Discourse and the Inclusion of Rural/Indigenous Communities in Environ mental Governance: Insights of Selected Grassfield Communities in Cameroon

Abstract

A vast range of issues have placed the environment at the fore-front of societal concerns especially in such domains as education, research, the media , government policy, and many others. The rural sector remains a domain where people’s livelihoods are invariably linked to the natural endowments around them, especially, the land, the flora and the fauna. These are some of the realities within which this paper was conceived. Understanding this background is very important in this paper because it guides the choice of textual data suitable for an understanding of the issue, the contexts of their production and other previous texts referred back to (koller 2009). Again, it is noteworthy that texts are typically produced, distributed and received in the context of social relations of some kind between text producer and text recipients. Furthermore, texts act as carriers for ideology (ibid).