmark

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Article history: Human adaptation to climate change is a heterogeneous process influenced by more than economic and
Received 11 December 2008 technological development. It is increasingly acknowledged in the adaptation to climate change
Received in revised form 2 October 2009 literature that factors such as class, gender and culture play a large role when adaptation strategies are
Accepted 8 October 2009
either chosen or rejected at the local scale. This paper explores adaptation strategies by focusing on
livelihood diversification in the face of the most recent of recurrent droughts in the Sahel. It is shown that
Keywords: for Fulbe, one of the two main ethnic groups in the small village in Northern Burkina Faso studied, culture
Climate change
acts as a major barrier to embracing four of the most successful livelihood strategies: labour migration,
Adaptation
Cultural barriers
working for development projects, gardening, and the engagement of women in economic activities.
Sahel ß 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Fulbe

1. Introduction not only economic and technological development, but also by

The importance of adaptation to climate change is increasingly
emphasised (Pielke et al., 2007). Adaptation has become part of the
discourse of global warming and is now widely recognised as a
fundamental and necessary response to the threat posed by the
climatic changes that will occur, or are already occurring, due to
past and present carbon emissions (IPCC, 2007; UNFCCC, 2007).
Human adaptation to a changing environment is not a new
phenomenon, but a sense of urgency has entered the scene and
researchers, policy makers, and civil society have engaged ‘‘in a
race against time to understand how adaptation can be facilitated,
supported, and ultimately sustained, in societies at risk from
climate change impacts’’ (Coulthard, 2008, p. 479). This is so
because adaptation is understood as a modification of behaviour
believed to either alleviate adverse impacts or to realise new
opportunities in response to observed or expected changes in
climate and associated extreme weather events (Adger et al., 2004,
2007).
New studies dealing with real-world adaptation practices and
processes have, however, noted a number of significant limitations
to adaptive capacity of human societies – i.e. the ability or potential
of a system to respond successfully to climate variability and
change. It has been shown that adaptive capacity is influenced by
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +45 3532 4163; fax: +45 3532 2501.
E-mail addresses: jon@geo.ku.dk (J.&. Nielsen), ar@geo.ku.dk (A. Reenberg).
social norms, values and rules (Klein and Smith, 2003; Robledo
et al., 2004; Brooks and Adger, 2005; Næss et al., 2005; Tompkins,
2005; Ford et al., 2006; Adger et al., 2007; Coulthard, 2008), and
that these adaptive responses vary between individuals and
between and within communities, regions and countries (O’Brien
et al., 2006). Adaptive capacity is, in other words, ‘‘highly
heterogeneous within a society or locality’’ (Adger et al., 2007,
p. 729) and often influenced by factors such as class, gender, health,
social status and ethnicity. Despite these insights, cultural barriers
to adaptation to climate change are not well researched (Adger
et al., 2007, 2009).
A current challenge in adaptation research is thus to recognise
and explain ‘‘varied sensitivities’’ to climate change exhibited by
different groups of actors and the consequences of these for
adaptation at the local level (Adger and Brooks, 2003, p. 179). The
aim of this paper is to show how one of these sensitivities, culture,
presents a barrier to adaptation to climate change in the small
Sahelian village of Biidi 2 in Northern Burkina Faso.1 In this
community the approaches to adaptation have been very
heterogeneous between the two major ethnic groups present in
the village territory: Rimaiibe and Fulbe.
1
Barriers are here understood as the conditions or factors that render adaptation
difficult as a response to climate change and are as such contrasted to limits, which
render adaptation ineffective and ‘‘largely insurmountable’’ (Adger et al., 2007, p.
733).

0959-3780/$ – see front matter ß 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2009.10.002
115
 J.Ø. Nielsen, A. Reenberg / Global Environmental Change 20 (2010) 142–152 143

The paper examines adaptation to climate change by focusing
on livelihood diversification, which is shown to be a key adaptive
strategy in the village as this negates the negative impact of
drought and climate variability on rain-fed agriculture. In recent
years, a number of studies on livelihood diversification have been
published (Ellis, 2000; Barrett et al., 2001; Carswell, 2002;
Elmqvist and Olsson, 2006; Wouterse and Taylor, 2008), all
emphasising that off-farm work constitutes a significant part of
observed livelihood diversification in rural communities and has
increased over time in importance in sub-Saharan Africa (Bryce-
son, 1996, 2002). Similarly, Mortimore (1998) noted that while
there are often few on-farm diversification strategies in the Sahel,
off-farm strategies seem to be swelling in number, indicating that
rural livelihood diversification is increasingly non-agricultural.
This move away from a dependence upon rain-fed agriculture for
sustaining a livelihood for households and individuals is clearly
observed in Biidi 2. There, the four most important livelihood
diversifications employed are: (1) labour migration to Abidjan,
Côte d’Ivoire, (2) working for development projects, (3) gardens,
and (4) women’s economic activities (Nielsen and Reenberg, 2009;
Reenberg, 2009). All of these aim to negate the negative impact of
drought and climate variability by providing households and
individuals with sources of income and food other than rain-fed
agriculture.
Initially Fulbe in Biidi 2 did not have to engage in these
strategies as their livelihood was based on cattle. The last 30 years,
however, many Fulbe have in general forsaken pastoralism in order
to engage in other livelihood activities (De Bruijn and Dijk, 1995;
Hampshire, 2004). In Biidi 2 pastoralism is still part of the land use
system, but rain-fed agriculture constitute the economic mainstay
of Fulbe households. This paper investigates how contemporary
Fulbe strategies are created in a setting of Fulbe cultural values
played out in a wider historical and political context defined by the
end of slavery, political legislation, and the arrival of international
development projects. The Fulbe preference for living in the bush,
their notion of personal freedom and integrity, their occupational
specialisations and their link to existential group identity (Ries-
man, 1977) will be highlighted as cultural barriers to climate
change adaptation among Fulbe.
The paper will start with a brief methodological overview and
an introduction to the setting and the climate in Biidi 2 over the last
40 years. The four dominant livelihood diversification strategies in
the village will be presented followed by an analysis of the current
cultural barriers to pursue these among Fulbe.
2. Methodology
This study draws on ethnographic research carried out in the
village of Biidi 2 between August 2007 and February 2008.
Participant observation, semi-structured interviews, focus group
interviews, and questionnaire interviews were the main methods
used.
Participant observation was chosen as a means to facilitate
rapport with the people being studied, the collection of data
regarding sensitive topics, and insights about daily activities and
perceptions (Bernard, 2002). The insights obtained were
explored further in semi-structured interviews. Sixty-five such
interviews were conducted with older, middle-aged and young
men and women covering all socio-economic and ethnic groups
in the village. Twelve focus group interviews were made,
differentiated by age, gender, ethnicity and social standing.
The focus groups, consisting of older men and women, of
different ethnicity, were repeated over time and covered
historical developments in order to map social memory
particularly regarding livelihoods and climate changes (McIn-
tosh, 2000). All semi-structured interviews and all focus group
interviews were digitally recorded. Observations and conversa-
tions during participant observation were written down in
notebooks. A questionnaire interview with 50 out of a total of 104
heads of households, again stratified to cover all social groupings
within the village was also conducted. Table 1 summarise the
methods used and the issues explored.

Table 1
Synthesis of methods applied, themes and temporal span covered, and quantitative density.

Methods Data characteristics

Themes covered Data acquisition time Temporal span covered Quantitative density

Participant observation Daily life August 2007 until Contemporary issues Constant presence in the village
Livelihood diversification February 2008 and the surrounding bush
Household composition, earnings and practices
Ethnic/cultural differences and perceptions
Role of agriculture
Cattle ownership
Impact of projects

Semi-structured Economic, cultural, biophysical changes over time August 2007 until Pre-1950 65 conducted
interviews Cause of changes February 2008 Past 50 years Differentiated according to age,
Adaptive response to changes over time Contemporary issues gender, social status, ethnicity,
Historical developments/events place of residence
Ethnic/cultural differences and perceptions
Climate perceptions

Questionnaire survey Biophysical, agricultural, and livelihood December 2007 Past 40 years 50 out of 104 heads of
changes over time and January 2008 Contemporary issues households interviewed
Causes of changes
Adaptive response to changes over time
Climate perceptions
Household composition, earnings and practices

Focus group interviews Economic, cultural, biophysical changes over tune December 2007 Past 50 years 12 conducted
Causes of changes and January 2008 Contemporary issues Differentiated according to
Adaptive response to changes over time age, gender, social status,
Climate perceptions and ethnicity
Ethnic/cultural differences arid perceptions

GPS measurement Household location within village territory November 2007 Current Total field acreage
Size of fields and January 2008 Mapping of all household

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The semi-structured interviews, the focus group interviews,

and the questionnaire, were structured in such a way that for each
category of questions, the respondents were asked to assess the
current situation (e.g. main income source; number of animals;
field size; etc.), then describe the main changes (if any) to these
over the past 50 years and finally, assess the main causes of these
changes (if any). No explicit indication of the focus on climate
factors was presented for respondents at this stage in order to
minimize biases in the answers. At the end of the interviews, the
focus group discussions, and the questionnaire, the respondents
were asked to assess their perception of climate change generally
and the perceived impacts of this on a range of livelihood
parameters. When impacts were assessed as negative, the
respondents were asked to explain their adaptive actions to
respond to these impacts. All interviews were conducted in Fulani,
the local language, with the help of interpreters.

3. Biidi 2

Biidi 2 is located approximately 14 km south-west of Gorom-

Gorom, the provincial capital of Oudalan Province (see Fig. 1).
Oudalan belongs to the drier part of the Sahelian zone of Burkina
Faso, which receives around 400 mm of precipitation annually. The
landscape in the region is dominated by vast, ancient pediplains,
cut by temporal rivers and two longitudinal E–W oriented dune
systems superimposed on the pediplain (Reenberg and Fog, 1995).
Biidi 2 is, like many other villages in this region, situated on one
of these dunes, and surrounded by more or less continuous fields.
The fields are mainly located on the pediplains and millet, sorghum
and cowpeas are grown (Rasmussen and Reenberg, 1992;
Reenberg and Paarup-Laursen, 1997). The dune is rimmed on its
southern side by gardens. Traditionally agriculture, pastoralism,
and some gardening have been the major components of the local
livelihood strategies. In recent decades, however, additional
components have been added to the livelihood portfolio as it will
be discussed in the following section. Fig. 1. Map of Burkina Faso showing the location of Biidi 2.
Three ethnic groups currently inhabit Biidi 2: Rimaiibe,
numbering 302 individuals, Fulbe, 167, and Wahilbe, 116 (as of
January 2008). Of these, 246 are under the age of 15, constituting cooked food, or engaged in other labour intensive tasks like house
42% of the total population. Wahilbe, who are blacksmiths, construction. Both Fulbe and Rimaiibe elders stated in interviews
constitute a kind of professional ‘caste’, separating them from that they were not paid for this, although they were given food and
the two other groups (see also Riesman, 1977); they are not dealt clothing. According to the villagers, slavery was made illegal
with in this paper. Many of the people ‘belonging’ to the village towards the end of the colonial period, but it was not until the coup
territory actually live in the surrounding bush and the village d’etat by Thomas Sankara in 1983 that the practice was fully
centre itself is populated almost exclusively by Rimaiibe and abandoned in the village.
Wahilbe. Only one Fulbe household, consisting of seven individuals,
is located within the village centre. Fig. 2 illustrates this spatial 4. Climate
location of Fulbe habitation in relation to the village centre.
Comparison with population enumeration done in the village in Concern about climate change and its impact on human
1995 by Reenberg and Paarup-Laursen (1997) shows that the populations in the Sahel since the 1970s was an immediate
village has had an annual population growth rate of 3.8% since response to these most recent of recurrent drought periods
then. (Nicholson, 1978; Watts, 1983; Brook, 1993; Webb, 1995; MaCann,
Biidi 2 was founded some 125 years ago by Fulbe coming from 1999; Rain, 1999). Averaged over 30-year intervals, annual rainfall
the north, bringing with them their slaves, the Rimaiibe.2 in the Sahel fell by between 20 and 30% between the 1930s and the
Traditionally, Rimaiibe children were born into a family owned 1950s and the three decades following the 1960s, prompting
by a Fulbe family. With no social standing besides that of slave, they Hulme to state, much in accord with Nicholson (1978), that ‘‘[t]he
were viewed and categorised alongside other types of wealth like African Sahel therefore provides the most dramatic example
cattle and material goods and they were often removed from their worldwide of climatic variability that has been directly and
family by their Fulbe owners around the age of 6–8 years, and boys quantitatively measured’’ (2001, p. 20).
were put to work in the gardens or fields, and girls began domestic No meteorological records for Biidi 2 exist, but in the nearest
work (see also Riesman, 1977, 1992; Bolwig and Paarup-Laursen, larger town, Gorom-Gorom, monthly rainfall data have been
1999). They worked alongside other Rimaiibe who minded their collected since 1955 (see Fig. 3). This dataset indicates that the
masters’ children and small domestic animals, prepared and region has gone through much the same change as the rest of the
Sahel: the wet 1950s and 1960s were followed by a prolonged dry
2
In Fulani, the word for slave is diimaajo, in plural, rimaiibe. Rimaiibe also means spell lasting from the early 1970s until the 1990s. The general
‘‘those who have not given birth’’. trend seen elsewhere in the Sahel towards more rain in the late
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 J.Ø. Nielsen, A. Reenberg / Global Environmental Change 20 (2010) 142–152 145

Fig. 2. Map showing the village territory and the placement of Fulbe households in the bush and in relation to the village centre. The households were mapped by GPS in the
course of field work in 2007. The spatial location of Fulbe households in the bush is closely related to Fulbe notions of freedom and personal integrity. For Fulbe, the bush is a
space free from the social constraints they feel exist in the village. Consequently, 19 out of 20 (only 16 are captured in the map) Fulbe households in Biidi 2 are located in the
bush. This spatial preference has major consequences for Fulbe engagement in labour migration, development work, and women’s economic activities.

1990s and early 2000s is also evident in the dataset from Gorom-
Gorom (Nicholson, 2005; OECD, 2006).
Despite the general improvement in rainfall in recent years,
both Rimaiibe and Fulbe are very concerned about the current inter-
annual and inter-seasonal fluctuations (Table 2). Generally, the
villagers perceive rainfall to be less predictable today than 40 years
ago and to have a larger number of ‘false starts’ making it
extremely difficult to know when to sow crops. The villagers
perceive the rainy season is shorter with more dense periods of
rain, often resulting in either flooding or drought. Interestingly, the
villagers argue that more intense rainfall in August make the bush
‘‘green’’. Temperatures during both the cold and the hot season are
also said to have risen in recent years. The wind is likewise
perceived to have increased, causing more pronounced movement
of sand, filling up river beds and destroying crops. Besides drought,
flooding and the movement of sand, the villagers mention
degradation of the soil, the disappearance of plants, trees, wild
fauna and watering holes, and growing problems with pests as
consequences of climatic alterations; all of these factors make rain-
fed agriculture difficult.
5. Livelihood diversification
Ethnic variations are known to be an important factor
influencing agricultural strategies (Reenberg and Fog, 1995). But
in Biidi 2 no large differences between Fulbe and Rimaiibe exists.
Evaluation given by local informants in interviews stresses that
agricultural and pastoral strategies have become more uniform
over the last 30 or so years. This conform well with the picture of
Fulbe observed across the Sahel who has in general abandoned

Fig. 3. Annual rainfall in Gorom-Gorom, 1955–2006. The graph illustrate that the general rainfall trend seen in the Sahel is mirrored in the study region: the wet 1950s and
1960s is followed by a prolonged dry spell lasting until the early 1990s. The general trend towards more rain in the Sahel in the 1990s and early 2000s is also seen in Gorom-
Gorom. The greater inter-annual rainfall variability noted by the villagers in Biidi 2 is captured in the graph. Note, for example, that the wettest year on record is 2003 and the
driest year 2004. Source: Direction de la Météorologie, Burkina Faso.

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Table 2
Perception of climate change in Biidi 2 the last 40 years based on household questionnaire interviews. N = 50 (Nielsen and Reenberg, 2009).

More/longer Stable Less/shorter Do not know

Rainfall
Rainfall during rainy season 16 (32%) 3 (6%) 31 (62%) 0 (0%)
Length of rainy season 13 (26%) 3 (6%) 30 (60%) 4 (8%)
Break between rainfalls in rainy season 37 (74%) 0 (0%) 7 (14%) 6 (12%)
Rainfall intensity 18 (36%) 0 (0%) 30 (60%) 2 (4%)
Inundations 31 (62%) 1 (2%) 15 (30%) 3 (6%)

Wind
Strong winds during rainy season 38 (76%) 3 (6%) 2 (4%) 7 (14%)
Length (time) of strong winds during rainy season 36 (72%) 3 (6%) 3 (6%) 8 (16%)
Strong winds during dry season 38 (76%) 4 (8%) 4 (8%) 4 (8%)
Length (time) of strong winds during dry season 34 (68%) 3 (6%) 3 (6%) 10 (20%)
Movement of sand due to wind 45 (90%) 0 (0%) 5 (10%) 0 (0%)

Temperatures
During the dry season 46 (92%) 2 (4%) 2 (4%) 0 (0%)
During the rainy season 35 (70%) 6 (12%) 9 (18%) 0 (0%)
During the hot season 48 (96%) 0 (0%) 2 (4%) 0 (0%)
During the cold season 36 (72%) 0 (0%) 14 (28%) 0 (0%)

pastoralism in order to engage in other livelihood activities and
mainly rain-fed agriculture (De Bruijn and Dijk, 1995; Hampshire,
2004). Former times’ differences between Fulbe, who depended
mainly on livestock, and Rimaiibe, who depended on millet
cultivation, has thus gradually disappeared and developed into a
more homogenous pattern in which both groups are now
permanently settled in and around the village and equally engaged
in millet cultivation and livestock (see also Reenberg and Fog,
1995; Reenberg and Paarup-Laursen, 1997).
Even in the best of years, however, the harvest meets only
between 7 and 9 months’ requirement for food, and this only for the
largest and most efficient households. In 2007 and 2008, to mention
the two most recent campaigns, the household with the largest fields
and the best access to labour power only produced enough cereals to
cover the households’ need for 7 months and 2 months, respectively.
The low yield combined with the intensive demand for labour
(sowing, weeding and harvesting) have resulted in four Rimaiibe
households giving up rain-fed agriculture altogether and many more
are thinking about doing the same because ‘‘it is simply not worth
the effort’’, as it was often expressed in interviews.
Over the last 30 years Rimaiibe have continuously responded to
unreliable outcomes from rain-fed agriculture by diversifying their
livelihoods, as a consequence off-farm livelihood strategies
represent today the mainstay of their income. A large number of
strategies are present in the village. Both Fulbe and Rimaiibe rated,
however, in semi-structured and focus group interviews, migra-
tion, development work, gardening and small-scale commerce as
the most important. Hence, in the 43 interviews in which the
interviewee were asked to weigh the most important strategies
these four were unanimously mentioned. In the twelve focus group
interviews the result was the same. This, the interviewees
explained, is due to the income which these strategies generate
vis-à-vis others like fishing, brick making, and fire wood collecting.
Moreover, the stability and dependability over time of these
strategies were mentioned as important factors.
It is hard to assess precisely the actual income generated by
engaging in these off-farm livelihood strategies due to a lack of
accounting and secrecy of earnings, but most Rimaiibe households
in general seem to earn enough money to buy food to last the
whole year.3 In addition to food, the money is used for clothing,
3
Rimaiibe often stated in daily conversation and in interviews that ‘‘we earn
enough to buy food until next harvest’’. Most households buy millet immediately
after harvest from more fertile regions of Burkina Faso and store this in granaries
next to their huts.
119
medicine, tools, animals, commercial activities and to meet social
obligations like marriage, baptisms and funerals. The growing
importance of livelihood diversification over the last 30 years is
supported by comparison with a study done in Biidi 2 in 1995 by
Reenberg and Fog (1995), who note that in the early 1990s, off-
farm strategies only rarely supplemented agricultural production,
whereas today, they are common among the Rimaiibe.
For Fulbe, the situation is rather different. They have not
diversified to the same extent despite being just as involved in
rain-fed agriculture as Rimaiibe – i.e. Fulbe and Rimaiibe household
members are equally engaged in sowing, weeding and harvesting,
they have similar total field acreage (see also Reenberg and Fog,
1995) and, according to the villagers, the same crop production
outcome. In line with Rimaiibe, none of the 20 Fulbe heads of
households in Biidi 2 considered the harvest sufficient and many
mentioned, when asked to rate the most important problem for
household well-being, the lack of food. It should be noted that
there is growing awareness among primarily young Fulbe men in
the village that a strict Fulbe identity and the continued emphasis
on agriculture may be a hindrance to their economic betterment
(see also Bolwig, 1999, p. 147). Some of the young Fulbe men
mention that migration, working for development projects,
gardening and small-scale commerce are good ways to better
your position, and although these strategies are not perceived as
particularly attractive due to cultural reasons, many of them are
considerably getting involved as ‘‘the millet do not last’’. A similar
process was also observed among other groups of Fulbe in Northern
Burkina Faso (see Buhl and Homewood, 2001; Hampshire, 2006).
5.1. Labour migration
Rimaiibe is well known to have a long history of labour
migration (Bolwig, 1999). However, the drought in the beginning
of the 1970s and its prolonged aftermath played a significant role
in consolidating the importance of labour migration seen in Biidi 2
as well as in the rest of Sahel over the last 30–40 years (Cleveland,
1991; Findley, 1994; David, 1995; De Bruijn and Dijk, 1995; Cordell
et al., 1996; Rain, 1999; Hampshire and Randall, 1999, 2000;
Mortimore and Adams, 2001; Henry et al., 2004; Hampshire, 2006).
Almost all young Rimaiibe men left after the drought for Abidjan,
Côte d’Ivoire, to earn money, primarily for food, and labour
migration became very important for household survival.
The importance of labour migration has been consolidated, and
each year, after the agricultural activities have ended in November
and December, a large proportion of Rimaiibe men leave. Hence in
 J.Ø. Nielsen, A. Reenberg / Global Environmental Change 20 (2010) 142–152
December 2008, ten youths between 15 and 25 years left, followed
in the beginning of January by three more, for a total of 36% of this
age group. Among the men aged between 25 and 35, seven out of
25, or 28%, left. And among the men older than 35 years, eight out
of 50, or 16%, left. Two other Rimaiibe aged 24 and 28 were already
in Abidjan, living in a small rented room. The value of this
accommodation is closely related to its location near a marketplace
where all the Rimaiibe men from the village work, loading and off-
loading trucks and buses during the day. At night, they all work as
private security guards. During this 24-h working day, only
interrupted by slow periods in the marketplace, during which they
return to the room to sleep, the men explained they earn between
US$5 and US$30 per day. The average amount the men return
home to the village with after 6 months, after all expenses such as
food and transport have been paid, is around US$200 to US$300.4
This money is used to meet social obligations, to buy food, clothes,
medicine, gardening tools and seeds, but is also reinvested in
cattle, small stock and small commercial activities.
Fulbe did not to the same extent establish a tradition for labour
migration in the 1970s and 1980s as they had built up large herds
of cattle during the wetter 1950s and 1960s. They dealt with the
shortage of food in the 1970s and early 1980s largely by selling
cattle. Among Fulbe in Biidi 2, this lesson is very important, and
they continue to place heavy importance on cattle as an
‘‘insurance against bad times’’ as they often stated it. This is
exemplified in their emphasis on the practice of transhumance,
which takes place between December and June each year.5 Of the
41 Fulbe men between 20 and 50 years of age in the village, 17, or
42%, practiced transhumance in December, 2008. As labour
migration takes place during the same period, only three Fulbe
men left for Côte d’Ivoire.
A substantial number of the cattle that Fulbe bring on
transhumance do, however, not belong to them but to Rimaiibe.6
The selling of cattle to deal with the food shortage experienced
in the aftermath of the droughts left many Fulbe in Biidi 2 with
very little or no cattle. 35% (7 out of 20) of Fulbe households in
Biidi 2 has currently no cattle and in all but three households the
number of cattle has dwindled over the last 20 years. 4 Fulbe
households own only one or two cows. Rimaiibe pays Fulbe to
take their cattle on transhumance but this salary is minimal in
comparison to the income which can be earned on labour
migration. Moreover, Rimaiibe men use the money earned while
in Abidjan to buy cattle and consequently they have manage, in
contrast to most Fulbe, to enlarge their herds. The continued
practice of transhumance among Fulbe thus seems to be
connected to other variables than economy; a point to which
we will return.
5.2. Working for development projects
In the aftermath of the drought and famine of the 1970s and
early 1980s, a plethora of development projects, the majority of
which owed their existence to international aid, entered Burkina
Faso, in particular the northern part, as this was perceived to be the
most vulnerable to food shortage (Atampugre, 1997). The impetus
for these organisations and for governmental aid was the desire to
4
This estimate is based on interviews with men having been to Abidjan within
the last 5 years.
5
Taking a herd of cattle often southward towards the end of the dry season in
order to find pasture and water.
6
The cattle are pooled together and a herd taken on transhumance therefore
often consist of cattle owned by different men. It was relatively hard to establish the
exact composition of these herds. However, in the herds taken by 7 out of the 17
men going the branding on the cattle was recorded. In all of these herds the majority
of cattle belonged to Rimaiibe. In subsequent interviews this trend was confirmed
except in 5 herds which consisted exclusively of Fulbe owned cattle.
120
147
alleviate the problems of poor socio-economic infrastructure and
food and livelihood security (Batterbury and Warren, 2001). The
early development efforts focussed on ‘modern’ technical inter-
ventions designed to boost and transform agricultural and
rangeland productivity, but for various reasons these failed (see
Vivian, 1994; Carney, 1998), and the focus shifted to reforms in
which issues of gender, cultural pluralism, better targeting of aid,
and support to local institutions became important (Carney, 1998;
Samoff, 2004).
In Biidi 2, the impact of development projects was first felt
around 1992–3, and since then, there have been around 20
projects carried out in the village. The projects arrive each year at
the end of the agricultural season. The lengths of time a project
stay in the village depend on its scale and aim. The larger projects
like PLCE/BN work in the village over many years (up to 5 years)
and are often involved in major undertakings such as planting
trees and bushes to fixate the dune or constructing dikes in the
fields against surface water and soil run-off.7 Other projects stay a
short time, providing ‘only’ advice or small goods like buckets and
classroom materials.
Rimaiibe explicitly attribute enormous importance to projects
like PLCE/BN because many of them provide salaried work. In Biidi
2 a ‘development project committee’ consisting of a president and
a treasurer is in charge of the payment of these salaries. Every
villagers employed by a particular project is listed by name and
each day the president record who worked. This list is copied and
handed over to a local representative of the project in question and
some time later the money arrives to the village. The treasurer then
redistribute this money according to days worked and age. The
projects pay very similarly and on average around US$3 for 1 day’s
work.8 They employ local people (male, female, and children) for
around 30 days a year. Children under 18 are paid half the salary of
adults over 18 years of age. As project employment, however,
collide in time with labour migration, school and transhumance it
is often only two or a maximum of three household members that
are de facto available to work for projects during a given year.
Rimaiibe households thus commonly earn around US$150 a year
working for projects, meaning that this activity rates only second
to labour migration as a source of cash revenue in the village. The
money is used for food and to reinvest in other economic activities.
All Rimaiibe households but 3 out of 64 engaged in this activity in
2007 and 2008.
Fulbe engagement with projects is almost non-existent.
Transhumance is part of the explanation, as it takes place at the
same time of year, but Fulbe are often unaware of the presence of
projects in Biidi 2 during the initial and most crucial phase in which
the project workers, in collaboration with the villagers, define the
problems, find solutions, and hire the people needed to realise the
projects. A major reason behind the absence of Fulbe is that the
project workers always come to the village centre and Fulbe by
cultural tradition live in the surrounding bush and are therefore
rarely around when ‘staff’ are hired. Fulbe often mentioned in
interviews and during daily conversations that their reluctance to
work on projects might become less pronounced if the projects
came to them in the bush. They acknowledge, however, that this is
unlikely to happen ‘‘as the projects only want to help the village
and Rimaiibe’’. Not surprisingly, only three Fulbe men and no
women worked on projects during the study period, interviews
revealed that this trend was mirrored in past Fulbe engagement in
projects.
7
Programme de Lutte Contre l’Ensablement dans le Basin du Niger.
8
This estimate is based upon actual observations of payment of development
work salary in the village by the first author and interviews with development
representatives and villagers.
148 J.Ø. Nielsen, A. Reenberg / Global Environmental Change 20 (2010) 142–152
5.3. Gardens
Blessed with the constant presence of groundwater just
below the land surface, the gardens are supplied by small
wells from which the owners fetch water for cash crops like
tomatoes, potatoes, watermelon and onion, sold at the nearby
markets in Tassmakat and Gorom-Gorom.9 The importance of
the gardens is hence twofold. On the one hand, they are
relatively independent of rainfall variability and drought, and on
the other, they enable production of crops which have a
commercial value.
Most villagers go to the market sporadically, but they generally
try to go to one of the markets every week particularly during the
agricultural off-season where most garden products are produced.
Normally, only one person represents the household at the market
and on an average market day she (it is often the women that go)
makes between US$3 and US$4, averaging around US$100 a year a
household.10 The money is used for food and reinvested in the
gardens and in other economic activities such as animals and
small-scale commerce. The importance of gardens is clearly
illustrated by the fact that four Rimaiibe households have given
up rain-fed agriculture altogether over the past 8 years in order to
concentrate full time on the gardens, something many more are
also thinking of doing because ‘‘the gardens don’t depend on the
rain’’, as it is always argued.
The ownership of gardens is, however, not evenly distributed
between the two ethnic groups. Of the 62 old and well-established
gardens in the village, only four are currently worked and owned
by Fulbe. The major reason behind this state of affairs is to be found
in post-colonial legislation and the end of slavery.
The coup d’etat by Thomas Sankara in 1983 initiated a
number of progressive ideas (Wilkins, 1989). He championed
women’s rights, anti-corruption initiatives, and the breakdown
of the rigid hierarchical structures keeping village chiefs and
certain ethnic groups, mainly the Mossi, in power. This discourse
was heard by the Rimaiibe in Biidi 2, and there, as in the rest of
Burkina Faso, Sankara sparked people’s imagination (Skinner,
1988; Wilkins, 1989; Malley, 1999). More important for Rimaiibe
in Biidi 2, however, was a concrete piece of legislation called the
Agrarian and Land Reorganization (RAF), enacted in 1984, whose
principal effect was to declare that all land belonged to the state
(Faura, 1995, p. 5–6; Lund, 1999; McCauley, 2003, p. 8). The idea
was to give ‘land to the tiller’, through usufruct rights, clearing
the way for the use and benefit of land by the ones currently
working it (McCauley, 2003). As the slaves were working in the
gardens, Rimaiibe now had the rights to the gardens and the
products they produced, and they have held on to them ever
since. Ten new gardens have been established over the last 10
years, all by Rimaiibe, and in a new garden project giving
away small garden plots, only two out of 36 plots were taken by
Fulbe.
5.4. Women’s work
The role of women constitutes another important livelihood
difference between the two groups. Rimaiibe women have become
very economically active since the 1980s and in only six of the 64
Rimaiibe households in Biidi 2 did women not to some extent
participate in the cash economy during the study period. This was
due to old age. Asked about the reason behind this development,
households unanimously mentioned the increased resilience of the
household due to the cash income generated by women; in some
9
The word biidi means in Fulani ‘old wells’ or ‘constant presence of water’.
10
This estimate is based on interviews with women and men regularly attending
the markets.
121
Rimaiibe households, women now contribute up to half the total
income or more.11 Generated by the women working for projects
and/or engaging in small-scale commerce such as selling mats,
food, garden produce and small domestic animals, the cash is used
to buy food, medicine, clothes, jewellery, and to invest in animals,
education, seeds or other material for their gardens, looms, or
houses. Among Fulbe, women in only two out of 20 households
engaged substantially in any form of work aimed at earning cash.
6. Cultural pathways of adaptation
These four means of livelihood diversification have been
instrumental for enhancing Rimaiibe’s ability to cope with the
climate change experienced in Biidi 2 over the last 30–40 years.
Considering that the diminishing importance of rain-fed agricul-
ture and the growing dependence on cash due to the lack and
variability of the rain is equally crucial for the Fulbe that are settled
in Biidi 2, a very pressing question becomes why Fulbe have not
latched on to these strategies to the same extent. The explanation
for this has already been sought in Fulbe’s traditional anchoring in a
pastoral culture with its emphasis on transhumance despite them
not having large herds, and in wider contextual factors such as the
development projects emphasis on working with those present in
the village, and new legislation on changing land ownership.
Clearly, these factors are important with regard to the strategies
embraced by Fulbe and highlight that adaptation to climate change
is rarely undertaken in a ‘‘stand-alone fashion’’ (Adger et al., 2007,
p. 737).
During fieldwork it became clear, however, that another factor
was at play and that this to a very large extent shaped Fulbe
reluctance to engage in labour migration, development work,
gardening and women’s work. Fulbe were in no way prevented by
either the projects or Rimaiibe from embracing these strategies and
it puzzled them (and us) why this does not take place. Why, for
example, do Fulbe simply not move to the village or, at the very
least, make sure they are informed of the arrival of new projects?
Why do they not clear land to make gardens, or turn up in larger
numbers when project organisers ‘hand out’ garden plots? Why do
they not go on labour migration in larger numbers instead of
transhumance? And why do Fulbe women not, like their Rimaiibe
counterparts, engage more actively in economic activities, thereby
enhancing their household’s resilience?
These questions became even more pressing as Fulbe were all
very aware of the benefits these strategies gave Rimaiibe as this
could be observed on a daily basis; Rimaiibe are generally perceived
by Fulbe to be richer, better fed, dressed and educated, and to have
more animals. Fulbe often stated that this is because Rimaiibe ‘‘do
what they do and earn money’’. Money they invest in food, clothes,
cell phones, motorbikes, education, gardening tools, farm equip-
ment, and animals, ‘‘and that is why they do better than us’’, as it
was stated by two older Fulbe women in an interview.
In the following, we will aim at explaining Fulbe’s lack of
engagement in strategies, which they are not prevented from
undertaking and clearly seeing the material benefits of, in terms of
cultural barriers among Fulbe.
6.1. Living in the bush
A major hindrance to the engagement by Fulbe in labour
migration, development work, and women’s work is their
preference to live in the bush (ladde) in small isolated households
(see Fig. 2). This preference is closely related to Fulbe notions of
freedom and personal integrity. For Fulbe, the bush is a space free
11
Women’s income was established through interviews with both men and
women. The buying power of women could also be observed at the market.
 J.Ø. Nielsen, A. Reenberg / Global Environmental Change 20 (2010) 142–152
from the physical and social constraints they feel exist in the
village (wuro) and is subsequently seen as a place of individual
freedom. Unlike the village, the bush is moreover a place where
self-control and endurance are required as you depend for survival
upon your ability to control your bodily needs, often through lack
of food, water, and sleep. Living in the bush captures in these ways
the central Fulbe notions of ndimaaku (personal integrity;
worthiness) as it is there you can maintain your integrity without
disturbance from the constraints imposed by village life and prove
your worthiness by surviving and thriving in the bush (see also
Riesman, 1977; De Bruijn and Dijk, 1994; Bolwig, 1999). When
asked about why they preferred to live in the bush, Fulbe
accordingly always gave personal freedom as the major reason:
‘‘Out here I am free. . . I don’t have to worry about what my
neighbours does, where my animals are, I just have to look after
myself and my family’’. Permanent villages are moreover
historically made up of separate slave hamlets (debeere) in which
Rimaiibe live in large patrilineal compounds, which further
alienates Fulbe and discourages them from moving to the village.
Living next to your former slaves is simply not desirable and is
connected to a great degree of semteende (shame) and is therefore
only done if you have lost your ndimaaku and hence ‘‘have become
like the slaves, depending upon others’’, as it was very often
expressed in interviews and during daily conversations.
The unwillingness of Fulbe to live in the village represents a
dilemma. All Fulbe interviewed mentioned that there are great
economic advantages to living in the village vis-à-vis the bush.
These advantages were all related to the increased importance of
livelihood diversification due to the lack and variability of the rain
and how village residence facilitates this diversification. Fulbe do
go on labour migration (see Hampshire, 2006) but not to the same
extent as Rimaiibe – something already partly connected to their
practice of transhumance – but another major reason is that living
in small isolated households in the bush makes it harder for the
men to migrate because, as Hamiidou, a middle-aged Fulbe father
of five, said ‘‘us men are expected to protect our wife and children’’.
In the village, men from a debeere can leave for Abidjan if a cousin,
brother, uncle or other male relative from the debeere stays behind.
This is not possible for Fulbe, since the men who can be spared
prefer to herd livestock and because leaving a household isolated
in the bush without male protection is considered dangerous.
The importance for male labour migration and other gainful
activities of having others close by is mirrored in women’s work. In
the village, the women belonging to a debeere spend most of their
day together. A large part of the day is spent on preparing food,
which is very labour intensive. But the women often assist each
other in pounding millet, freeing time for other chores. Similarly,
they help mind each other’s children and small domestic animals,
again freeing time. Often, the free time created by working
together is utilised by the women to make mats and sauce, work in
their gardens and fields and for development projects, tend to their
animals, and go to the market, where they sell their garden
produce, animals, food, and/or mats. Because Fulbe women live in
isolation from other households, they cannot combine forces to the
same extent. They spend most of their day preparing food and
looking after their children, which leaves them very little time to
engage in economic activities like their Rimaiibe counterparts (see,
however, Buhl and Homewood, 2001). Fulbe women lament this
situation to some extent and would like to be more active in
economic activities. This is related to the power vis-à-vis their
husbands. Fulbe women see Rimaiibe women gain power through
their growing economic importance in the household, but they also
see the reduced vulnerability of the household resulting from such
activities. Fatimata, a young Fulbe woman with three small
children, captured these sentiments: ‘‘They [Rimaiibe women]
do not always have to ask their husbands for money and they [the
122
149
husbands] listen to them because they have money. . . they also eat
better because they can buy food’’. Fulbe men acknowledge both
aspects, particularly the former. Fulbe men see the growing power
of the Rimaiibe women as a confirmation of the moral and personal
weakness of Rimaiibe men as people ‘‘easily manipulated and
pushed around’’, and their reluctance towards living in the village
must thus also be seen in this light.
6.2. Appropriate work and ethnic identity
Fulbe and Rimaiibe are not only defined by cultural traits, but
also by occupational specialisation. Occupation is thus closely
related to ethnicity and contrasting occupations are a very
common way to illustrate ethnic differences in Biidi 2 and in this
area generally (see also Riesman, 1977, pp. 116–117). Crucially,
this process of differentiation based upon occupation is related by
Fulbe in Biidi 2 to other stereotypical traits such as body posture,
skin colour, perceived intelligence, physical endurance and
behaviour. This means that not only is occupational transgression,
or doing the work of another ethnic group, a challenge to ethnic
status but also a potential embracement of psychological and
physical stereotypes deemed ‘non Fulbe’ (see Coulthard, 2008 for a
similar argument from India).
For Fulbe, it is among their ex-slaves that one finds most clearly
expressed everything that is the opposite of what they perceive
themselves to be (see also Hampshire, 2004), and therefore doing
the work of the slaves presents an existential challenge. Labour
migration, working for development projects and in the gardens
are by Fulbe viewed as slave work, requiring a number of both
mental and physical attributes that they do not see themselves as
having or desiring. In contrast, Fulbe view Rimaiibe as perfectly
suited for this type of work. Fulbe describe Rimaiibe as black, short,
stocky and physically strong, making them very suited to bending
over and working hard in the sun. Fulbe in Biidi 2 often stated in
interviews and during daily conversations that Rimaiibe are less
intelligent and therefore perceived to be suited to do repetitive
work all day without getting bored or frustrated. In contrast, Fulbe
view themselves as upright, slender, refined, light-skinned and
cultivated (see also Riesman, 1977, p. 127), traits which,
according to Fulbe in Biidi 2, make them incompatible with the
type of work required in the gardens, projects and on labour
migration, as such work is rightly understood to take place in the
sun, requiring a lot of bending over, lifting and pushing. To do this
type of work was therefore often deemed beneath Fulbe and
shameful (semteende).
The Fulbe lack of engagement in development projects is
similarly associated with Fulbe understandings of themselves.
The projects do neither exclude Fulbe nor target Rimaiibe, but
Fulbe in Biidi 2 see projects as the extended arm of a central
government of which they have been suspicious ‘‘since the first
whites arrived here’’ (see also Lund, 1999). This suspicion,
interviews revealed, was to a large degree due to the abandon-
ment of slavery during both the colonial and post-colonial period
and the resulting undermining of Fulbe access to labour and
gardens, but also to the fact that Fulbe view themselves as a free
and independent people unaccustomed to and uneasy about
being subjected to ‘‘foreign rule’’ (Lund, 1999). Again, the Rimaiibe
were used as a contrasting image and Fulbe explain their
engagement with projects as a result of them being used to be
‘‘bossed around’’ and told what to do ‘‘because they are slaves’’. To
work for others, and in particular on projects where the work is
always extremely physical and repetitive therefore does not
appeal to Fulbe in Biidi 2 as it equates them with their former
slaves. Accordingly, they often ridicule the three Fulbe men
actually working for projects by treating them like slaves, telling
them to fetch or do things.
150 J.Ø. Nielsen, A. Reenberg / Global Environmental Change 20 (2010) 142–152
6.3. The most Fulbe of work: transhumance
This Fulbe love of freedom epitomised in their preference to live
in the bush and their rejection of acting like slaves by working for
projects and doing menial and repetitive work like gardening and
labour migration, is also captured in that most Fulbe of work,
transhumance (Riesman, 1977, p. 70), which is the occupational
specialisation associated with Fulbe in this region (Milleville, 1991;
Raynaut, 1997; Hampshire, 2006).
Transhumance has in the past turned out to be a successful way
for Fulbe to deal with the transient biophysical setting of northern
Sahel as it negate localised drought. Over the last 20 or so years,
however, Fulbe in Biidi 2 mentioned that practicing transhumance
is becoming increasingly difficult, less necessary, and not the most
efficient way to increase the herd.
The difficulty associated with transhumance is, according to
Fulbe, that the traditional destinations and particularly the ‘‘land of
the Mossi’’ – as the central plateau of Burkina Faso is called in Biidi 2
– is becoming increasingly cultivated and populated, restricting
access to watering holes and grazing areas (see, however, Breusers
et al., 1998). Stories told by Fulbe returning from the ‘land of Mossi’
often pivots around conflicts with Mossi farmers and they are
consequently looking for other places to go. However, Fulbe do not
really need to go. The bush surrounding Biidi 2 provides enough
fodder and water for their cattle: ‘‘The bush is green and here is
enough water. I don’t need to take my cattle to the land of the
Mossi, but I still go despite problems [with Mossi farmers]’’.
Moreover, Fulbe, like Layya just quoted, acknowledge that
engaging in livelihood diversification strategies and particularly
labour migration enables Rimaiibe men to buy and keep cattle, i.e.
to augment their herds. A group of older Fulbe men stated in a focus
group discussion that ‘‘Rimaiibe men come home from Abidjan
with enough money to buy cattle. It is good to have cattle. In harsh
times they can be sold, but many Rimaiibe men do not even do that.
They make more money in other ways and their herds grow’’. This
view is echoed by young Fulbe men. They similarly argue that
labour migration and other income generating strategies result in
larger herds and they regret that practicing transhumance prevent
them from participating in these activities as they collide in time:
‘‘Going to Abidjan and transhumance both takes place after
harvest. That is unfortunate, really, for we can see how Rimaiibe
men our age make a lot more money than us. Money they often
invest in cattle. Cattle are the best way to deal with problems. They
can always be sold. That was how our fathers dealt with the big
droughts when we were small’’.
Fulbe are, in other words, well aware that transhumance is
currently associated with difficulty, not strictly necessary, and not
an advantageous economic activity as it vis-à-vis labour migration
for example do not augment the herd or prevent the selling of
cattle to buy food; yet they continue to do it. Abdoulaye, a young
Fulbe man, captures why: ‘‘We like it; it is pulaade [to act like a
Fulbe]’’. Being in the bush with the animals, often far from home,
provides freedom, solitude, independence and the means by which
the men become alert, cunning and enduring; psychological
attributes all deemed quintessentially Fulbe and associated with
ndimaaku and the more encompassing concept of pulaaku, or Fulbe
identity. They also perceive their build as physically suited for
walking with the cattle. ‘‘We are built to do it’’, was a frequently
given explanation, followed by ‘‘and we are the ones that know
cattle’’. Fulbe perceive themselves as experts on cattle, and they
take great pride in their knowledge of them, mainly gained while
on transhumance. While Fulbe do not consider their close
relationship with cattle during transhumance as being the cause
of their ‘‘cultural and psychological peculiarities’’ (Riesman, 1977,
p. 119), they often use their knowledge about cattle to distinguish
themselves from Rimaiibe. Because Rimaiibe today have as many
123
cattle (if not more) as Fulbe and maintain that they too know about
cattle even though they do not go on transhumance, transhumance
has taken on more importance as a distinguishing occupation for
Fulbe. Fulbe maintain that transhumance provides them with a way
to ‘‘know the cattle’’ in its most intimate details, setting them apart
from Rimaiibe, who are ‘‘ignorant about cattle’’ because they do not
to the same extent go on transhumance. Transhumance represents
in this way, like many of the other activities that Fulbe do or do not
do, aspects of what being Fulbe is all about, as it encapsulates
certain psychological and bodily traits deemed Fulbe and reinforces
the differences between Fulbe and Rimaiibe. Fulbe in Biidi 2 are
consequently reluctant to give up on transhumance mainly due to
existential and cultural reasons, despite the fact that transhu-
mance is associated with difficulties, not strictly necessary, and
stands in the way of often more economically viable strategies
such as labour migration.
In sum, Fulbe are well aware of the potential benefits of labour
migration, development work, women’s work and gardens, as they
daily observe how these strategies benefit Rimaiibe by providing
them with cash so crucial for household survival, but they are
unwilling to fully embrace these strategies because they entail
attributes deemed ‘non Fulbe’. In this way, Fulbe can be viewed as
being culturally prevented from pursuing more lucrative pathways
of adaptation, as the available or successful adaptation strategies to
the most recent climate change in Biidi 2 appear ill-suited to Fulbe
norms and values, which, in turn, can be viewed as cultural barriers
to adaptation.
7. Conclusion
Considering the growing political, academic and local aware-
ness of the necessity of adaptation to climate change, under-
standing that adaptation is defined by ‘varied sensitivities’
exhibited by different groups of actors is crucial. Adaptation to
climate change will never be a homogenous process agreed upon
by all parties, but one influenced by factors such as class, gender
and culture, to mention but a few. Acknowledging this must be a
first step for researchers, policy makers and civil society if
adaptation at the local level is to be facilitated, supported and
understood.
This paper has attempted to illustrate this heterogeneity in
adaptation to climate change by focusing on livelihood diversifica-
tion as both a process by which ‘‘rural households construct an
increasingly diverse portfolio of activities and assets in order to
survive and to improve their standard of living’’ (Ellis, 2000) and as
something determined by culture. It should be noted, however,
that the chosen approach, based on in-depth analysis of one village,
limits the generalisability of the data for the wider region. Indeed it
seems that Fulbe in other parts of the region are embracing the
strategies rejected in Biidi 2 (Buhl and Homewood, 2001;
Hampshire, 2006). Hence, cultural barriers to adaptation can only
be understood in context, which requires that the scale and agency
of decision making is defined. This is generally much less
problematic at the micro-scale, where the range of agents,
contexts and interests are less diffuse (Adger et al., 2009). This
does not, however, mean that place-based, micro-scale and
context-specific studies may not provide insights of a more
generic nature about conditions that enhance or constrain adaptive
capacity (Adger et al., 2007, p. 729). Indeed, understanding the
general importance of the role of culture in adaptation to climate
change probably depends upon micro-scale and context-specific
studies due to the contextual nature of culture (see, for example,
Tompkins, 2005; Coulthard, 2008).
In Biidi 2, Rimaiibe have taken advantage of the arrival of
development projects, the labour power of women and the wells in
the gardens and increased their labour migration in order to better
 J.Ø. Nielsen, A. Reenberg / Global Environmental Change 20 (2010) 142–152
cope with the biophysical uncertainty caused by the most recent
Sahelian droughts. Among Fulbe, livelihood adjustments are less
prominent. Reluctant to embrace the diversification strategies of
labour migration, development work and gardening, they have
effectively cut themselves off from three major adaptation
strategies available in the village. While the traditional Fulbe
preference for transhumance coupled with specific historical
developments (the end of slavery, land legislation and the focus of
development projects on helping the village) have been stressed to
play a part in their decisions, the argument in this paper has been
that the main reasons behind the persistence of this prioritization
are cultural. In particularly, the Fulbe adherence to the traditional
concepts of ndimaaku (personal integrity; worthiness), semteede
(shame) and pulaaki (Fulbe-ness) have been shown to be crucial
since the livelihood diversification options of labour migration,
gardening, and working for development projects all challenge
these concepts in substantial ways. Adaptation for Fulbe thus
presents an existential challenge as the livelihood strategies
available confront their cultural self-image and singularity quite
profoundly. Choosing against contemporary pathways of adapta-
tion by Fulbe is in this light highly understandable.
Acknowledgements
The field research was funded by a Danish Ministry of Foreign
Affairs Research Grant (Grant 104.Dan.8-914). This study was part
of the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis (AMMA)
project. Based on a French initiative, AMMA was built by an
international scientific group and is currently funded by a large
number of agencies, especially from France, UK, US and Africa. It
has been the beneficiary of a major financial contribution from the
European Community’s Sixth Framework Research Programme.
Detailed information on scientific coordination and funding is
available on the AMMA International web site: http://
www.amma-international.org. Helpful comments given by three
anonymous referees are gratefully acknowledged. I would like to
extend my thanks to the villagers of Biidi 2.
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126
 Paper D

The Outburst. Climate change, gender relations and situational analysis,

2010, accepted for publication in International Journal of Social Analysis,
2010.

127
128
The Outburst

Climate change, gender relations and situational analysis

________________________________________________________

Abstract

Since the major Sahelian droughts of the early 1970s and 1980s,

international development and aid organizations have played a large

role in the small village of Biidi 2 located in northern Burkina Faso.

This paper explores how a visit by a development ‘expert’ to the

village can be analyzed as a social situation in which normal social

control is suspended and negotiated. Focusing on gender relations, the

analysis shows how the women of Biidi 2 involved in the event were

relatively free to construct alternative definitions of their identity and

social position vis-à-vis the men.

Key words: Sahel, Burkina Faso, Climate Change, Situational

Analysis, Gender, Social Change

129
Introduction

Concern about the climate and its impact on rural populations in the

Sahel zone of West Africa was an immediate response to the most

recent of recurrent drought periods commencing in the early 1970s

(Rain 1999; Webb 1995; Brook 1993; Watts 1983; Nicholson 1978)

Averaged over thirty-year intervals, annual rainfall in this area fell by

between 20 and 30 percent between the 1930s and the 1950s and the

three decades following the 1960s, prompting Hulme (2001: 20) to

state that “[t]he African Sahel therefore provides the most dramatic

example worldwide of climatic variability that has been directly and

quantitatively measured”. It is repeatedly argued that this change in

rainfall had major economic and social consequences for the rural

populations of the Sahel zone already under stress from deteriorating

political and economic conditions (Warren 1995).

Rural communities in the Sahel have always faced climate variability

and have to a large extent been able to develop their livelihood

strategies in a way that enables them to cope with and adapt to an

unpredictable climate (Mortimore and Adams 2001). These strategies

have traditionally included crop diversification, migration and small-

scale commerce, but in the aftermath of the drought of the 1970s and

1980s a new possibility presented itself: the arrival of international

development projects. This paper explores one of the social

130
consequences of this new livelihood strategy by focusing on a

particular event that took place in Biidi 2, a small village in northern

Burkina Faso.

Following Gluckman’s (1958 [1940]) understanding of a social

situation, the visit by a development ‘expert’ and in particular, its

immediate and surprisingly antagonistic aftermath caused by an

unexpected outburst will be analyzed as an occasion of social

potentiality for the women of the village (Kapferer 2005, 2006).

Often social relationships are most clearly demonstrated and

negotiated in precisely such instances where the “concatenation of

events is so idiosyncratic as to thrown into sharp relief the principles

underlying them” (Mitchell 1983: 204). This is so because conflicts

are relatively ‘open spaces’, or ‘unstructured contexts’, in which

normal social control is revealed, suspended and/or negotiated,

leaving actors involved in the event, such as the women of Biidi 2,

relatively free to construct alternative definitions of their identity and

social positions (Kapferer 1995, Mitchell 1956). As such, conflicts

reveal how social life is not merely a function of normative rules and

ideal principles duplicating themselves endlessly, but rather an

ongoing dialectical process (Evens and Handelman 2005). In

conflicts, social relations are thus both revealed and spurred as actions

are quickly adjusted, thereby generating new social relations. This is

exactly what happened in the aftermath of the outburst as the women

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of Biidi 2 seized this opportunity in an attempt to change their position

within the village vis-à-vis the men (Kapferer 1995; Mitchell 1956).

The paper is organized as follow: first, a brief introduction to the

village, followed by a presentation of the recent climate change

experienced there. Then, two of the livelihood strategies employed in

the village to negate the effect of this climatic change are presented:

working for development projects and women’s economic activities.

The social situation is then described and, finally, the situation is

analyzed.

The Village of Biidi 2

Biidi 2 was founded some 125 years ago and is located approximately

14 km south-west of Gorom-Gorom, the provincial capital of

Oudalan, the northernmost province of Burkina Faso. The landscape

in the region is dominated by vast, ancient pediplains, cut by temporal

rivers and longitudinal E-W oriented dune systems superimposed on

the pediplain (Reenberg and Fog 1995).

Biidi 2 is, like many other villages in this region, situated on top of

one of these dunes, surrounded by more or less continuous fields. The

fields are mainly located on the pediplain and cultivated with millet,

sorghum and cowpeas (Reenberg and Paarup-Laursen 1997;

132
Rasmussen and Reenberg 1992). The dune is rimmed on its southern

side by gardens. Agriculture, pastoralism, gardening, migration,

development projects, and small-scale commerce constitute the

economic mainstays of the village.

The ethnic composition in Oudalan is complex, with several different

ethnic groups present (Claude et al. 1991). In Biidi 2, three ethnic

groups reside: Rimaiibe, numbering 302 individuals, Fulbe, 167, and

Wahilbe, 116 (as of January 2008). Of these, 246 are under the age of

15, constituting 42% of the total population. Wahilbe, qua their role as

blacksmiths, constitute a kind of professional ‘caste’, separating them

from the other two groups (see also Riesman 1977). Comparisons with

population figures from 1995 indicate that the village has had an

annual population growth rate of 3.8 percent since then (Reenberg and

Paarup-Laursen 1997). Many of the people ‘belonging’ to the village

territory actually live in the surrounding bush and the village center

itself is populated almost exclusively by Rimaiibe and Wahilbe. Only

one Fulbe household, consisting of seven individuals, is located within

the village center.

A major reason behind this spatial differentiation is the historical

master-slave relationship between Fulbe and Rimaiibe. Permanent

villages like Biidi 2 are historically made up of separate slave hamlets

(debeere) in which Rimaiibe, the former slaves of Fulbe, live in large

133
patrilineal compounds. For Fulbe it is shameful (semteende) to live

next to their former slaves and consequently, they prefer to live in the

bush. Slavery was abandoned in the colonial period but it was not

until the late 1970s and early 1980s that this really came into effect in

the village. This slave-master relationship determines much of the

interactions between Fulbe and Rimaiibe, and despite relatively good

relations and large cultural similarities between the two groups such as

shared language, they do not generally work or live together, nor do

they marry each other or get buried together.

Climate Variability in Biidi 2

Biidi 2 receives between 200 and 600 mm of rain a year between June

and late September. There exist no meteorological data from Biidi 2,

but in the nearest larger town, Gorom-Gorom, monthly rainfall data

have been collected since 1955. This dataset indicates that the region

has gone through much the same climate development as the rest of

the West African Sahel, with the wet 1950s and 1960s followed since

the early 1970s by a prolonged dry spell lasting until the 1990s. The

general trend seen elsewhere in this region towards more rain and

greater inter-annual rainfall variability in the 1990s and early 2000s is

also evident in the dataset from Gorom-Gorom (Nicholson 2005).

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Generally, the villagers perceive the rain to be less predictable today

than 40 years ago, to have a number of ‘false starts’ (making it

extremely difficult to know when to sow), and to fall in either greater

or smaller quantities than ‘before’. The villagers attribute this last

mentioned feature to a rainy season they perceive as shorter with more

dense periods of rain, often resulting in either flooding or drought.

Temperatures during both the cold and the hot season are also

perceived to have risen and both seasons to have become longer. The

wind is likewise perceived to have increased, causing more

pronounced movement of sand, filling up river beds and destroying

crops. Besides drought, flooding and the movement of sand, the

villagers mention degradation of the soil, the disappearance of plants,

trees, wild fauna and watering holes, and growing problems with pests

as consequences of the changed climate; all of these factors make

rain-fed agriculture difficult and, in turn, livelihood diversification

increasingly important.

Development Projects and Women’s Work

Since the drought of the early 1970s, Rimaiibe, on whom this paper

largely focuses, have experimented with different types of

agropastoral practices and diversified their sources of income

135
 dramatically.1 Among these diversification strategies, working for

development projects and women’s small-scale commerce, often

initiated on the basis of micro-credit loans from projects, are two of

the most important in terms of cash earning.

Development Projects

In the aftermath of the drought and famine of the 1970s and early

1980s, a plethora of NGOs, the majority of which owed their

existence to international aid, entered Burkina Faso, in particular the

northern part, as this was perceived to be the most vulnerable to food

shortage (Atampugre 1997). The impetus for these organizations and

for governmental aid was the desire to alleviate the problems of poor

socio-economic infrastructure and food and livelihood security

(Batterbury and Warren 2001). The early development efforts

focussed on ‘modern’ technical interventions designed to boost and

transform agricultural and rangeland productivity. However, as these

for various reasons began to fail, focus shifted to reforms in which

issues of gender, cultural pluralism, better targeting of aid, and

support to local institutions became important (Carney, 1998; Vivian,

1994).

1
Rimaiibe follow in this regard the trends seen elsewhere in the Sahel (Mertz et al. 2008; Elmqvist
and Olsson 2006; Mortimore and Turner 2005; Batterbury and Warren 2001; Mortimore and Adams
2001; Roncoli et al. 2001; Bolwig 1999; Rain 1999; Mortimore 1998; Reenberg et al. 1998;
Raynaut 1997; Reenberg and Paarup-Larsen 1997; de Bruijn and van Dijk 1995, 2001)

136
In Biidi 2, the impact of NGOs began around 1992-3, and since then,

there have been around 20 projects in the village. These projects vary

in size, duration and efficiency, but Rimaiibe attribute enormous

importance to them. A major reason for this is related to the fact that

many of the projects provide Rimaiibe with salaried work or with a

source of cash income through the selling of goods produced with

their help. Over a year, many Rimaiibe households earn as much as

US$150 working for development projects, meaning that this activity

rates only second to circular labor migration as a source of cash

revenue in the village. The money is mainly used for food and to

reinvest in other economic activities.

Because development projects are a main source of salary work in

Biidi 2, the villagers have become very adept at attracting new and

desired projects. While many projects seem to arrive out of the blue

this does not mean that the villagers are not prepared when they do

arrive. A very common topic of conversation among both men and

women is projects and how to get them to come to the village, what to

get them to do, and if they arrive unexpectedly, how to get them to

stay. Once they are there, the villagers are very good at working with

the project staff by fulfilling the aims they set up as they have clearly

understood that target deliverables are a high priority of projects. The

villagers are also acutely aware that fulfilling these targets and

working well for projects seem to attract other projects. This is echoed

137
by development project staff who emphasize that Biidi 2 is a good

village to work with and a good village to try out new projects in.

Another major incentive for the villagers to spend time on projects is

that they are convinced that projects will continue to come if only the

village works well and achieves results with the ones already there.

Women’s Work

Rimaiibe women have become very economically active since the

1980s and in only six of the 60 Rimaiibe households in Biidi 2 did the

women not to some extent participate in the cash economy during the

study period. This was due to old age. Asked about the reason behind

this development, the villagers unanimously mentioned the increased

resilience of the household to the shortage of food from agriculture

due to the cash income generated by women; in some Rimaiibe

households, women now contribute up to half the total income or

more. Generated by working for projects and/or by engaging in small-

scale commerce, the cash is used to buy food, medicine, clothes,

jewellery, and to invest in animals, education, seeds or other materials

for gardens, looms, or houses.

138
The Social Situation

The expected arrival of the development ‘expert’ from Dori was

making everyone slightly edgy that morning. As is often the case with

visitors, we had no idea about the exact time of his arrival. A couple

of the younger boys had been sent down to the small junction to spot

the dust being kicked up by the jeeps and soon the boys’ yells could

be heard: Jeeps were on their way. A group of younger and elder men,

with the president of the ‘development projects association’ of the

village in front, quickly left for the newly established garden paid for

by a large international donor and now to have its first evaluation.

Haste was important. The men wanted to get there before the project

‘expert’ and his staff. This was important for a number of reasons.

Chief among these were getting the entourage to park their jeeps in a

particular place.

The garden project had started a year earlier. A piece of land had been

selected next to the river in which there is always a bit of water. The

garden is large and square and surrounded by a metal mesh fence. It is

divided into two halves: one for the women and one for the men.

These two sections have been split among the villagers who wanted a

little garden plot on which to sow the potato seeds provided by the

project. At the time of the visit, the two halves of the garden were very

different. The men had been largely inactive and the land had, with the

139
exception of a few plots, not been broken in. In contrast, the women’s

half was all cultivated with beautiful potato beds and small trees

providing shade.

The trick was to get the development expert to park as far away from

the men’s garden as possible and to keep him from noticing the state

of it. This was to be achieved by guiding him through the women’s

garden along a predetermined route along which he would have his

back to the men’s garden most of the time; where this was not

possible, large groups of villagers were strategically placed, blocking

his view.

Things were running smoothly. The jeeps had been intercepted exactly

where planned and the villagers and I had taken up our positions. The

expert and his entourage, the president of the development project

association, the traditional chief and the administrative head of the

village along with a few others, had entered the garden at the gate

furthest away from the men’s garden, and they were now walking

along the predetermined route, expertly guided by the ‘president’.

When the group came down to the most precarious place closest to the

men’s garden, where a group of the tallest men, among whom I rank,

stood to hide the view, the plan, however, crashed to the ground.

140
Asoman, the big brother of the male ‘president’, stepped out of our

group, walked the few steps over to the expert, and while pointing to

the men’s garden told him about how it had never taken off. The

reason for this, he continued, was to a large extent his little brother,

whom he thought was incompetent and a thief, who had stolen all the

seeds destined for the men’s garden. He then proclaimed that for the

project to become a success, it needed a new president, an older one,

and he thought that he was the ideal choice. The expert, who

obviously did not want to get involved, looked at the men’s garden,

noted its sorry state and proclaimed that he would come back in four

weeks’ time to have another look and if the garden had not improved

he was not so sure about continued funding. The men sensing this

opening quickly assured him that next time it would resemble the

women’s garden. The expert seemed content with this and walked on,

staying for another ten minutes before driving off.

As soon as he was gone, a huge and very animated and hostile

argument broke out. During my previous five months in the village I

had never experienced a hostile argument and I was surprised by its

intensity. The argument initially centered on how Asoman had

jeopardized Biidi 2’s image as a good development village and how

this could be disastrous for attempts to attract new projects, thus aptly

illustrating the importance of development projects. But as the

141
discussion in the garden evolved, it became clear that other things

were at stake and chief among these were gender relations.

Analysis

Gender Separation

In Biidi 2, and among Fulbe and Rimaiibe in general (de Bruijn &

Dijk 1995; Riesman 1977), men and women live quite separate lives.

The men spend most of their time outside the village, working in their

fields and gardens or visiting relatives and friends. In contrast, women

spend most of their time in and around the village and mostly in the

vicinity of their hut. There they prepare food, make mats or other

handicrafts, look after the children and the small domestic animals,

and socialize with other women belonging to the same lineage.

Interaction between the sexes often occurs around midday and at night

when the men return to the village to eat and rest. The two groups do

not sit together on these occasions and communication between them

takes place across a spatial divide. This spatial and social separation is

mirrored in ceremonial life such as name givings, marriages and

funerals but also in political life and within the household. It is the

men that hold all political offices and make the decisions regarding

almost all issues of importance for the village and the household.

142
The Desire To Stay Married

Fulbe and Rimaiibe have virilocal residence and the women are

incorporated into the lineage of the husband at marriage. All children

from the marriage belong to the husband’s lineage and if the woman is

unhappy about her marriage, which is not uncommon, she is free to

leave but without her children. For the woman, this is a very strong

incentive to stay in the marriage and to stay on good terms with her

husband. As the younger women are the most attractive marriage

partners in the eyes of the men, being a divorced and older woman

moreover makes it hard for her to get married again.

The separation between the sexes and/or women’s desire to stay

married make public critique by women of their husbands very rare.

Prior to the development expert’s visit I had thus never experienced it.

But the fissure in normality created by the outburst and the ensuing

discussion seemed to provide them with an ‘unstructured context’ and

hence a chance to suspend normal gender relations by speaking out

(Mitchell 1956). With the exception of the two brothers, who had to

be physically separated, it was the women who entered the discussion

with most passion.

143
Negotiating Gender

“Look at the garden we are standing in!” Fatimata exclaimed in a high

voice. “We [the women] made this”, she continued, “you [the men]

have made nothing, and today you have depended on us”. The other

women nodded and contributed with similar statements growing in

boldness and culminating in a series of speeches by different women

pivoting around the importance, the hardship, and the inventiveness of

women’s work, of which the garden stood as a perfect example.

The men responded by highlighting how they already had a garden to

look after and that they had not been given the seeds as these had

mysteriously disappeared (perhaps been stolen!) and by giving a

number of other excuses, none of which made much of an impression

on the women. The discussion then moved on from being a common

one, in which the two groups took turns highlighting general points

pertinent to them, to one between male and female family members of

individual households. The discussions revolved around the relative

importance of the women’s income for the household.

Many of the women highlighted how they have sold things and

animals at the market for the past several years and that the income

generated through such activities made life in the household better.

Therefore, the women were “tired of being told what to do all the time

144
by men, because we also have money and also know things”, as Awa

expressed it. This coupling of increased economic importance and

gender roles by the women brings us back to Asoman’s outburst.

Asoman is married to Haawa. Haawa, like many other women in Biidi

2, is very involved in the micro-credit schemes set up by aid

organizations and has been very successful at buying and selling

chickens and goats. Moreover, she is involved in garden projects and

goes to the market in Tassmakat on Mondays and in Gorom-Gorom

on Thursdays to sell her produce. Besides these activities she also

works for wages for development projects. Over the last four years,

she has made around US$150 a year through these activities. Haawa

is quite aware of the importance of this money for the household and

in a subsequent interview she told me that: “we can’t count on the

fields, the rain is never good, but we need to eat. To buy food. I buy

most and Asoman knows this”.

Asoman has had no luck on migration, returning home with only

US$50 a year before giving it up three years ago. He works in his

garden, which provides him with some, but not much, income and he

is also involved in working for the development project, planting

hedges in the sand dune. His lack of success in the garden bothers

him and he explains it as a result of bad luck and wrong decisions.

This does, however, not change the fact that his economic activities do

145
not add up to as much as what Haawa earns and he has been seeking

employment in order to change that. The major reason behind this is

that Haawa’s earnings make him feel uncomfortable about his position

as head of the household as “it is not easy to decide what the money is

used for when I am not the one making it”.

Like his control over the money, his control over Haawa is slipping.

For “when she has money she is not that dependent upon me; what

can I give her that she can not buy herself”, he asked rhetorically in an

interview. A few days later he was even more pessimistic: “She

could just leave me, she would be able to take care of herself, she does

not need me.” In a meek attempt at consolation, I suggested that this

would probably not happen as she would have to leave the kids, but

even this Asoman was not so sure about for “I can’t buy them food,

she can”.

His attack on his younger brother must be seen in this light. It was a

reaction to the fact that he was losing his position as the major

breadwinner vis-à-vis Haawa and the challenge this presents to his

position as head of household. By discrediting his brother and laying

claim to his paid job as president of the project association, Asoman

was trying to gain work and in turn cash in order to reassert himself as

the undisputed head of his household. Indeed, he was willing to

sacrifice the image of Biidi 2 as a good ‘development village’ to this

146
cause. “Development projects come and go,” he later explained and

while he was aware that his outburst had been potentially damaging,

he did not regret it. Why should he, he asked me, “it was good to

expose my little brother’s incompetence.” He hoped that it would

result in a re-election and that he would then get elected, because “I

will do a better job and I need the money more than he does”.

The Potential of Unstructured Context

Ironically, however, Asoman’s outburst had provided the women with

an ‘unstructured context’ in which gender roles could be publicly

negotiated, potentially leading to a further deterioration of his already

weakened position as head of the household. Asoman sensed that:

“All we talked about [in the discussion] was women, their work, their

money, and how well the women worked for development projects.

And that did not really help me”. No indeed, for as Asoman had

rightly predicted, the presidency of the ‘development project

association’ came shortly thereafter up for election due to ‘bad

management’ but it was not he who got elected but the wife of the

former administrative head of the village, Digga.

The election of Digga suited the development project staff fine as

they, according to the local representative, prefer to work with women

because “they are more committed to making the projects work”. The

147
project’s contentment with the new president and with the “increased

involvement of women in developing their village,” as it was put, was

quickly manifested, and the garden was substantially enlarged and

better fenced. This, in turn, enhanced the position of Digga and the

argument increasingly made by some of the women that they are as

suited for public positions as the men.

After Digga’s untimely death a couple of months later, Asoman and

two other men ran for election along with Haawa. The men argued

that the election of Digga had been spurred by the unprecedented

situation caused by the outburst and that a return to normality in which

all public offices are held by men would once and for all put the event

in the garden behind them. In response, Haawa used the track record

of Digga, the discourse of empowerment of women among the

development projects, and the ability of women to make money for

the household as arguments for continuing with a woman president.

The project was present throughout the period leading up to the

election and strongly emphasized that the election was to be

democratic, meaning that all adults and not just the men in the village

were allowed to vote. The women liked this, and on the day of the

election they turned up in great numbers to vote for Haawa. Asked

why, they emphasized two things: First, they thought that Digga had

done a great job and that Haawa could be expected to do the same.

148
Second, many of them were afraid that if Haawa was not elected,

things would “become like before, when it was just men who were

presidents” and that voting for Haawa could cement the change

initiated with the election of Digga and thereby manifest the

emergence of a new social reality. Haawa won.

Conclusion

The analysis of a social situation taking place in the aftermath of

drought and climate variability demonstrates how situational analysis

provides insights into ongoing social processes and their relations to

wider contexts such as climate and development projects. While the

visit of the development ‘expert’ and its aftermath stands as an ‘apt

illustration’ of the importance of these two contexts for life in the

village, it also revealed how gender relations were being challenged

within the event and how this challenge in turn seems to indicate new

directions in these relations in the village. The election of Digga and

then Haawa to a public ‘office’ in this way illustrates how fissures in

normality ─ in this case created by the outburst of Asoman ─ provides

an initial context in which current social relations are both revealed

and spurred as actions are quickly adjusted generating new social

relations (Kapferer 1995, Mitchell 1956).

149
It is, however, difficult to make definite claims about future gender

relations in Biidi 2 on the basis of the outburst and the two elections,

but increasing evidence that future climate change will strongly affect

the African continent and particularly the drier regions (Adger et al.,

2007) implies that continued emphasis on non-agricultural livelihood

diversifications and the continued presence of international donors

remain crucial for Sahelian households. In Biidi 2, women are

increasingly engaging in livelihood diversifications such as gardening,

development projects, and small-scale commerce and their economic

importance within the household is thus unlikely to diminish in the

years to come. Combining this with their frequent encounters with

development discourses of gender equality and the project’s positive

treatment of women vis-à-vis the men, it is highly likely that the

outburst and the subsequent elections will result in further changes in

gender relations in the village. The aftermath of the outburst is, in

other words, loaded with social potentiality for the women of Biidi 2

and if they seize this, as Digga and Haawa did, traditional gender

relations with the men as the undisputed heads of households and

public offices seem untenable.

150
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