Setting expectations: how colonial narratives continue to shape our analysis of geomorphology in the Global South

The world faces unprecedented land-use pressures, and one of our societal roles as geoscientists is to document, measure, and analyse landscape degradation, producing understanding that can mitigate or help prevent ongoing damage. We do this in a framework of prior studies that shape the way we understand the system and how it operates, which thereby also shapes how we construct research questions and design data collection. This is, of course, how science operates. However, sometimes we need to step back and examine the foundations of our guiding framework.

Doing this exercise for geomorphologic interpretations of landscape change in the Global South reveals a buried legacy of colonial-era assumptions and assertions about harmful impacts of indigenous/traditional land-use practices: a “narrative of blame” that targets Global South populations. Global North colonists, seeing unfamiliar countryside managed with unfamiliar techniques, wrote interpretive descriptions of what they perceived as degraded landscapes—but which were based primarily on their experiences elsewhere and/or which drew on gut feelings coming from a lack of local knowledge and inherent disdain for the native population and their methods. These ideas were published, repeated, restated and rephrased, achieving over time the status of received wisdom. They are still recycled today, as part of literature review and project justification. They provide rationalisation for assumptions that we build into project design, and they give license for interpretations on the basis that overarching controls have already been established; e.g. “It is well known that …… and therefore …. “. But tracing individual precepts back through the literature often reveals that in fact the variables in question have never been subject to rigorous testing or verifiable measurement.

Examples of the impacts of these colonial narratives on modern science are widespread, and include over-interpretation of small amounts of data (e.g. short-term and/or small-scale measurements in areas of high erosion being extrapolated to represent regional or national erosion rates) as well as conclusions being formulated without perceived need to perform measurements or comparative analysis (e.g. inferring that because deforestation elsewhere has been linked elsewhere with erosion, tree removal in a study site must also have caused rapid and intense soil loss).

This is not to say that humans do not cause erosion or landscape degradation. Damage that we do throughout the world is indisputably documented. But there is a clear imbalance in the way we measure and analyse geomorphic change, and—particularly in the Global South—there is a history of embedded assumptions, fed by strong implicit bias that indigenous and traditional land-use practices are inherently damaging. This means that many projects are (unintentionally) preconditioned to return results that will be in line with expectations set by the governing assumptions. Which of course strengthens those assumptions. To properly quantify and understand anthropogenic impacts on the landscape we must test all our embedded expectations. The colonial-era narrative of blame is pervasive and deeply entangled in our science. It is our job to learn to identify it and uproot it. And to avoid setting expectations in project design and analysis.