Persistent Connections and Exclusions in Mozambique

The urgency to solve the problem of climate change has increasingly propelled policy solutions that involve forests and the land sector in the Global South. Under this logic, the World Bank has been promoting a series of initiatives in Mozambique intended to reduce this country’s carbon emissions by preventing deforestation. For the Bank’s officials, deforestation in Mozambique is caused by rural (and poor) populations’ “unsustainable” practices of slash and burn and charcoal production – all of which ought to be prevented with conservation agriculture, intensification of cashew production, and an industrial plantation of eucalyptus. These types of interventions in the Global South have been criticized for constituting forms of colonialism that create regimes of exclusion and sustain processes of capitalist accumulation. Drawing on Wolf’s scholarship and interweaving ethnographic data from Mozambique with archival research about Portuguese colonial practices in the forestry sector, this chapter provides a multi-level and historical analysis of the political implications of these interventions as they are conceived internationally, and implemented, and experienced locally. By critically analyzing current discourses about climate change and the environment, the chapter argues that such discourses have legitimized a new political economy responsible for the perpetuation of forms of capitalist accumulation and the creation of new and diverse forms of local exclusion in Mozambique. Overall, the chapter provides different examples of historical and contemporary extractivism in Mozambique, with an increased immersion into global political economies and which render invisible local forms of agricultural production and negate the agency of small-scale farmers

Colonialism · Development economics · Economics · Economy · Geography · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · African history and culture studies

• A Bit Too Simple

  Open Access•Mette Fog Olwig•Bit Too Simple•2025

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