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Michael Mortimore Winner of the
2008 Robert McC. Netting Award Michael Mortimore
is a cultural ecologist and a geographer working within the “Netting
tradition”, and a foremost proponent of the skill of Africa’s dryland farmers and agropastoralists
in managing and adapting to harsh environmental conditions and constrained
livelihood opportunities. Mortimore was very highly
esteemed by Netting as a person and scholar, since both of them worked
extensively in Nigerian agrarian societies over many decades. Their
publications share a similarity of approach: fieldwork based on a fine
attention to everyday life, and a rigorous submission of broader claims and
theories about the West African landscape to empirical examination. Trained at the University of
Leeds in the UK, Mortimore taught at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, northern Nigeria between 1962 and 1979. He was
then Professor of Geography at Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria from 1979 to 1986. He then continued
research studies in the UK at several universities, and latterly as a partner
of a policy consultancy set up with Mary Tiffen, Dryland Research. Mortimore’s
research and publications are all concerned with the drylands
of Africa. Recalling some of his major
contributions…. Adapting to Drought, published
in 1989 by Cambridge, was a summation of his long-held view that even the
most disadvantaged African smallholders ‘adapt’ more or less successfully to
climatic change and severe drought, rather than submitting to it. It was
based on first-hand, blow-by-blow observation over 25 years, and particularly
of the Sahelian famines and droughts of the late
1970s and 1980s. It became standard reading for researchers interested in the
cultural ecology of the region alongside Watts' Silent Violence and other
works. Working the Sahel, [1999] was with the result of work with Prof. Bill
Adams (Cambridge) and Nigerian colleagues. It presented a more detailed model
of how agropastoralists deal with environmental and
economic pressures, based on several in-depth cases in the same region. More People, Less Erosion
(1994). Mortimore embarked on a major project with
Mary Tiffen and Francis Gichuki,
in the Machakos Hills of Kenya, from 1991. This
region was long held to have suffered serious erosion accompanied by
population growth. The researchers set about testing population-environment
models and relationships. Building on Boserup’s
work, they discovered that population growth and environmental enhancement
occurred thorough multicropping and other farming
methods, terracing, and strong community organizations. This ‘controverted’
Malthusian thinking. The launch of More People, Less Erosion at the ODI in
London was electric – most of the relevant staff members of the Department
for International Development, the World Bank, and academic researchers on
East Africa were there, and the study has echoed through revisionist thinking
about African degradation myths and agrarian policy ever since. It hit the
policy world with a storm, and it remains one of the most controversial and
talked-about theses on African development paths. It has been cited over 400
times. It took several years for aspects of the findings of the project to be
contested by Murton and others. But the “Machakos
model” has survived professional scrutiny. Mortimore embarked on a further project with Tiffen in the late 1990s, coordinating collaborative
studies of long term change in natural resource management and livelihood
strategies in dryland areas of Kenya, Senegal,
Niger and Northern Nigeria. The idea was to test the Machakos
model in areas of varying population density and environmental conditions,
and they found it had broader relevance. The project concluded in 2001,
although in 2006 he received renewed funding for the Niger-Nigeria component.
It has provided nuance to their earlier claims, and allowed variance in
economic and political conditions to be examined. Desertification. Mortimore has been a long-term critic of the argument
that the Sahara is 'spreading' as a result of poor land management,
or that farmers and herders tend towards destroying their natural capital. In
Adapting to Drought he challenged the well-funded international
desertification apparatus to listen more to farmers, and almost two decades
later, he was actually engaged by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification
to make this case to them. He has authored numerous papers on the topic,
including in Science. Mortimore remains in demand from universities
(particularly in Scandinavia and the UK) and development agencies. He is
currently conducting a strategic assessment of ecosystem management and
poverty relations in several African countries, spending many weeks in the
field over the last year, despite recently celebrating his 70th birthday. For those of us based in
universities it seems remarkable that he has achieved excellence in
scholarship without access to guaranteed income and funding – the 15 years of
research leading to Adapting to Drought was, he says, conducted with only
US$10,000, and he has always managed with modest funding. He has sought
neither fame, nor personal advancement or professional rewards in his career,
and remains deeply committed to the people of the region he knows and loves.
In his lifetime, Mortimore really has shifted
widely-held opinion, working tirelessly to overturn Africa’s ‘desertification
and poverty’ myths. The clarity of his prose,
integrity and insight in his theory, care in his empiricism, mastery of
geographical techniques, and key contributions to education and capacity
building for research in developing countries, mark him out as a rare scholar
of human-environment relationships. He
is an unusually worthy recipient this year’s Netting Award, and this would be
an award that would have brought Netting himself
particular pleasure. Simon Batterbury, 2008 |
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© CAPE |
Page last updated June 24, 2008 |
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