This article examines the tensions between memory, identity and livelihoods in the making and transformation of cultural patrimony among Fulani cattle keepers of West Africa. Two areas of cattle breeding are examined: the Grassfields of Cameroon and south-western Burkina Faso. Studies on Fulani livestock raising suggest that each group possesses a particular cattle breed that has not changed with time. While the Fulani are thought to be conservative pastoralists, their livestock management practices suggest otherwise. They cross and change cattle breeds in order to adapt to new ecological or socio-political conditions. These strategies of adaptation and adjustment of cattle seem to be in opposition to strategies of heritage conservation. The relationship between Fulani pastoralists and their cattle breeds shows that an animal patrimony is a social product that is susceptible to being reworked. Fulani cattle breeding shows that new crossbreeds can result in the construction of a new heritage over the medium and long term as long as it is transmitted from the present to the next generation and preserved for a period of time.

The shea tree (Vitellaria paradoxa) is indigenous to Africa's Sudano-Sahelian region and crucial to savanna ecosystems and peoples. African women have long collected, marketed and transformed shea nuts into a multipurpose butter. The growing global trade in shea butter destined for the Western food and cosmetics industries thus represents an opportunity to bolster impoverished female incomes. However, such international sales are also prompting changes in the west African shea landscape. This article examines the role of shea as a female heritage in Burkina Faso, West Africa's largest shea exporter. It focuses on the knowledge systems informing the management, conservation and processing of shea. It also considers the effects of global shea commercialization on the maintenance of traditional agroforestry practices, tenure rights, and butter-making techniques. In so doing, the article illuminates the cultural and botanical heritage of shea as well as the significance of this species in biodiversity protection, African natural heritages and female knowledge systems.

The emergence of biodiversity standards in the nature conservation literature requires that we consider the interactions between conservation and local practices from a new angle. The coastal forest of Monogaga, a protected area inhabited by a local population, is an ideal terrain for comparing the impact of local agricultural practices and the activities of Sodefor, the government agency charged with the management of this conservation area. The discourses and uses of forest resources of these two actors allow us to compare the biodiversity of forest cover categories recognized by peasant farmers and Sodefor, using the standard statistical methods for measuring biodiversity (the Shannon and Weaver index, species richness, number of special status species).

For Sodefor, it is the most dense forest ecosystems (the ‘black forests’ ) and the lands that they occupy that constitute the area's natural heritage. The agency believes that these forests must be protected from all human uses, especially farming, if the forest is to be transmitted to future generations. In contrast, Wanne farmers view the old forests (kporo) as long-term fallows (teteklwoa) or reserves of fertile land that will be cleared when there is a need for more farmland in the future. For them, patrimony is constituted by the intergenerational transmission of a bundle of resource access and farming rights within lineages.

With regard to biodiversity, a comparison of the two types of resource management practices (Sodefor and farmer) gives nuanced results. The farmers' areas are more diverse than those of Sodefor when considering the Aké Assi threatened species list. For the Sassandrian species list, both management types maintained the same quantity of species. For endemics and the IUCN red list species, the spatial units controlled by Sodefor show more diversity.

The issue of nature as local heritage refers to temporalities: the transmission of a valued common good over time, as well as the assessment of causes leading to degradation of the natural environment. How are such ideas shaped in local discourse and practices in the Moose chiefdom of Maane? The article focuses on the creation, development and main features of the ritual territories of earth priests over time. A pessimistic discourse on the present environmental situation connects the degradation of the land to processes of social erosion: loss of knowledge and morals. Is this degradation considered to be a recent phenomenon, or is it inherent in the passage of time at whatever moment in the history of Maane?

This article examines the origins and evolution of the terroir approach as an organizing idea in development planning in West Africa. We consider the evolving meaning of the terroir concept in three distinct periods: as a research approach crafted in a French geographical school; as a site for research-development programmes, and, most recently, as a tool for conservation planning, territorial restructuring, and land privatization. An important shift in the meaning of the terroir concept is apparent in its evolving uses. For the terroir school, the terroir came to represent the socio-natural heritage of a group in which its social organization and pattern of resource use became inscribed in the landscape. The concept took on new meaning in the late-1980s as an appropriate location for on-farm research by agricultural development planners. The terroir became both an alternative research site and a setting for mobilizing rural populations to adopt new land management and farming techniques. The meaning of the concept shifted again in the 1990s with the advent of the gestion des terroirs approach. In the hands of conservation and development planners, the terroir was conceived of as a scale of intervention for a host of government, aid donor, and NGO programmes. In summary, a significant change in the meaning of the concept has taken place from one in which the notion of local heritage was dominant to one that emphasizes territory and boundary clarification.

Among various processes of recognition and development of local know-how related to biodiversity, the protection systems based on Geographical Indications seem to open up interesting perspectives for the countries of the South. Ethiopia is on the way to equipping itself with such a tool.

In this article we argue that Ethiopia offers an exceptionally good terrain for setting up such a mechanism. It has many products derived from the exploitation of biodiversity by a variety of cultural groups. Many of these products already have reputations linked to their cultural geographical origin. The existence of competitive national and international markets requires labels and protection systems.

Nevertheless adoption of a Geographical Indications system is not without its problems. The specific circumstances of the Ethiopian context – social and institutional as well as environmental – raise questions as to the limitations and possible risks of such a system, including the unequal development of certain components of biodiversity, standardization and loss of know-how, modification of current territorial subdivisions and the corresponding social and administrative organizational structures.