Managing biodiversity & divinities: Case study of one twenty-year humanitarian forest restoration project in Benin

Humanitarian assistance around the world frequently represents an immense and well-intentioned impulse to redress the suffering of others. And yet, cross-cultural misunderstandings and conflicts of differing value-systems—as knowledge mismatches between those offering help and those targeted for help—will often risk neutralizing or rendering ineffective the assistance offered. Given the critical need for humanitarian assistance successes worldwide, research to mitigate this risk has a particular urgency. Understanding “use” as any activity that transforms a world, this case study analyzes the complexities of multi-actor resource use at a successful, 20-year rain forest restoration and preservation project in Benin. Findings from this case study supply examples for how “edges”—as a type of co-operative space—enabled effective rain-forest biodiversity restoration delivery despite unresolved, and at times unresolvable, knowledge mismatches between the actors in the case. Limited to a single case, the study nonetheless offers ‘edges’ as a promising analytic and strategic means for (1) anticipating and neutralizing the frustrating delivery effects of cross-cultural knowledge mismatches, (2) better securing more effective shorter-term outcomes and less harmful longer-term impacts from humanitarian assistance efforts generally, and (3) directions for future, more widely ranging research into other assistance-delivery contexts, as well as literature on collaboration generally.