Ian Convery

Forests and Community in Post-conflict Mozambique: a Lifescapes Analysis of How Forest Communities Interact with Their Local Environment Ian Convery

In recent times, Mozambique has endured rapid and violent change, creating multiple, uneven fissures across place and time. This book investigates this dynamic in relation to forest communities, and uses the concept of lifescapes to explore the differential impacts of forest resource use at the household and community level. For some communities, forests represent synergistic places, where health and economy, the present and the spirit world, the future and the past coincide. In such areas, place - people relationships are complex, dynamic and multi- dimensional, emphasising the importance of embedded social practices in understandings of nature and related local production systems. For other communities lifescape change has dislocated aspects of this relationship, resulting in a new lifescape, a different way of relating to the land, which has implications for the future sustainability of both the production system and the resource base.