"To know what's happening around the world, you have to study the knowledge of local people"

Recently, we cound find a portrait of anthropologist Melissa Leach in the Guardian. At the age of 35, Leach became professor of the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University. Now, at 42 and proficient in four African languages, she has been made director of a new global research hub known as the Steps centre (social, technological and environmental pathways to sustainability).

Her research has consistently challenged public policy and the stance taken by government authorities, the Guardian writes:

In the early 1990s, when Leach was a PhD student at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, she went to Guinea in west Africa with Fairhead, then her research partner.

The area was widely assumed to be experiencing a deforestation crisis, and experts held local villagers responsible. Leach, Fairhead and a Guinean researcher discovered - by talking to the villagers, researching the area’s history and “viewing things through an anthropological lens” - that the opposite was true. The forest was in fact growing, because farmers had worked out how to turn savannah into forest.

Leach and her colleagues had shown how experts can reach wildly wrong conclusions if local knowledge and history are not taken into account. Their findings became a book, Misreading the African Landscape, and a film, Second Nature: Building Forests in West Africa’s Savannahs. A decade later, they are still being used to illustrate the power of anthropological methods.

Her new centre opened in June and hopes to develop a new approach to understanding why the gap between the poorest and the richest is growing, and to doing something about it. It promises to question the “assumption that the world is stable, predictable and knowable through a single form of knowledge that assumes one size fits all". “We are about producing scholarly research, and playing a public and intellectual role.”

At the Steps centre, there are 18 academics representing disciplines ranging from anthropology to ecology to medicine. Academic and policy debates, she says to the Guardian, are compartmentalised into areas as agriculture or health. Rarely do the different disciplines manage to speak to one another. “We urgently need new, interdisciplinary approaches to understanding and addressing situations that combine an understanding of social, technological and environmental processes.”

>> read the whole story in the Guardian

There are already several papers to download at the website of the Steps centre.

And the centre has of course its own blog “The crossing”

Leach has been interviewed by the Guardian before, see Ground rules for research. Technology won’t help developing countries if it is not tailored to local needs and Steps towards better development.

I also found an older paper:

James Fairhead and Melissa Leach: Webs of power: forest loss in Guinea

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