Environment and access to resources in Africa

Many issues of environment and access to resources are clouded with uncertainty. This arises out of a lack of reliable data, particularly on environmental change; ideological and technical problems of definition and measurement; the inability to identify reliably human agency in environmental change; a wide range of contradictory interpretations of the impact of land degradation; different levels of abstraction and scale involved in analysis; and the "atomisation' of theories linking environmental and social change. A set of responses in terms of a future research agenda is proposed, a central part of which is a dynamic resource access-environmental change model linked to a decision-making model which focuses on land users' responses to environmental change. These two models provide a clearly specified context and anchoring point for a number of theoretical issues in African agrarian studies which hitherto have not been linked together