Green states in Africa: beyond the usual suspects

Abstract

Whilst the ‘green state debate’ has primarily focused on a narrow range of usual suspects in the developed world, the debate can be enriched and challenged by considering more diverse cases. Viewing African states from a green state perspective invites empirical reassessment of the geographical scope of the concept, and introduces a new set of conceptual questions about the political significance of transitions in environmental governance. Ecological modernisation theory has largely neglected African states because it is assumed that African states are weak, failing, or failed, and that environmentalism is a post-materialist phenomenon. Whilst both assumptions can be challenged empirically, a biopolitical perspective on the African environmental state, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, can both position African state development within a longer-term context and challenge some assumptions of ecological modernisation. Examples from Egypt, South Africa, and the Kavango-Zambezi Trans-frontier Conservation Area highlight underestimated continuities in environmental state practices. The international and transnational drivers of the green state in Africa are emphasised, as well as the political dangers of a green ‘state building’ project.

Keywords:

• Africa
• environmentalism
• biopolitics
• ecological modernisation
• post-colonialism

Acknowledgements

The comments of the editors of this special issue, the journal editors, and two anonymous reviewers, greatly improved this article. Versions of this article were also presented at seminars in Birmingham, Kent, Oxford Brookes, and Sheffield, as well as at the 2015 BISA conference. The argument is developed further in Carl Death (forthcoming), The Green State in Africa, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Notes

1. Mol’s more recent work does consider the impact of greening within China on peripheral economies in Africa (see Mol 2011), but does not discuss the green state in Africa. Weidner (2002) looks briefly at Nigeria and Morocco. Work on African environmental states which does not take an ecological modernisation approach includes Bryant and Bailey (1997), Duffy (2006a), Dunn (2009), Miller (1998), and Peluso and Watts (2001).

2. http://epi.yale.edu/ and http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/collection/esi/ (accessed 7 January 2014).

3. http://www.happyplanetindex.org/data/ (accessed 7 January 2014).

4. http://epi.yale.edu/ and http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/collection/esi/ (accessed 7 January 2014).

5. http://www.cdmpipeline.org/regions_7.htm (accessed 7 January 2014).

6. These projects, and others like them, are discussed by the author in more detail in a forthcoming book: The Green State in Africa.

7. http://www.africangreens.org/ and http://www.dakar2012.org/ (accessed 7 January 2014).

8. http://epi.yale.edu/epi2012/rankings (accessed 7 January 2014).

9. http://www.aideffectiveness.org/Country-Tanzania.html (accessed 7 January 2014).

10. http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2013/gabon (accessed 7 January 2014).

11. http://www.peaceparks.org/tfca.php?pid=19&mid=1008 (accessed 7 January 2014).