CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Of all the global environmental problems, desertification is, perhaps, the most threatening for poor rural people. These people include many of the worlds most vulnerable,marginalized, and politically weak citizens. In spite of the progress in the understanding of the ecologicaldimension of this phenomenon, few communities wellbeing has improved by the myriad action plans and activities carried out by local, regional, or national organizations, particularly in Africa.Why, almost a century after its first detection, does desertification continue to be among the most important environmental problems faced by humankind? Undoubtedly the inherent complexity of the desertification phenomenon hampers almost every phase of the sequence leading to the mitigation or control of an environmental problem (i.e., first detection,general recognition, agreement on regulation).However, regulations are not dependenton scientific knowledge alone but also on political pressure mechanisms. Approaches to the desertification problem broadly fall into two competing perspectives: the predominantglobal environmental management (GEM) discourse and the populist discourse. The predominance of the GEM discourse, despite the poor performance of top-down solutions to unsustainable resource management, can be explained by its convenience for the interests of three main groups involved in the desertification issue: national governments, international aid donors, and scientists. On the contrary, the bottom-up approaches promoted by the populist discourse do not fit the terms and conditions of bilateral and multilateral funding and instead stress the principlesof participation and decentralization. Future contributions to the solution of the desertification problem require the synthesis of recent social and ecological advances intoa new synthetic framework that overcomes the constraints upon the solutions imposed by the GEM and populist discourses.

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