So-called canned hunts take place within fenced private game ranches and typically target animals bred in captivity solely for that purpose. Thousands of semidomesticated lions form the focal point of South Africa’s canned-hunting industry. Notions of animal welfare, “fair chase,” and conservation have been deployed to varying degrees to sway public opinion surrounding canned hunts in South Africa and abroad. While state regulatory efforts have largely failed to date, the Campaign Against Canned Hunting (CACH) has successfully promoted stricter controls on the importation of lion trophies in Australia, Europe, and the United States, in part by highlighting the recent death of Cecil, a charismatic lion shot by an American bowhunter in Zimbabwe.

Human–wildlife conflict (HWC) is often considered in terms of how the impact on humans can be mitigated, but in the context of the larger goal of meeting conservation goals. This article explores the hidden costs of HWC on human well-being in northern Kenya through a qualitative case study of Laikipia County. Drawing on narratives of wildlife as destructive, wildlife as inherently more important or valuable than humans, and wildlife preservation as a pathway for capturing resources, it explores the impacts of HWC on human well-being, situating the study within the HWC, political ecology, and human security literature.

This article utilizes a newly available dataset on the geographical distribution of development projects in Zambia to test whether electoral incentives shape aid allocation at the subnational level. Based on this dataset, it argues that when political elites have limited information to target distributive goods specifically to swing voters, they allocate more donor projects to districts where opposition to the incumbent is strong, as opposed to districts where the incumbent enjoys greater popularity.

This article aims to analyze the emergence of the migration-development nexus after decolonization in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa. The first section explores the way in which French governmental bodies and NGOs started to frame public policies linking migration and development in the 1960s and 1970s. The second section highlights how developmentalist ideology was mobilized in the 1980s in order to set up return policies in partnership with African governments who were increasingly inclined to control migrants’ monetary remittances. The last section emphasizes how the migration-development nexus was orchestrated to control migratory flows from the late 1980s onwards.

This article investigates food security and well-being in the context of “development-forced displacement” in Ethiopia. In the lower Omo, a large hydroelectric dam and plantation schemes have forced people to cede communal lands to the state and business speculators, and indigenous communities have been targeted for resettlement in new consolidated villages. The authors carried out a food access survey in new villages and in communities not yet subjected to villagization and complemented this with ethnographic research carried out over a period of four years. The results of the two methodological approaches were inconsistent. The survey data suggest that household food access was poor in both places but better in villagization sites than in the other communities. The ethnographic research, however, suggests that village settlers were unable to feed themselves from the irrigated plots they were allotted and were therefore dependent on food aid. They spoke of indignity, bodily discomfort, and the severance of meaningful social relations. This article discusses the contrast between the information generated by the different research methods and asks how this tension relates to two major narratives about development: development as a process through which the state actualizes a national dream, and development as a process that creates affluence for some by impoverishing others.

The international aid community presents education and employment programs as the keys to mitigating youth participation in violence. Yet, existing evidence suggests that faith in such programs may be misplaced. This study investigates this disconnect between faith and evidence. It argues that education and employment programs are commonly built on an economically-focused “dominant discourse” that makes presumptions about youth and their interests. Based on qualitative research with youth in Nairobi, Kenya, it further argues that this dominant discourse overlooks self-identity and social connectedness factors that are crucial to youth, as well as the limitations imposed by governance and structural conditions.

Despite gains in national income, Ethiopia’s cities have seen a steady increase of homeless women and children. This study focuses on the lives of twenty-five adult women and twenty-seven children living on the streets of Hawassa, Ethiopia. Nearly all were driven to the streets by poverty compounded by abuse and violence and/or loss of supporting family members, illness, and lack of social supports. The Ethiopian government offers a food-for-work program, but this is an inadequate social safety net. Recommendations include government provision of long-term shelter, food assistance, school supplies for children, legal and economic assistance, and access to medical care.

This article explores the impact of gender quotas on sustainable representation in Africa. Sustainable representation is broadly defined as viable and substantial political representation secured for the long run. The research draws on evidence from cross-national election data and two case studies, Uganda and Kenya, which demonstrate that women rarely exceed the minimum thresholds set by gender quotas. This suggests that these quotas may have a ceiling effect on women’s representation. For gender quotas to generate long-term representational outcomes, they must be designed to account for other characteristics of the electoral context that affect women’s participation outside the quota mandate.

The technocrat, a supposedly apolitical figure who joins government on the basis of technical expertise, looms large in discussions of governance. The empowerment of technocrats has sometimes been taken as a barometer for Africa’s economic and democratic progress. Rejecting this conventional wisdom, this article argues that technocrats are inevitably trapped in a web of politics—politicians leverage the apolitical image of technocrats for political gain, and public debates implicate technocrats as targets of protest. This article pursues this argument through a case study of Nigeria, where technocrats were both politicized and politicizing figures during the rule of the People’s Democratic Party between 1999 and 2015.