Governing ecosystem services for building resilience in food security

Food is a very basic human need which can't be met without nature and the ecosystem services it provides. In West Africa, a large part of the population is chronically food insecure and affected by recurrent crises while natural resources are under pressure. Strengthening resilience of food insecure people, villages or countries has then become the watchword of donors and policymakers involved in the food security field. The Global Alliance for Resilience (AGIR) in Sahel and West Africa launched in 2012 has led to many projects aiming at better linking emergency and development, and to many works focusing on the analysis and the measurement of resilience so as to assess the results of projects. Resilience indicators tend to emphasize endowments ("capitals") and their respective evolutions, while resilience-thinking would highlight how this dynamic interconnect. In this communication, we aim to go beyond the framework of development projects and debates on resilience metrics, to discuss how people in West Africa use natural resources for their food and nutrition security in face of diverse shocks and long term constraints. What strategies are adopted at individual, household and collective level to build a socio-environmental context that maintains or increases the capacity of natural resources to contribute to food and nutrition security? How multi-levels governance on access and use of natural resources and the power relationships affect these strategies? Burkina Faso is our field to study the evolution of farm households' strategies over the medium and long term, and how particular events in governance have affected these trajectories. We highlight the key role of natural vegetation, fallows and parklands in food and nutrition security as well as how learning processes serve to build strategies aiming at preserving this role. (Texte intégral