Critical Zone Science, Social Sciences and Local Governance: An overview of the Critical Zones Africa Research Programme

A critical zone-based environmentalism understands that local habitability arises primarily in Earth’s material exchanges across bedrock, aquifers, soils, plants, and the lower atmosphere. With support from the Science For Africa Foundation, the Critical Zones Africa (CZA) consortium is working in specific locales of five African countries to understand how societal and policy processes are affecting circulations of water, soil nutrients and contaminants. This paper presents a first comparative assessment of these relations, and explores their implications for landscape governance, social sciences, and landscape repair.

Beginning with forensic accounts of flows and movements of water, soil nutrients and contaminants in landscapes, ie both horizontal and vertical relations, CZA team studies have explored where, how and why harms to habitability have arisen.  If environmental governance sciences are to shift from their current basis in finance, property and objects, to molecular and energy flows and the processes between them, the comparative aspect of the CZA project asks with what concepts and analytics might damaged relations be described, understood, and remediated? 

A first step to building a politics capable of habitability repair, is to recognise how specific patterns of social relations and concepts affect landscape flows, movements, interactions and transformations of matter and materials.

Reflecting comparatively on the research findings emerging from the CZA studies, this paper sets out a critical zone-based social science for local governance.