Meet the Jury Ronald Twongyirwe on Balancing agriculture, conservation and oil extraction in Uganda’s Albertine Rift: Competing development pathways in a changing rural landscape

Arenberg Doctoral School is proud to invite you to Meet The Jury!

When internationally renowned experts visit KU Leuven as a member of a PhD Examination Committee, we like to seize this opportunity to give this expert a forum to a large audience. All members of Science, Engineering & Technology are most welcome to the Meet The Jury Lectures.

Dr. Ronald Twongyirwe (Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Uganda) will give a lecture on “Balancing agriculture, conservation and oil extraction in Uganda’s Albertine Rift: Competing development pathways in a changing rural landscape”.

SHORT ABSTRACT:
The coexistence of agricultural intensification, biodiversity conservation and extractive resource development presents one of the defining challenges of sustainable development in rural Africa. Situated within debates on political ecology and resource frontiers, this seminar examines how competing development trajectories are reconfiguring land use, livelihoods and socio-environmental relations in Uganda’s Albertine Rift. Drawing on more than a decade of interdisciplinary research combining land-use analysis, surveys, the seminar explores interactions between commercial agriculture, forest conservation and the emerging oil industry. Rather than treating these sectors as discrete policy domains, I conceptualise them as mutually constitutive processes operating across scales. The expansion of sugarcane out-grower schemes illustrates how commercial agriculture generates income opportunities while accelerating forest conversion, reinforcing land inequalities and reshaping food production systems. Conservation initiatives reveal tensions between fortress conservation, community livelihoods and biodiversity protection. Meanwhile, the prospect of oil extraction demonstrates how expectations of future resource wealth – what I describe as the affective fabric of extraction – are already transforming land markets, governance arrangements and local aspirations before production begins. The Albertine Rift is presented as a resource frontier where competing claims over land, nature and development intersect, producing new forms of cooperation, conflict and socio-environmental change. I argue that understanding these dynamics requires moving beyond sector-specific analyses towards an integrated socio-political ecology of landscape transformation that recognises the interconnected nature of agricultural production, conservation and extractive development. Such an approach is essential for designing governance frameworks capable of balancing sustainability, livelihood resilience and equitable development in rural landscapes.

• Venue: Room M2, CAPA building, Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren
• Date: 3 September 2026 – 12:00-13:00
• Dr. Ronald Twongyirwe is visiting KU Leuven on the occasion of the PhD defence of Noelia del Carmen Valderrama Bhraunxs.