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How natural and cultural forces shaping tropical forested landscapes are conceptualised is of vital importance to Anthropocene debates. We examine two concepts: disturbance and landscape domestication. From the perspective of disturbance, humans – whether ancient or modern – are a priori negative for tropical forests, outside of and alien to nature. From this view, the Anthropocene is a planetary scale aggregation of disturbance. A more just vision of tropical forests, accepting anthropogenic influence on biodiversity, would combine ‘disturbance’ with other concepts that capture human agency and intentionality. Landscape domestication proposes that humans can shape ecology and plant and animal population demographics, making the landscape more productive and congenial for humans, upgrading or degrading the biodiversity of tropical forests. Herein, forest peoples shape the Anthropocene itself through their ‘domestication’ of the forest. Yet this approach can overdetermine culture, ignoring non-human agency, whilst human impacts can be seen as the outcome of intentional modifications to increase landscape productivity, at worst a disavowed projection of ‘economic man’. Using the convivial scholarship framework of Nyamnjoh, we argue that these ideas give incomplete views of tropical forests in the Anthropocene and can be enriched by concepts derived from African worldviews with ‘relationality’ and ‘wholeness’ at their core. These are expressed in ohanife, deriving from Igbo language, ubuntu, from the Nguni language and ukama, a notion from Shona culture. Together these concepts evince an ‘eco-bio-communitarianism’ embracing humans, God, spirits, ancestors, animals and inanimate beings in a ‘community of beings’ irreducible to the culture-nature divide (moving beyond disturbance) and allowing for the agency and personhood of non-humans (moving beyond historical ecology). This is consonant with Indigenous Amazonian worldviews, such as that of Kopenawa. Approaching human-nature relations from Nyamnjoh’s idea of conviviality, we elaborate a less incomplete and more just perspective on the cultural and natural shaping of Anthropocene tropical forests.

AbstractThis article discusses the supporting roles of Traditional Authorities (TAs) towards state-led formal education in Ghana through the Otumfuo Education Fund (OEF) from 2000 to 2012. The OEF is an educational fund initiated by the current Ashanti king, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, in the early 2000s to address falling educational standards not only within his kingdom but also other parts of Ghana in line with the state’s educational vision. As one of the foremost educational partnership by a traditional leader in support of state-driven formal education at a massive scale in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), we examine how such state-chieftaincy hybrid governance approaches can promote educational delivery. Through in-depth interviews with 15 multiple stakeholders including officials at the OEF secretariat, traditional leaders, headteachers, government officials and project consultants involved with the OEF, we investigated the effectiveness and limitations of the OEF’s partnership with state educational agencies in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. By using Helmke and Levitsky’s typology of formal-informal interactions, we find that hybrid arrangements between traditional leaders (through the OEF) and the Ghanaian state aligns to an ‘accommodating-complementary’ type of partnership. Under this, the OEF supported the state in four main areas namely providing scholarships (to brilliant but needy students), expanding and renovating educational infrastructure in deprived areas, providing educational materials and organising career development workshops for students. We conclude that greater attention should be given to partnerships between state educational agencies and TAs, particularly in deprived areas where access to education remains a challenge.