Global COE Program - Kyoto University - In Search of Sustainable Humanosphere in Asia and Africa

 The aim of this project is to conduct a wide range of interdisciplinary studies on sustainable development in Asia and Africa from a global, long-term perspective. We put forward a new paradigm, which is specifically designed to activate the dialogue between specialists of Asian and African history and area studies, and scientists working on frontier technology. It is also designed to create a framework under which to assess the impact of global environmental concerns such as global warming upon the local societies of Asia and Africa, and to suggest a sustainable path of local and regional development.

 Recent research on Asian and African history and area studies has noted that locally and regionally inspired movements of people, goods, services and information have been integral part of globalization, shaping the culture, economy and institutions of both the local society and the region with which it was associated. It has also been argued that culturally and environmentally coherent and relatively autonomous “world regions”, such as East Asia and South Asia, not only survived but supported the process of globalization. Today, as globalization gathers its pace, both local societies and big regions continue to act as a positive force of change although some of them can also suddenly lose their command, and fall into a victim of global political and economic forces.

 Meanwhile, scientists have developed their own interest in the sustainability of local societies in Asia and Africa. Inspired by global warming and the need to contain the amount of carbon dioxide, attempts have been made to measure material flows and conversions, plant fast-growing trees, make commercial products from hitherto unused biomass and forest waste, forecast whether and rainfall better, and regenerate forest cover in the tropics. Efforts have also been made to seek clean energy of various kinds including energy taken from outer space. All of these efforts require an appropriate understanding of how local people live and interact with their immediate environment.

 We propose to call such an ecological and social environment in which local people live “humanosphere”. Specifically, it includes not only the land surface on which to cultivate, but all other factors that affect their livelihood and environmental sustainability. In abstract terms, its structure can be described in the form of material and energy flows and conversions. In practice, other factors, such as water flows, biological activities in common lands and forests, and rainfalls and temperatures, are among the main concerns for the people living in local society. To the extent that climate is affected by the changes in atmosphere and oceanic currents, observations of its changes by equatorial atmospheric radars and satellites could provide vital information for our understanding of humanosphere at a local or regional level. The movements of water, air and biomass also influence local disease environment. The complex interactions of these phenomena make up the substance of our concept of humanosphere.

 At the same time, humanosphere can only be made sustainable if cultural, economic and institutional basis of the local society is responsive to its changing needs. If capitalism identified land, labour and capital as three main factors of production, and the state identified a piece of land surface as an object, the private property rights of which should be protected by law, the institutional treatment of other features of humanosphere such as tropical forests, rivers and water underneath the land surface, has often been less clear and uniform. Nor were rigid territorial boundaries of nation states helpful in dealing with international river management, cross-border smog and global warming. We need a comprehensive review of current cultural, economic and institutional forms of management to see if it is possible to arrive at the more explicit recognition of the structure of humanoshpere, and design the kinds of institutions responsive to the needs of resource management and the welfare of local society.

 We thus aim at creating a new paradigm of “sustainable humanosphere” in the field of Asian and African area studies, by bringing the knowledge of frontier science and technology into contact with the conventional disciplines of natural ecology, politics and economics, sociology and anthropology, and history, and by so doing train a new generation of area studies specialists and scientists equipped with a more comprehensive range of humanities, social science and science disciplines than hitherto possible. The outcome of this research will be disseminated through seminar and conference presentations, and through publications of books, journal articles, and working papers and conference proceedings. This will be done mainly in English and in Japanese, and in some critical cases in several other Asian languages.