Evolution Of Natural Resources And Local Governance In The Commune Of Droum In Niger

Abstract

The combined effects of climate variability and change, as well as human pressure, continue to strongly influence land use changes in Niger. In the commune of Droum, the diachronic analysis of the landscape shows that, like several other regions of Niger, there are significant transformations in the evolution of the natural environment. As part of this study, the exploitation of multi-date satellite imagery made it possible to trace the landscape dynamics in progress between 2005 and 2025.

The main objective of this work is to detect changes in land use and analyze the issues related to the exploitation of community natural resources in a context of local governance.

The methodology used consisted, on the one hand, of analyzing the bibliographic data, in particular that of the diagnosis carried out by the commune in 2015, which made it possible to highlight the potential in natural resources of the commune as well as the mechanisms of local governance. On the other hand, an approach based on the diachronic analysis of the study of land use from a supervised classification of satellite imagery which led to evaluating the evolution of the landscape of the commune.

The results obtained reveal that land use changes are characterized by increasing anthropogenic pressure, materialized by the extension of rainfed cultivation areas and the degradation of plant resources, in particular the wooded-shrubby steppe. From 2005 to 2025, the area occupied by the wooded-shrubby steppe decreased from 12.90% of the area of the commune to 5.90%. On the other hand, the rainfed crop/fallow mosaic unit marked an extension, increasing from 79.87% of the area of the commune in 2005 to 90.03% in 2025, while other units experienced progress (dense wooded steppe) or relative stability (rocky outcrop). In this context of increasingly widespread degradation of community natural resources, mechanisms in terms of local governance are applied for more sustainable management of these potentialities.