Melissa Leach's research while affiliated with University of Sussex and other places
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Publications (176)
On 3 November 2022, the annual EADI Directors’ Meeting was held at King’s College, University of London, UK. Part of the deliberations included an opening Roundtable discussion focusing on development studies in times of multiple crises.
The UN Security Council's response to Ebola in 2014 legitimised militarised responses. It also influenced responses to COVID-19 in some African countries. Yet, little is known about the day-to-day impacts for ordinary citizens of mobilising armies for epidemic control. Drawing on 18 months ethnographic research, this article analyses militarised re...
Global debates about vaccines as a key element of pandemic response and future preparedness in the era of Covid-19 currently focus on questions of supply, with attention to global injustice in vaccine distribution and African countries as rightful beneficiaries of international de-regulation and financing initiatives such as COVAX. At the same time...
This article shares findings on COVID-19 in Africa across 2020 to examine concepts and practices of epidemic preparedness and response. Amidst uncertainties about the trajectory of COVID-19, the stages of emergency response emerge in practice as interconnected. We illustrate how complex dynamics manifest as diverse actors interpret and modify appro...
The Covid-19 pandemic is more than a health crisis. It has worse outcomes among individuals with co-morbidities, has exposed fault lines in our societies, and amplified existing inequalities. This article draws on emerging evidence from low- and middle-income contexts to highlight how Covid-19 becomes syndemic when it interacts with local vulnerabi...
This paper argues for a rethinking of disease preparedness that puts incertitude and the politics of knowledge at the centre. Through examining the experiences of Ebola, Nipah, cholera and COVID-19 across multiple settings, the limitations of current approaches are highlighted. Conventional approaches assume a controllable, predictable future, whic...
COVID-19 is proving to be the long awaited ‘big one’: a pandemic capable of bringing societies and economies to their knees. There is an urgent need to examine how COVID-19 – as a health and development crisis - unfolded the way it did it and to consider possibilities for post-pandemic transformations and for rethinking development more broadly. Dr...
Food has become both a pivotal topic in development and a lens through which to integrate and address a range of contemporary global challenges. This review article addresses in particular the interrelationship between food and sustainable, equitable development, arguing that this is fundamentally political. We offer a set of approaches to understa...
This paper highlights the major challenges and considerations for addressing COVID-19 in informal settlements. It discusses what is known about vulnerabilities and how to support local protective action. There is heightened concern about informal urban settlements because of the combination of population density and inadequate access to water and s...
This guest editorial reflects on the role of anthropology in the recent outbreaks of Ebola virus epidemics in West Africa and the opportunities and challenges in contributing to the management epidemics in general.
This volume seeks to advance understanding of indigenous knowledge (IK) in the context of natural resource management. The book links theory and practice in providing an overview of the conceptual issues surrounding IK enquiries in the context of their contributions to sustainable agriculture and environmental conservation. Key themes are addressed...
Transmission of zoonotic pathogens from bats to humans through direct and indirect contact with bats raises public apprehension about living close to bats. In the township of Ve Golokuati in Ghana, several “camps” of Epomophorus gambianus roost in fruit trees that provide ecosystems services for residents. This study explored human-bat interaction...
Purpose
Bats provide many ecosystem services and have intrinsic value. They also act as host reservoirs for some viruses. Several studies have linked zoonotic diseases to bats, raising questions about the risks bats pose, especially to people living close to bat roosts. Through a series of case studies undertaken in three communities, this paper e...
This article explores the implications for human health of local interactions between disease, ecosystems and livelihoods. Five interdisciplinary case studies addressed zoonotic diseases in African settings: Rift Valley fever (RVF) in Kenya, human African trypanosomiasis in Zambia and Zimbabwe, Lassa fever in Sierra Leone and henipaviruses in Ghana...
This paper argues that addressing the underlying structural drivers of disease vulnerability is essential for a ‘One Health’ approach to tackling zoonotic diseases in Africa. Through three case studies—trypanosomiasis in Zimbabwe, Ebola and Lassa fever in Sierra Leone and Rift Valley fever in Kenya—we show how political interests, commercial invest...
The recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa highlights how engaging with the sociocultural dimensions of epidemics is critical to mounting an effective outbreak response. Community engagement was pivotal to ending the epidemic and will be to post-Ebola recovery, health system strengthening and future epidemic preparedness and response. Extensive liter...
Bats are known to be a natural reservoir for a lot of disease pathogens and can spread several diseases. All 11 genera of fruit bat found in West Africa are found in Ghana, and human–bat interactions are common. However, there is a dearth of knowledge about the socio-cultural factors that shape these interactions. This paper explores the socio-cult...
This Bulletin attempts to link two sets of pressing contemporary concerns. On the one hand, it addresses changing relationships between science, policy and society in the context of internationalisation and public challenges to formal expertise; concerns currently under hot debate in European settings as much as in developing countries. On the othe...
A considerable amount of disease is transmitted from animals to humans and many of these zoonoses are neglected tropical diseases. As outbreaks of SARS, avian influenza and Ebola have demonstrated, however, zoonotic diseases are serious threats to global public health and are not just problems confined to remote regions. There are two fundamental,...
Overview of different models.
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List of symbols and glossary.
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Effect of number of trials.
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Cumulative number of infections arising from human-to-human transmission and zoonotic spillover and no depletion of susceptibles generated by the ABM.
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Effect of human population size.
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Transition probabilities for the ABM.
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Application to Lassa Fever.
Zoonotic Spillover with human-to-human transmission when random effect in the rate are important.
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Relationships between parameters of Poisson and negative binomial distributions.
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Alternative mechanisms leading to a Negative-Binomial.
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Analytical solutions for the mean cumulative number of infections for some special cases.
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Effects of different functional forms of the exposure and prevalence on the rate of spillovers.
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Temporal variations in the parameters.
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Value of the parameters used in the numerics.
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Effective Reproductive Number for the simulation generated by the ABM (Zoonotic Spillover with human-to-human transmission).
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Global risks of zoonotic disease are high on policy agendas. Increasingly, Africa is seen as a ‘hotspot’, with likely disease spillovers from animals to humans. This paper explores the social dynamics of disease exposure, demonstrating how risks are not generalised, but are related to occupation, gender, class and other dimensions of social differe...
We describe for the first time a current indigenous soil management system in West Africa, in which targeted waste deposition transforms highly weathered, nutrient- and carbon-poor tropical soils into enduringly fertile, carbon-rich black soils, hereafter “African Dark Earths” (AfDE). In comparisons between AfDE and adjacent soils (AS), AfDE store...
This article argues that the recent Ebola crisis is the result of structural violence, as interlocking institutions have produced interlaced inequalities, unsustainabilities and insecurities. These have underlain the vulnerabilities in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea through which a disease outbreak became a major health, social and economic crisi...
and collaborating on research initiatives. This kind of initiative avoids the wasteful duplication of eff ort, and should be reproduced for other medical humanitarian emergencies. The Ebola response shows the need for new global mechanisms to be established that can rapidly mobilise all experts who can bring relevant local contextual, medical, epid...
Multiple ‘green transformations’ are required if humanity is to live sustainably on planet Earth. Recalling past transformations, this book examines what makes the current challenge different, and especially urgent. It examines how green transformations must take place in the context of the particular moments of capitalist development, and in relat...
Background
Zoonotic infections, which transmit from animals to humans, form the majority of new human pathogens. Following zoonotic transmission, the pathogen may already have, or may acquire, the ability to transmit from human to human. With infections such as Lassa fever (LF), an often fatal, rodent-borne, hemorrhagic fever common in areas of Wes...
Amidst the pressing challenges of global climate change, the last decade has seen a wave of forest carbon projects across the world, designed to conserve and enhance forest carbon stocks in order to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and offset emissions elsewhere. Exploring a set of new empirical case studies, Carbon Conflicts and Forest L...
Drawing on the recent identification of anthropogenic dark earths (ADEs) in West Africa's Upper Guinea forest region, this article engages with Amazonian debates concerning whether such enriched soils were produced intentionally or not. We present a case study of a Loma settlement in Northwest Liberia in which ethnography, oral history, and landsca...
This paper describes West African farming practices and knowledge that lead to the formation of carbon-rich high-fertility African Dark Earths (AfDE) – human-made soils analogous to Amazonian terra preta, yet subject to continuing production and use. Gender relations and women’s roles are central to how these soils are produced and used. Through so...
This article explores the politics of knowledge involved in understanding and responding to epidemics in an era of global health governance and biosecurity. It develops and applies an approach focused on how multiple, competing narratives about epidemics are constructed, mobilized and interact, and selectively justify pathways of intervention and r...
The ability of innovation—both technical and social—to stretch and redefine 'limits to growth' was recognised at Stockholm in 1972, and has been a key feature in debates through to Rio+20 in 2012. Compared with previous major moments of global reflection about human and planetary futures—Stockholm, Rio in 1992, Johannesburg in 2002—we now have a be...
Rapid environmental change in the face of enduring poverty and social inequality has brought unprecedented attention to the challenge of achieving social equity and environmental sustainability, at all levels from the local to the global. There is a clear need for conceptual approaches that enable these challenges to be addressed together, so that...
In a context of neo-liberal environmental governance, imperatives for global climate change mitigation are motivating a new round of policy initiatives and projects aimed at carbon forestry: conserving and enhancing forest carbon stocks, and trading these values in emerging carbon markets. In this context modelling and measurement, always significa...
Lassa fever is an acute, sometimes severe haemorrhagic infection caused by the Lassa virus and transmitted by the multimammate rat, Mastomys natalensis. It is endemic in parts of West Africa, including eastern Sierra Leone where the Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium (www.driversofdisease.org) is working. There is little information on...
Many serious emerging zoonotic infections have recently arisen from bats, including Ebola, Marburg, SARS-coronavirus, Hendra, Nipah, and a number of rabies and rabies-related viruses, consistent with the overall observation that wildlife are an important source of emerging zoonoses for the human population. Mechanisms underlying the recognized asso...
The urgency of charting pathways to sustainability that keep human societies within a "safe operating space" has now been clarified. Crises in climate, food, biodiversity, and energy are already playing out across local and global scales and are set to increase as we approach critical thresholds. Drawing together recent work from the Stockholm Resi...
This book explores how parents understand and engage with childhood vaccination in contrasting global contexts. This rapidly advancing and universal technology has sparked dramatic controversy, whether over MMR in the UK or oral polio vaccines in Nigeria. Combining a fresh anthropological perspective with detailed field research, the book examines...
Across the world, ‘green grabbing’ – the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends – is an emerging process of deep and growing significance. The vigorous debate on ‘land grabbing’ already highlights instances where ‘green’ credentials are called upon to justify appropriations of land for food or fuel – as where large tracts of lan...
Biochar currently attracts technological and market optimism, promising multiple wins – for climate change, food security, bioenergy and health – not least for African farmers. This paper examines the political-economic and discursive processes constructing biochar as a novel green commodity, creating new alliances amongst scientists, businesses, v...
We live in a time of unprecedented advance in science and technology, with global annual spending on research and development (R&D) now exceeding a trillion dollars. Yet development challenges have also grown. For many people and places, poverty is deepening, and the environment is in crisis. Thousands of children die daily from waterborne diseases...
While community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) now attracts widespread international attention, its practical implementation frequently falls short of expectations. This paper contributes to emerging critiques by focusing on the implications of intra-community dynamics and ecological heterogeneity. It builds a conceptual framework highli...
There is no abstract for this paper.
This paper elaborates a ‘pathways approach’ to addressing the governance challenges posed by the dynamics of complex, coupled, multi-scale systems, while incorporating explicit concern for equity, social justice and the wellbeing of poor and marginalised groups. It illustrates the approach in relation to current policy challenges of dealing with ep...
Linking environmental sustainability with poverty reduction and social justice, and making science and technology work for the poor, have become central practical, political and moral challenges of our times. These must be met in a world of rapid, interconnected change in environments, societies and economies, and globalised, fragmented governance...
Biochar' is currently the focus of extraordinary levels of both technological optimism and debate. As a substance, biochar refers quite simply to the carbon-rich product that results when biomass – from wood or leaves to manure or crop residues – is burned under oxygen-deprived conditions. But around the idea of biochar and the processes of generat...
Summary This article reflects on the challenges faced when the ideal of consensual communities is questioned. A more complex view of institutional relationships at the local level is envisaged, one which emphasises conflict as much as consensus. This, in turn, suggests some implications for institutional design and processes of conflict negotiation...
Links between food security and the environment occur at national and international levels, as well as locally. But perceptions of the relationship at global and village levels diverge widely. Considering a number of issues including the effect of global warming on food production and the possibility of green conditionality being imposed on aid flo...
Focusing on a particular field-soil-vegetation complex (tombondu), this article considers how changing patterns of gendered resource use impact on its prevalence within overall land use patterns, and hence on the environment. Ruined settlements, offering improved land productivity on "ripened' soils, provide Kuranko farmers in Guinea with a potent...
An erroneous analysis of environmental change has informed environmental policy in part of Guinea for a century. Using this case study, the relationship between the production of information about environmental problems and external institutions which address them, is examined. To see how certain analyses of change have gained credence and validity...
IntroductionWomen and Environment: Natural Connections?Critiquing Natural ConnectionsGender and Environment in the New MillenniumSome Conclusions
References
Social aspects of African farming require renewed attention, as recent international initiatives in agricultural development have moved upstream towards issues of governance and programme and policy support. Social and cultural relations significantly shape agricultural production and investment, the technologies employed therein, and the operation...