SOCIAL AND ECOLOGICAL SUSTAINABILITY IN THE USE OF BIOTIC RESOURCES IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

The paper adapts the ecological concept of sustainability that derives from the work of Holling to explain the evolution of institutions in rural sub-Saharan Africa, and to see why policies designed to alleviat e the degradation of rangelands in Botswana and Kenya through institut ional reform have not been as successful as hoped. We argue that the r eason why these and other institutional initiatives have had limited s uccess is that they took little account of the role of the institution s they were intended to replace in guaranteeing the social security of individual resource users, and failed to address that role. Using the term social sustainability to describe the ability of social institut ions to continue functioning in the face of stress and shock, we show that the new policies were compromised precisely because they were not socially sustainable. The main policy implication of the paper is tha t institutional initiatives should address the needs satisfied by the structures they replace, if they are not to provoke conflicting evolut ionary response on the part of those institutions.