Chapter 5

Desertication
Steffan Bauer
German Development Institute

5.1 Introduction
The issue of desertication is intriguing to study for both scholars who perceive of globalization as a recent phenomenon with a decidedly new quality of global interdependencies and for those who are more skeptical about its distinctiveness and novelty [1]. To begin with, the very question whether desertication is, after all, a global issue or not is a matter of heated debate among scientists as well as policy makers. Much like globalization, desertication has evolved as a complex, multifaceted phenomenon, and much like globalization, it is contested both as a concept and as a process [2,3]. I shall argue in the following that desertication is as much a product of globalization as it circumscribes a local environmental phenomenon that occurs across the globe and that is interlinked with several processes of global scope. Hence, the phenomenon of desertication itself does not necessarily require encompassing the whole globe in order to be associated with the phenomenon of globalization [4]. The chapter is organized in two main sections. The rst is concerned with the key characteristics and underlying concepts of desertication. In this section, I will discuss the extent to which desertication actually constitutes a global issue. As a rst step, I will address desertication from a geographical angle, thereby relating it to concepts of dryland degradation and drought. Secondly, I take a historical perspective on dryland degradation to show that, while there have always been deserts, desertication is a rather recent issue. In a third and nal step of this section, I will highlight some global issues that are related to

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desertication in that they are indicative of global interdependencies that affect the worlds dryland regions. To this end, I will elaborate in particular on the examples of agricultural trade liberalization as well as climate change and biological diversity. Having thus established that desertication can indeed be perceived as a global issue, in the second main section, I turn to the global ` political responses vis-a-vis the desertication phenomenon. First, I will trace how desertication has been globalized politically. Second, I will outline recent efforts to govern global desertication by way of an international legal commitment, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertication (UNCCD). The latter sub-section will both describe the international institutional arrangements to halt desertication and discuss the instrumental status that is attributed to the convention in the global pursuit of sustainable development and poverty eradication. The chapter concludes with a brief outlook pertaining to the relevance of desertication for both global environmental governance and future research on globalization and the environment.

5.2

Desertication as a Global Issue

A glance at the plethora of denitions that seek to capture the essence of desertication is helpful to underscore just how contested the concept of desertication remains to this day in the fora of public policy as well as in academic circles [510]. Far more than one hundred denitions are dispersed throughout the literature of the natural and social sciences, thereby reecting the prevalent taxonomic confusion as much as promoting it [11]. Much of the current debates about what desertication is and how it should be addressed as a global policy issue converge, however, around the denition provided in the UNCCD. Although this denition is inevitably disputed in its own right, it provides a useful point of reference. In the following, I will use the conventions denition, in which desertication is dened as land degradation in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas resulting from various factors, including climatic variations and human activities [12].

5.2.1

The Issue at Stake: Dryland Degradation

A look at the biophysical characteristics of arid and semi-arid lands as well as the geo-ecological processes that supposedly cause their desertication reveals why the very term is so contested. To begin with, the commonly envisaged image of encroaching deserts, i.e., wandering sand dunes that spread over hitherto fertile land to irretrievably bury it, grossly distorts the phenomenon that is actually occurring. Instead, desertication is rst and foremost about the degradation of drylands. This, however, does not equal an expansive movement of existing deserts (although the latter arguably provides for a useful illustration of the potentially transboundary nature of ecological deterioration). In terms of spatial scale, some 40% of the worlds land mass can be classied as dryland and thus as potentially at risk of desertication [13]. It stands to reason that this risk is signicantly higher for sub-humid and semi-arid zones compared

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to the arid and hyper-arid zones (comprising actual deserts), which have little to lose in terms of natural productivity. From the perspective of human livelihoods, the trajectory of desertication is, for the same reason, much more severe in semi-arid regions where there is a relatively high population density compared to scarcely inhabited deserts. The total population of the worlds drylands inhabitants amounts to roughly two billion, about half of which dwell in rural livelihoods [13]. How many of these really are affected by dryland degradation and to what extent ultimately depends on the concepts and indicators that are applied to assess the vulnerability of these livelihoods and the extent and quality of dryland degradation [14,15]. Accordingly, available estimates vary widely. While various sources consider 70% and more of the worlds drylands as degraded, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) suggests a much more conservative 10%20%. Even so, the livelihoods that need to be considered as severely affected amount to at least 250 million and probably up to 1.2 billion people, while many more are threatened by the prospect of desertication [7,13,1621]. For instance, household members may as a consequence of desertication become economic refugees to supplement family income by way of sending remittances, or even whole families may be uprooted and forced to migrate in order to survive [22]. Again, while the general dynamic is well documented for parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, precise quantication of desertication-related migration is highly uncertain on a global scale [22]. Uncertainty and variation in data estimates are symptomatic of the wide denition of desertication as it has been internationally established through the UNCCD. Conceptually employed to encapsulate a number of causes, effects, symptoms and interactions of a highly complex phenomenon, it almost inevitably brings with it a variety of arbitrary interpretations with potentially substantial implications. These will depend on who is referring to desertication, in which context, and, crucially, to what end. While this is widely acknowledged to be problematic, it is also pragmatically accepted that an unambiguous denition will not emerge in the foreseeable future [23]. Hence, instead of referring to desertication, experts often prefer to relate to the environmental process that is at the heart of the desertication discourse, namely dryland degradation. In a sense, dryland degradation provides the common denominator within the plethora of interpretations. Pertaining to the quality of land, a process of degradation always implies a loss in biological and economic productivity of soil as a natural resource. Again, however, judgments on soil productivity may lie in the eye of the beholder. As Herrmann and Hutchinson observe, what is a loss of productivity from the perspective of a peasant farmer might actually constitute a gain from the perspective of a livestock herder [11]. Once more, the text of the UNCCD provides for a widely used denition. Land degradation means reduction or loss in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas, of the biological or economic productivity and complexity of rain fed cropland, irrigated cropland, or range, pasture, forest and woodlands resulting from land uses or from a process or a combination of processes, including processes arising from human activities and habitation patterns such as (i) soil erosion caused by wind and/or water; (ii) deterioration of the physical, chemical and biological or economic properties of soil; and (iii) long-term loss of natural vegetation [12].

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Two key terms that are inextricably linked to debates about desertication and dryland degradation are aridity and drought. While they are explained at length elsewhere, a basic awareness of these concepts is needed to grasp both the complexity and ramications of desertication [6,8,11]. Crucially, these terms refer to distinct conditions and must not be used interchangeably. Aridity is the major climatic condition that denes the physical characteristic of drylands and deserts by way of a permanent rainfall decit in association with high variability and unpredictability of precipitation. Drought, to the contrary, is a temporary event that is dened by rainfalls that are well below average over an extended period of time (typically more than one year) in a given region [11]. Moreover, episodes of drought may occur in any environment, not just drylands. In contrast to aridity, there is also a distinct social component to drought in as much as its impact on affected livelihoods tends to accumulate and often persist beyond an immediate drought period. For instance, conditions of drought-induced food insecurity may trigger migration even as precipitation patterns are returning to normal. In short, while aridity and drought are strikingly similar in their appearance, they both are fundamentally different natural phenomena [11]. Against these externally given natural background conditions, human land use activities have been the focus of policy debates and research on the causes and consequences of desertication. Yet, controversies typically arise about the extent to which the causes of desertication are natural or anthropogenic [24]. Evidently, the natural and human drivers of desertication can hardly be disentangled. This analytical problem is compounded by the highly politicized debates about the anthropogenic nature of global warming. Notwithstanding these delicate problems, natural and social scientists tend to agree that the immediate causes of dryland degradation result from a mixture of unsustainable human activities at the local level, namely the exploitation of soil and water resources beyond the limited carrying capacity of ecologically vulnerable drylands. The overgrazing and trampling of pastures, deforestation due to rewood consumption and commercial logging, expansive crop cultivation in fragile marginal lands, and intensive, often mono-cultural crop-cultivation are only some typical examples for the stress humans place on drylands. Often these are aggravated by accompanying increases in population pressure, which is exceptionally high in dryland regions [25]. Where these anthropogenic factors are at work, recurring droughts, desiccation, extreme weather events and global warming will inevitably exacerbate the exhaustion and erosion of soil as well as the depletion of water sources, but these factors are unlikely to trigger desertication by themselves. Hence, geographer Monique Mainguet cautions that the observation of land degradation makes for a useful alarm signal from the environment to indicate when human activities have reached the threshold of tolerance [21]. Of course, land degradation can affect any geographical region. Typically a short term process, it can be easily halted and even reversed, at least in theory. It is precarious, however, for the drylands in the worlds arid and semi-arid regions where the capacities to attend to land degradation are typically severely compounded by endemic poverty. In addition, political and economic structures have proven unfavorable for sustainable land management in many of the affected countries, notably in Africa [26]. Consequently, in these

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regions land degradation is particularly prone to worsen incrementally, thus eventually amounting to full-edged and irreversible desertication.

5.2.2

A Brief History of Desertication

Again like globalization, desertication is not necessarily a new phenomenon. Humankind has had a stake in the availability and accessibility of arable land and pastures ever since it started to cultivate crops and to herd livestock. Arguably, then, processes of anthropogenic land degradation are just as old. In fact, anecdotal evidence for an early human awareness of desertication is dispersed throughout literature. Plato is said to have deplored the vanishing of fertile soil in ancient Attica, Sumerian literature illustrates the adverse impact of deforestation in Mesopotamia, and the region of todays Argentina purportedly suffered from considerable land degradation at the time of the Spanish conquest. France and Great Britain installed a joint Anglo-French Forestry Commission to advise their colonial administrations on natural resource management [27]. This did little to prevent them, however, from spurring considerable dryland degradation in vast parts of West Africa through colonial plantations in the early 20th century. For instance, the areas west of todays Senegal and south of todays Niger were particularly affected by large-scale groundnut monocultures. The social consequences of land degradation in the North American Dust Bowl have found expression in American art and literature of the 1930s.* The case is not settled, however, over who established desertication as a subject for systematic academic research, although natural scientists, geographers and cultural anthropologists evidently were concerned with the respective issues as early as the 1920s. For instance, the aforementioned Anglo-French Forestry Commission also investigated evidence of an advancing desert in the West African colonies [27]. Several scholars attribute the coining of the term desertication to the French colonial geographer Andre Aubreville. While Aubrevilles seminal Climats, forets et desertication de lAfrique tropicale (1949) assessed the progressive loss of vegetation cover and soil erosion in African drylands, he stopped short, however, of dening desertication [28]. A more systematic scientic inquiry into environments under arid and semi-arid climatic conditions only commenced in 1951 when the United Nations Educational, Scientic and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) established its Arid Zone Research Program. Commissioned through this program, Peveril Meigs eventually provided the taxonomic basis for most contemporary efforts to dene arid conditions [11,29]. These pioneering achievements notwithstanding, the history of desertication as a global issue only really began with the 1977 United Nations Conference on Desertication, which followed the experience of the Great Sahelian Drought of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Its contribution to the globalization of
* See, but for two outstanding examples, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion in the Thirties by photographer Dorothea Lange and agronomist Paul Taylor as well as John Steinbecks novel The Grapes of Wrath, both originally published in 1939.

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desertication and subsequent implications for the political responses to it will be addressed below.

5.2.3

Desertication and Global Interdependence

Considering that most historical examples of desertication, as well as recent ones, typically relate to local occurrences of dryland degradation, it would appear that the phenomenon is global merely in the sense that it can be observed all around the world. Moreover, there is considerable regional variation in the causes, appearance, and consequences of aridity. For instance, geographers distinguish four basic categories of deserts according to the dryland zones where they are found. These are the trade wind deserts beneath the subtropical atmospheric high-pressure zones, the continental deserts in the interior drainage basins of the mid-latitudes, the rain shadow deserts typically found on the lee side of mountain ranges, and the coastal deserts found at those continental edges that are affected by cold ocean currents [11]. Also, land degradation is higher both in extent and severity in some parts of Europe and North America than it is in those regions that are commonly associated with deserts and desertication, namely Africa and Asia [30]. Yet, the peoples of the latter regions are much more severely affected by desertication by way of complex interlinkages within their regional context, notably poverty, population pressures, governance issues and ensuing questions of food security. From this perspective, desertication might hence be considered as a predominantly regional affair. The global scope and signicance of desertication is immediately apparent when taking into account the global interdependencies that are evidently interlinked with desertication, even if the complexity of these interlinkages is only partly understood today. In fact, a complex but plausible chain of causation between Western driving habits, Western transport and energy policies and the changing agricultural fortunes of Bangladesh or sub-Saharan Africa and their internal politics can be established without much difculty [31]. This relates in particular to the tangible interlinkages between desertication and two genuine global common problems that will be addressed below, namely climate change and the loss of biological diversity. Moreover, from a perspective of political economy, the structuralist argument can be made that desertication is a global issue in as much as the supply and demand for arable land has become increasingly transnationalized. By denition, land degradation decreases both the quality and absolute availability of arable land. Land rights granting people access to (potentially) useful pastures and arable soil have always been a crucial determinant for socio-economic development and equity. Historic examples for local uprisings and violent conicts about the use of land abound were often charged with ethnic or other pretexts. Yet, free market globalization and its inherent tendency to increase privatization does not stop short of land ownership. Hence, even more land is turned from a state controlled public good into private commodities, an increasing share of which is directly or indirectly managed by transnational enterprises. In conjunction with an eventual breakthrough in the

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liberalization of world trade in agricultural commodities, in itself an epitome of globalization, this trend is likely to intensify. To be sure, public ownership does not necessarily preclude the marginalization of rural population as can be witnessed in many poorly governed countries around the world. Nor does it guarantee properly functioning markets at macroeconomic and sector levels [32]. However, the appropriation of private land is clearly out of the reach of the rural poor, who predominantly inhabit the worlds dryland regions. Consequently, the so-called anti-globalization movement, rather ironically a highly transnational phenomenon in its own right, has duly enlisted the cause of the landless among its objectives. Not least, the issue of desertication is inherently linked to global political ambitions, namely the ght against world poverty and the promotion of sustainable development, both of which are again intertwined with the economic issue of agricultural trade liberalization. In the following, I will briey discuss the global interdependencies between desertication and agricultural trade liberalization as well as among desertication, global warming and biological diversity to illustrate the actual globalization of the desertication phenomenon.

5.2.3.1

Agricultural Trade Liberalization

On many counts, the liberalization of world trade epitomizes the common understanding of globalization. If they provide a reliable and realistic barometer, the vivid and at times militant protests of the aforementioned anti-globalization movement routinely address the governmental conferences convening under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In the realm of agricultural trade, liberalization has so far been comparatively modest due to persistent protectionist measures on behalf of developed countries, notably represented by the United States farm bill and the European Unions common agricultural policy. Subsequent distortions of the world food markets seriously affect the terms of trade to the disadvantage of food producers in many poor dryland countries [13]. Accordingly, agricultural trade liberalization continues to be a bone of contention in protracted trade negotiations among a signicant number of stakeholders with very different stakes. Yet, the history of the world trade regime and the agenda of the WTOs ongoing Doha Round suggest that further liberalization of agricultural trade is pending rather than stagnating [33]. The interdependencies of agricultural trade liberalization and desertication are two-fold. On the one hand, agricultural trade liberalization is supposed to substantially promote economic growth in the developing world and thus provide a powerful instrument in the ght against poverty. Indeed, the marginalization of developing country farmers in the world trade system is commonly perceived as a major driver of poverty [34]. This, it is further assumed, would in turn alleviate the pressures exerted on the worlds drylands by the rural poor. On the other hand, the extension and intensication of agricultural production that is likely to ensue from agricultural trade liberalization is expected to accelerate dryland degradation, thus further compounding the scarcity of usable land

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[13,34]. Export-oriented crop cultivation is typically accompanied by water shortages due to large scale irrigation, water pollution through the use of pesticides and fertilizers, and soil degradation both by sterilization and salinization. Either of these ecological impacts can be a driver of land degradation and accordingly increases the risk of desertication in dryland regions. Moreover, large-scale agricultural production for the world market bears the risk that rural populations may be further marginalized in terms of access to both land and markets, thus potentially off-setting whatever alleviation might be achieved through economic growth. Indeed, the globalizing aspects of the political economy would arguably benet some stakeholders while others are left behind and unable to improve their lot in the globalization process [2].

5.2.3.2

Climate Change and Loss of Biological Diversity

Although estimations about the magnitude of recent global warming vary considerably, it is by now well established that it is indeed occurring, rst, at an alarming rate and, second, mostly driven by anthropogenic factors [35]. First and foremost, anthropogenic climate change is linked to the large-scale emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that follow from the tremendous energy consumption we nd ingrained in the economic structures and subsequent behavioral patterns of the industrialized world [31]. Despite a lack of similarly robust knowledge on global precipitation patterns, it can reasonably be assumed that anthropogenic-induced global warming has serious consequences for desertication [36]. For one thing, natural scientists expect climate-related biological feedback loops to affect global desertication [37,38]. In particular, so-called carbon fertilization is hypothesised to boost plant growth by way of a carbon-dioxide enriched atmosphere. The latter is assumed to enhance photosynthesis as well as water use efciency in plants [11]. However, recent research cautions that the positive effects of carbon fertilization may be offset by an ensuing loss in soil nutrients [11]. More importantly, rising temperatures are certain to lead to increasing evapo-transpiration. This, in turn, further intensies the feedback between global warming and desertication. Given no substantial changes in rainfall, increasing evapo-transpiration, in combination with continuous pressure from human land use under drier conditions, could ultimately cause the desertication of degraded drylands. This would then intensify global warming through the release of ever more carbon dioxide from cleared vegetation and the subsequent reduction of carbon sequestration potential of the degraded land [11]. The magnitude of this feedback is considerable. At the current rate of desertication, it is estimated that an annual average of 300 million tons of carbon are released into the atmosphere from drylands, which equals about 4% of all global greenhouse gas emissions [13]. A further dimension of the global ecology, biological diversity is deeply ingrained in most ecosystemic services that drylands potentially provide. It is adversely affected both by global warming, which tends to perturb the stability of ecosystems, and desertication, which directly compounds the loss of species as reductions in vegetation cover affect both ora and fauna. However, vegetation

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and its diversity of physical structures are instrumental in soil conservation, as well as the ability to fulll crucial regulatory functions pertaining to rainfall inltration, surface runoff and local microclimates. The disruption of these and other related ecosystemic services that are provided through dryland ora are found to be key drivers of desertication and accompanying manifestations, such as the loss of important habitats of a wide variety of species and reduced capacities of carbon sequestration [13]. Taken together, the strong interlinkages between desertication, biological diversity and climate change, underscore the globalization of desertication in spite of its local appearance.

5.3 Governing Global Desertication

In response to ongoing global transformations, the political world has turned to new governance approaches in order to adjust its problem-solving capacity to the magnitude of global challenges. The global governance of desertication can therefore be understood as a political process that involves a multiplicity of actors who interact at multiple levels and through a variety of institutional mechanisms [39,40]. Today, this process is contained, as well as guided, by a global convention that has evolved and is being implemented under the auspices of the United Nations.

5.3.1

The Political Globalization of Desertication

The issue of desertication eventually entered the arena of international politics in 1973, following a particularly severe drought and ensuing famine in the Sahel region (19681973). As an immediate response, several countries of the Sahel region stepped up their cooperative efforts by establishing an Inter-State Permanent Committee on Drought Control in the Sahel, to which the United Nations duly responded with the creation of a Sudano-Sahelian Ofce. Soon thereafter the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) called for a United Nations Conference on Desertication (UNCOD), although the issue of desertication had not been addressed by the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment that had established and originally mandated the UNEP. UNCOD was eventually held in Nairobi in 1977 and has been lauded as one of the best scientically prepared conferences of the 1970s [41]. At the conference, representatives of ninety-four governments actually produced a Plan of Action to Combat Desertication (PACD), albeit to little avail [5,41,42]. Notably, the UNEPled Inter-Agency Working Group on Desertication proved unable to generate the necessary nancial support from governments. However, the PACD, administered and monitored by the UNEPs Desertication Control/Program Activity Center, effectively established desertication as an issue of international environmental politics. From a normative perspective, desertication was no longer to be viewed as an exclusive problem of the Sahel region. At the same time, the ineffectiveness of the PACD in terms of substantive policy making fostered the notion that if anything meaningful were ever to be done about desertication, the issue would have to attain higher international prole as a truly global issue [43].

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Thus, in association with the persistent demands of African governments, the UNEP and the PACD were instrumental in galvanizing the political globalization of desertication [43,44]. Even so, tangible efforts to address the phenomenon at the global level did only materialize in the wake of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 [5]. It was at this so-called Earth Summit that, at the insistence of developing countries, governments nally agreed to negotiate an international legal convention with the objective of halting the degradation of the worlds drylands. The United Nations General Assembly duly established an intergovernmental negotiating committee that rst convened in January 1993.* Ensuing intergovernmental negotiations came to an exceptionally swift close when the UNCCD in those Countries Experiencing Serious Drought and/or Desertication, Particularly in Africa, to quote its cumbersome full name, was formally adopted in Paris on June 17, 1994. Although most parties were explicitly unhappy with diverse elements of the treaty, the convention legally entered into force in 1996 after a comparably swift ratication process. Today, 191 signatories are members to the convention, which equates to the closest approximation to universal membership of any comparable international legal agreement that has been achieved to date. Oddly, this impressive manifestation of the political globalization of desertication comes in conjunction with an explicit prioritization of Africa as well as several regional annexes, which underscore the divergent expectations concerning the conventions implementation [12]. Despite the universal endorsement of the convention and the extraordinary brevity of the negotiations preceding it, the UNCCD process is second to none in exposing fundamental political tensions between the developed and the developing world, notably concerning state obligations and nancial provisions. In addition, the negotiation process unveiled unprecedented stark tensions within the coalition of the global South, which were overcome by the developed countries reluctance to concede to a convention on desertication in the rst place [43,45]. In fact, attaining the UNCCD has widely been interpreted as a token of the bargaining power that developing countries might derive from an increased global awareness of ecological interdependence [4550]. Namely, the developed countries approval to negotiate a convention on desertication at the UNCED was a price on which the G77 and China insisted for their acceptance of the Northern-driven Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) respectively, both of which were opened for signature at Rio. There is by now an increasingly substantive amount of literature on the negotiation process that led to the convention. In the most comprehensive assessment to date, Elisabeth Corell scrupulously examined the UNCCDs evolution, thereby bringing to the fore the inherently political nature of the prevailing desertication discourse [5]. A chief witness, long-term UNCCD Executive Secretary Hama A. Diallo, underscores this reading by observing
* See UNGA Resolution 47/188 of December 22, 1992. After receiving from Chad its 50th ratication on December 26, 1996.

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that desertication has a political appeal that land degradation does not have [5]. Indeed, the framing of desertication enshrined by the convention bears strong implications for its interpretation by policy makers as well as the general public with crucial repercussions for the translation of its objectives in terms of policy implementation. Notwithstanding plausible scientic objections as to the elusiveness of desertication as a concept, in the realm of international politics desertication has thus undeniably become a global issue.

5.3.2

The UNCCD Process in its First Decade

One decade after its entry into force, the UNCCD remains an intriguing case to study, not only in a view of globalization but also in terms of global environmental governance. However, owing to the relative youth of the UNCCD process, no studies are yet available to evaluate the achievements of the UNCCD in a manner that could possibly match the insights of the case studies available for many other multilateral environmental agreements. In the following section, I will outline how the UNCCD has thus far been implemented and how this relates to the global political issue that desertication has become in the two decades preceding the adoption of the convention. As is to be expected, the implementation of the UNCCD strongly reects its genesis in the context of the UNCED and the ensuing ubiquity of the sustainable development paradigm in global environmental policy making. In fact, as the only one of the so-called Rio Conventions that was actually spawned, as opposed to being opened for signature at the Rio Summit, the UNCCD gives ample reference to the norms and principles that dominated debates at the UNCED [47,51,52]. In particularly notable distinction from the time-honored international environmental agreements of the 1970s and 1980s, the UNCCD places a strong and explicit emphasis on the involvement of nongovernmental stakeholders, particularly community based organizations, thereby reecting the UNCEDs emphasis on participatory approaches to policy making and implementation. The relative success in this endeavor is reected by a growing number of studies that scrutinize the inuence exerted by non-state participants in the UNCCD process [5,27,53 55]. Moreover, the spirit of Rio has also transpired to respective provisions in the convention that are meant to further decentralize modes of governance and to appropriately appreciate local knowledge in the combat against desertication [52,5659]. Consequently, many professionals engaged in the implementation of the convention, both at national and international levels, do not necessarily perceive the UNCCD as an environmental treaty. This reading of the convention is prominently underscored by UNCCD ofcials, who like to promote the UNCCD as the sustainable development convention in order to distinguish it from the plethora of multilateral environmental agreements. In fact, highlighting once more the complexity of desertication, implementation of the UNCCD is also intended to be instrumental in the global ght against poverty [12]. Poverty, it is recognized, can be both a cause and a consequence of dryland degradation.

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Consequently, measures to combat desertication should ideally address poverty and sustainable land management simultaneously [60]. Many have subsequently considered the UNCCD as a development convention and its primary objective as ghting poverty, thereby reecting salient differences of opinion that protracted the negotiations of the convention between developing and developed countries. The underlying desire, mostly on part of developing countries, to fashion the UNCCDs implementation in a manner that prioritizes poverty reduction over environmental protection is as apparent as it is politically legitimate. It is for this precise reason, however, that developed countries have been reluctant to acknowledge desertication as a global commons problem and to commit themselves to substantive legal obligations. Hence, the future success or failure of the UNCCD will arguably depend on the effective mediation of divergent perspectives on the environment-poverty-nexus [61]. Thus far, the implementation of the UNCCD has been predominated by its formal institutionalization at the international level and within the geographical regions specied in the respective annexes to the convention [12]. Formally, this process began with the rst Conference of Parties (COP), which convened in Rome in the fall of 1997, although some institutional provisions had already been taken in the interim period following the adoption of the convention and during which the negotiations committee continued to meet. Constituted by all signatories of the convention, the COP is the political core around which the UNCCD regime is built. It convenes every two years and acts as the principal governing body of the convention. In this function, the parties are seconded by a Committee on Science and Technology (CST) and, since 2002, a Committee for the Review of the Implementation of the Convention (CRIC).* The former is designed to promote the coordination of scientic research on desertication related issues and to facilitate the transfer of relevant technologies between the parties, thereby paying special attention to local know-how and practices. The latter is meant to meet on an annual basis to provide for a continual review of the implementation of the convention and to develop policy recommendations accordingly. All of these bodies are serviced by the UNCCD Secretariat that, after an interim period at the UN ofces in Geneva, took its permanent ofces alongside the UNFCCC Secretariat in Bonn, Germany, in 1999 [62]. Although considerably smaller than the latter, the UNCCD Secretariat operates on equal footing in terms of international protocol, which implies an elevated status compared to the majority of environmental treaty secretariats, at least formally [63]. One manifestation thereof, the UNCCD Executive Secretary is ex ofcio Assistant Secretary-General to the United Nations. As the administrative hub within the UNCCD regime, the secretariat also maintains the interlinkages of the UNCCD with other international agencies, notably the United Nations headquarters, the World Bank, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the climate change and biodiversity conventions as well as a number of regional organizations and a range of banks
* The CRIC was formally established by COP-5 in Geneva in October 2001 (ICCD/COP(5)/L.15.).

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and funding agencies [64]. Due to their placement, perhaps, within this complex institutional setting, procedural and institutional matters dominated the rst couple of COP meetings. Again reproducing the compromises of the original negotiations, much time has been spent in particular debating the nancing of UNCCD implementation. In this respect, the convention provides for a global mechanism, which is administered through the IFAD and is meant to liaise between UNCCD related development projects and the appropriate multilateral donor agencies [65]. Yet, developing countries made it clear that they felt shortchanged by lack of a genuine UNCCD funding mechanism. The issue proved to be a major bone of contention at virtually every COP gathering, but has meanwhile been ameliorated, if not entirely solved, by the incorporation of sustainable land management into the portfolio of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) as of 2003 [66]. This has been perceived by many as an overdue step, which developing countries, notably from Africa, had aspired to ever since the establishment of the GEF in 1994. Not least, GEF eligibility in its own right signies the globalization of desertication because the facility is exclusively mandated to fund projects pertaining to the protection of the global commons. Following this breakthrough in the international institutionalization of the UNCCD, governments eventually turned to the substantive aspects of on the ground policy implementation at their sixth COP, which was held in Havana, Cuba, in 2003. Yet, the issue of nancing the convention process and the UNCCDs eligibility for GEF funds is exemplary for the many issues that had proven insurmountable throughout the negotiations and which basically remained unresolved at the time the UNCCD was adopted. Hence, time and again these issues return to haunt the parties, thus arguably inhibiting a more efcient implementation of the convention. Indeed, it appears uncertain whether the challenges associated with the transition from formal institutionalization to substantive operationalizing will effectively be solved in the immediate future [67]. Thus far, serious judgments of the UNCCDs effectiveness in terms of tangible impacts on the ground can hardly be made. As might be expected, however, the few qualitative case studies that are available indicate marked discrepancies between regime intentions and local implementation [56,58]. Although the high-ying sustainable development principles laid out in the convention transpire to national discourses on land development policies, they have a long way to go to eventually converge with the realities of local communities affected by desertication. Analytically, an assessment of the UNCCDs impact on the ground is further exacerbated by the fact that links between local land management policies and national applications of UNCCD provisions often remain vague. Even if these links could be clearly identied, the separation of the specic outcomes of the UNCCD from the background noise of general political and socio-economic developments will remain problematic [68]. Indeed, a satisfactory solution is not in sight as to how certain observable effects may be causally attributed to the implementation of the UNCCD amidst myriad variables that are potentially interfering with the complexity of desertication [69].

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5.4

Summary and Outlook

Profound interlinkages with the global development agenda notwithstanding, desertication and dryland degradation are concepts that relate rst and foremost to global environmental change. Specically, desertication circumscribes processes of environmental degradation in the roughly 40% of the Earths land masses that are climatically arid, semi-arid or sub-humid. Contrary to popular belief, desertication neither relates to an encroachment of existing deserts nor is it a genuine global commons issue in the sense that global warming or stratospheric ozone depletion are. Despite signicant global interlinkages, desertication as such, occurs locally and accordingly, needs to be primarily addressed at local and regional levels where it may be halted or reversed. Yet, desertication has evolved as a globalization concept that has achieved considerable status, both symbolically and substantially, in the intricate governance of northsouth relations. Besides, the process by which the political globalization of desertication has been advanced undergirds the notion that global policy making is no longer an exclusive domain of nation states. Academic experts, international bureaucrats, multinational enterprises and civil society actors at local, national and transnational levels have all had a part to play in shaping the ways in which desertication is perceived, and, subsequently inuence the outcomes of global desertication politics. The global governance approach to dryland degradation has found its expression manifested in the UNCCD. Although the latter evidently evolved as a product of two decades of international environmental politics, it simultaneously reects a global paradigm shift in which development concerns have arguably taken precedence over environmental issues since the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development and, even more so, since the global endorsement of the Millennium Development Goals in 2000 and the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development. Part and parcel of the global discourse on sustainable development, the UNCCD process in its rst decade has indeed contributed to highlighting the interlinkages among desertication, environmental protection and poverty. Hence, the global response to desertication embodied by the UNCCD can in parallel be seen as a manifestation of the globalization of the sustainable development paradigm [52]. Against this background, some argue that the implementation of the UNCCD epitomizes postmodern global governance [70]. Skeptics caution, however, that the establishment of a global convention was a wrong strategic choice to address the manifold problems associated with drylands development and that the UNCCD evades the real challenges that people affected by desertication are facing [42]. Arguably, now that the UNCCD process at last seems prepared to move from its initial conceptual phase to a much awaited implementation phase it nds itself at a crossroad [34]. Whichever path it may take, the global magnitude of both the severe socio-economic and environmental ramications of desertication is not to be denied. What remains to be seen, however, is whether the combat against desertication can and will be effectively fought by global means or whether humankind would be better advised to de-globalize desertication and resort to addressing land degradation on the ground. In this context, the

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policy relevance of competing conceptual understandings of desertication must not be forgotten. While the United Nations denition does provide useful relief from the taxonomic haggling preceding the UNCCD, it does not actually solve the problems that are ineluctably attached to a denition that is neither scientically precise nor politically unambiguous. Clearly, a solution to this dilemma is not in sight. Alas, the limitations of the prevalent concept of desertication and its implications in terms of how it is employed academically as well as politically always need to be borne in mind as we strive for a better understanding of desertication as both a product and a driver of global environmental change.

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