The spread of the invasive shrub Prosopis juliflora has brought ecologically damaging, economically disruptive and visibly dramatic environmental change across swathes of territory in the drylands of eastern Africa. As a landscape dynamic, its impacts in many areas eclipse those of climate change and land use change. Yet, despite extensive research on the problem and potential solutions, and repeated attempts to feed this knowledge into policy and intervention, progress in managing the Prosopis invasion has been generally ineffective and overly technocratic.
The PROSE project, led by the School of Global Development, is reviewing research dissemination and policy activity within the region and undertaking analysis designed to foster more equitable and sustainable policymaking. GEJ researchers are working with research partners in the Horn of Africa region, principally in Somaliland and in Afar, in north-east Ethiopia, but with wider engagement that will span from Kenya north, though Ethiopia, Somalia and Djibouti to Eritrea.
The project has been funded by The British Academy as part of a large tranche of projects oriented toward strengthening analysis in a variety of sectoral fields of how effectively knowledge exchange happens at the research/policy interface. The work in all projects will contribute to deepening concepts around knowledge pathways and mechanisms for achieving policy influence, using and evaluating an established analytical framework on ‘evidence-informed policymaking’ (EIPM). Several of the funded projects are oriented toward environmental management themes, which have hitherto been under-represented in the academic literature on EIPM.
RESEARCH PARTNERS:
– University of East Anglia
– Organization for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa (OSSREA)
– Somalia Water and Land Information Management (FAO SWALIM)
