Green States in Africa: Beyond the Usual Suspects

Green states in Africa: beyond the usual suspects

Carl Death

Politics, University of Manchester, UK

Email: [email protected]

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, postcolonialism

Introduction

The ‘green state debate’ has hitherto largely neglected states outside the ‘developed’ world.

For Arthur Mol, as for many others, ‘it is the western industrialized societies that are leading the way in creating, designing and governing global environmental institutions and in

“determining” environmental-induced transformations in all kinds of social practices and institutions’ (2002, p. 110). Most research on the drivers and implications of the emergence of environmental or green states – states in which the governance of environmental issues has become central and is closely linked to core imperatives of survival, maintenance of domestic

1 order, generation of finance, capital accumulation and political legitimation – have tended to focus on a set of ‘usual suspects’: Nordic countries, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan,

Canada, Australia, the UK and the USA (e.g., Barry and Eckersley 2005; Buttel 2000;

Dryzek et al. 2003; Meadowcroft 2012; Weidner 2002).1 I suggest that African states might also be viewed from a green state perspective, and that this would invite an empirical reassessment of the geographical scope of the phenomenon as well as introducing a new set of conceptual questions about the political significance of transitions in environmental governance.

There are a number of reasons for this neglect of African states by green state theorists.

African countries tend to do rather badly on most indexes of environmental performance and governance, such as Yale’s Environmental Performance Index (EPI) or Columbia’s

Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI).2 The top performers in most of these indexes are the usual suspects mentioned above. Even on the Happy Planet Index, produced by the New

Economics Foundation, African countries also score badly, despite their lower ecological footprint, due to lower life expectancies. This index calculates ‘the extent to which countries deliver long, happy, sustainable lives for the people that live in them’ by ranking countries on how many long and happy lives they produce per unit of environmental input (well-being and life expectancy, divided by ecological footprint), and Costa Rica, Vietnam, Columbia and

Belize come out highest.3 Algeria is the highest placed African country at 26th place, followed by Tunisia and Morocco; the highest placed sub-Saharan countries are Madagascar and

Malawi at 49 and 72 respectively.

However, most theorists have resisted defining green states in terms of objective measures of environmental performance, and instead focus on the relative centrality of environmental

2 (resource conservation) or ecological (respect for the inherent value of nature) imperatives within the state. From this perspective a consideration of African states over the longue durée poses some interesting challenges. I will argue that a biopolitical perspective on the evolution of states in Africa draws attention to a central and long-standing concern with the government of human and nonhuman species life. Whilst this differs considerably in emphasis from what theorists like Robyn Eckersley (2004) regard as a green state, it should prompt consideration of the political consequences (both positive and negative) of the particular forms of green statehood that already exist or are emerging, often driven by international state-building projects. From a biopolitical perspective there are elements of green transnational statehood in Africa which – as elsewhere – may be cause for concern.

This argument proceeds by first examining the concept of the environmental state as presented by theorists of ecological modernisation, and the reasons why African states are neglected by these studies. An alternative approach to the environmental state is then proposed, drawing inspiration from Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and the production of state effects (Foucault 2003; 2007; 2008). A number of examples of the centrality of environmental and ecological imperatives to state practices are then highlighted, drawing particularly on cases of colonial agricultural policy and postcolonial wildlife management and biodiversity conservation, all of which are key sites of environmental governance but which also tend to be neglected within ecological modernisation approaches.

Ecological modernisation and African exceptions

The concept of the ‘green state’ is experiencing something of a revival in political science and international politics (Barry 2012; Kuehls 2014; Meadowcroft 2012). The difficulties faced by market mechanisms and neoliberal models of governance in resolving

3 environmental contradictions and producing effective action in areas like climate change or biodiversity loss are increasingly evident, but it was the impact of the global financial and economic crises since 2007 which did most to politically re-legitimise the central role of state structures in intervening to protect economies and financial markets (Death 2014; Jessop

2012). These political considerations amplified academic trends which over a much longer time period have sought to ‘bring the state back in’ whilst also re-evaluating statist frameworks and methodologies (Jessop 2001; Mitchell 1991; Scott 1998; Tilly 1985;

Whitehead et al. 2007). Theorists of ecological modernisation have articulated a normative case for the importance of states in environmental governance, as well as more empirical and analytical assessments of the drivers and implications of state transformations (Barry and

Eckersley 2005; Dryzek et al. 2003; Eckersley 2004; Litfin 1998; Meadowcroft 2012; Mol and Buttel 2002).

Normatively, Eckersley makes a powerful case that in the face of environmental challenges,

‘there are still few social institutions that can match the same degree of capacity and potential legitimacy that states have to redirect societies and economies along more ecological sustainable lines’ (2004, p. 7; see also Barry 2012; Kuehls 2014). This is a theoretical and generalised argument; when considering empirical cases, she finds little of interest outside the industrialised world. Although her conclusion recognises that ‘the most serious challenge to global sustainability’ lies in problems of poverty, underdevelopment and historical injustice, she proposes that the European Union is one of the best hopes for an evolving green transnational state and expresses the hope that as states become greener they will start to care more about environmental injustice and poverty (Eckersley 2004, pp. 252-3). Barry and

Eckersley conclude their edited collection with the explicit claim that ‘most of the promising developments are emerging from the developed world’ (2005b, p. 272).

4 The reasons for this focus on the developed world are most cogently advanced by theorists of ecological modernisation. Two arguments why Africa has not progressed toward environmental or ecological states are key: first, that African states are weak, failing or under-developed; and second, that environmentalism is a post-materialist concern unlikely to achieve much salience outside developed societies and economies.

The first argument is borrowed from modernisation theory more broadly, and places African states much further behind the rest of the world on a linear path toward the modern, bureaucratic, Westphalian nation-state (Bayart 1993). The modern state in Africa was largely the product of colonial imposition, and only weakly embedded in local societies (Warner

2001; Young 1988). After initial enthusiasm for the transformative role of independent

African states – ‘the chisel in the hands of the new sculptors’ (Migdal 1988, p. 4) – the postcolonial nation-building project was beset with difficulties including domestic conflicts, debt crises, Cold War support for predatory and neo-patrimonial elites, and the emasculation of bureaucracies through neoliberal Structural Adjustment Programmes (Clapham 1998;

Grovogui 2001; Reno 2001). It became common to describe the African state as parasitic, failed, a shadow, vampiric, neo-patrimonial and so on (Bayart 1993; Conca 1994;

Cornelissen et al. 2012; Grimm et al. 2014; Grovogui 2001; Reno 2001), to the degree that it is possible for a political theorist like Jonathan Joseph to suggest that African societies ‘lack stable bodies like the state’ (2010, p. 237). For these reasons the typical African state is regarded as altogether unsuitable for progression toward the ‘post-Westphalian’ transnational environmental or ecological state (Mol 2015).

5 The second argument advanced by theorists of ecological modernisation is that environmentalism is a post-materialist concern, and hence of less political salience in societies where basic needs – personal security, employment, healthcare, food, water and shelter – remain unsatisfied (Mol 2002, p. 105; Weidner 2002). The process of ecological modernisation emphasises the emergence of ‘new social movements’ in Western Europe and

North America in the 1960s and 1970s to agitate for the environment, gender and sexuality struggles, youth politics, nuclear disarmament and so on. As economies grew and gained increased technical expertise, these advanced states responded to environmental social movement concerns by ‘decoupling’ economic and social development from environmental degradation (Buttel 2000; Meadowcroft 2012; Mol 2002).

Following the logic of this account, it is often assumed that developing countries lack modern environmental movements either because they have more pressing economic, social and political problems, or because their populations are regarded as too poor, uneducated, or downtrodden to campaign on environmental issues. Moreover, in the case of authoritarian states, the argument is often made that even if the population does have an interest in environmental reforms, they have no means to hold government accountable to those desires.

Mol, for example, notes the weakness of civil society organisations and popular environmentalism in Africa (2002, p. 107; cf. Mol 2011, p. 790).

For these reasons Sonnenfeld and Mol conclude that ‘developing countries in sub-Saharan

Africa are barely touched by emerging global political institutions and agreements aiming at environmental reform’ (2002, p. 1324; see also Mol 2011, p. 793). Some empirical evidence seems to support this claim. As noted above, African countries tend to perform poorly on environmental performance and governance indexes: South Africa and Nigeria, the

6 continent’s wealthiest states, are ranked 128 and 119 respectively on the 2012 EPI, and 93 and 98 on the 2005 ESI.4 In 2012 there were only 258 projects in the Clean Development

Mechanism pipeline in Africa, a mere 2.9% of the global total.5 Luke Patey’s account of environmental regulation, monitoring and enforcement in Sudan is typical and is replicated across the continent: ‘environmental impact assessments are often substandard, only conducted after operations have already begun, and shelved upon completion with little follow-up’ (2010, p. 633; see also Broch-Due 2000; Bryant and Bailey 1997, pp. 66-9; Leach and Mearns 1996; Resnick et al. 2012).

However, this picture underestimates the importance of environmental governance to the evolution and transformation of states in Africa. The ecological modernisation argument has,

I will argue, limited purchase and utility in Africa, and important modifications to both the

‘failed state’ and ‘post-materialist’ claims are required. Moreover, I suggest that a biopolitical perspective better captures the long-standing centrality of environmental and ecological imperatives to the production of states in Africa.

First, the image of the failed African state is at best a limited caricature (Grimm et al. 2014;

Grovogui 2001). In the first decade of the twenty-first century, six of the ten fastest growing economies in the world were in Africa (Cornelissen et al. 2012, p. 5). Moreover, states like

Egypt, South Africa, Sudan, Nigeria, Ghana and Ethiopia have long histories of large modernist development projects, often with the aim of managing more sustainable resource use, mitigating environmental threats, or protecting sites of natural and national heritage

(Migdal 1988). These include programmes of agricultural reform and tree-planting, urban planning and re-settlement schemes, irrigation projects and dams, massive conservation projects, disease eradication and public health programmes and so on (Anderson 1984;

7 Beinart 2003; Bonneuil 2000; Bryant and Bailey 1997; Gruffydd Jones 2012; Leach and

Mearns 1996; McCann 1999; Mitchell 2002; Scott 1998; Verhoeven 2011). Contemporary examples of modernist state-led development projects that claim green credentials are not hard to find. The forested Congo Basin is one of the largest potential global sources of carbon credits for reduced deforestation (REDD+) and is attracting widespread international private and public interest. South Africa is helping to fund the Grand Inga dam in the Democratic

Republic of the Congo, scheduled to be the world’s largest source of hydropower. North

African countries hope to become major renewable energy suppliers to Europe, with Algeria planning to invest $60 billion by 2030, and Morocco is proposing one of the largest concentrated solar plants in the world. Ghana is set to begin construction on the Nzema solar photovoltaic plant, which would be Africa’s largest and the fourth largest of its kind in the world. The Lagos Urban Transport Project for Nigeria has created the first Bus Rapid Transit system in sub-Saharan Africa, and the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project is billed as one of the largest investments in wind energy in Africa and the largest single private investment in

Kenya’s history. Ethiopia has set out a strategy for a Climate Resilient Green Economy that would establish food security, expand renewable energy, stimulate reforestation, and leapfrog to modern and energy-efficient technologies in transport, industrial sectors, and buildings.

Other prominent green economy strategies have been developed in Rwanda, Mozambique and South Africa. Such projects suggest there is much on the continent to interest ecological modernisation theorists.6

Second, the ecological modernisation account of the growth of ‘modern’ environmentalism is widely contested. For Richard Grove (1995), the environmental movement emerged not from post-war Western activism but through the encounter between Europe and the colonial

(especially tropical) world. Moreover, there are many movements outside the West, albeit

8 with often very different framings and in different cultural contexts, which are centrally concerned with ‘environmental’ issues, broadly defined. A brief list of just some of the most well-known examples would include the Chipko movement in India, the Green Belt

Movement in Kenya, Gandhian movements for voluntary simplicity, the Movement for the

Survival of the Ogoni People in the Niger Delta, indigenous peoples movements, La Via

Campesina, peasant anti-GMO movements, climate justice networks, Inuit movements for

Arctic protection, many forms of Buddhism and other religious ecologisms, and so on

(Beinart 2000; Broch-Due 2000; Bryant and Bailey 1997; Cheru 2005; Duffy 2006a; Miller

1998; Ntsebeza 2005; Peluso and Watts 2001). Doherty and Doyle have argued that the development of Friends of the Earth International has ‘increasingly been driven by the major concerns of its southern members’ (2014, p. 25), and the twelve African branches have played particularly significant roles (through individuals like Nnimmo Bassey, chair from

2008 to 2012). Green political parties exist in 30 African countries (although they are often very small), and the Fédération Démocratique des Ecologistes du Sénégal (FEDES) held the

Global Green Congress for green parties in Dakar in March-April 2012.7

Such developments could perhaps be explained by ecological modernisation theorists as the belated modernisation of African environmental movements and states. Supporting this interpretation, the Yale Environmental Performance Index ranks those states which have improved most over the past decade: Egypt and Angola are fifth and sixth best improvers overall, Botswana is 21st and Ghana 28th.8 But this picture of belated improvement and modernisation underestimates the centrality of environmental governance to the evolution of

African states over the longue durée (Iliffe 2007; McCann 1999; Neumann 1998). The environmental state in Africa is not a recent emergence, and recognising the importance of practices of resource governance and species protection to the historical production of

9 African states is significant for the concept of the green state more generally. A biopolitical perspective provides an important counter-weight to the teleological and politically optimistic account of the ecological modernisers.

Biopolitics and green state practices

There is an assumption in the ecological modernisation literature that a green state is politically necessary and desirable, that states which make environmental and ecological concerns more central imperatives will be more rational, secure, and sustainable (Dryzek et al. 2003; Meadowcroft 2005). There are many good reasons for this, as Eckersley (2004) and others develop at length. However, it is also true that many from both the fields of environmental politics and African studies have been more sceptical about the desirability of stronger states (see Bayart 1993; Paterson 2000 and Scott 1998). A biopolitical perspective – drawing upon Michel Foucault’s work on the governance and administration of life – also works to highlight some of these more troubling aspects of the green state.

Foucault’s work helps make the multifaceted and omnipresent nature of power relations central to the discussion about green states. For Foucault, bio-power is ‘the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power’ (2007, p. 1). Similarly, for

Mitchell Dean, biopolitics is ‘a form of politics entailing the administration of the processes of life of populations’, and the regulation of ‘the social, cultural, environmental, economic and geographic conditions under which humans live, procreate, become ill, maintain health or become healthy, and die’ (1999, pp. 98-9; see also Nadesan 2008; Rutherford 1999). From this perspective environmental concerns have been central to forms of governance since the earliest political communities: the pursuit of a safe and healthy living environment; food and

10 water security; the preservation of cultural and natural landscapes; regulations to protect against communicable diseases; sustainable utilization of resources and so on (Anderson

1984; Beinart 2000; Iliffe 2007; Gruffydd Jones 2012; McCann 1999; Meadowcroft 2012;

Whitehead 2008; Whitehead et al 2007).

This is not to say that techniques of biopolitical environmental governance have not changed over time. Certainly it is possible to identify dramatic changes in forms of biopower, for example in the nineteenth century administration of European towns and cities, the poor, food supplies, disease management and the ‘national population’ (produced through statistical measurement) (Foucault 2003, pp. 242-7; Rutherford 1999); or the formation and expansion of environmental ministries, international organisations, regulatory regimes, scientific networks and movements from the 1960s and 1970s onwards (Meadowcroft 2012, p. 64). For

Foucault, however, such shifts are not seen as transformations in the nature or essence of the state (as in the shift from a liberal to a welfare state, and then on to a green state: see Dryzek et al. 2003, p. 2), but rather shifting assemblages of practices and technologies and discourses and ‘state effects’ (Foucault 2008, pp. 76-7; see also Dunn 2009; Jessop 2001; Kuehls 2014;

Mitchell 1991; Whitehead 2008). Foucault avoided formulating a theory of the state because

‘the state has no heart, as we well know, but not just in the sense that it has no feelings, either good or bad, but it has no heart in the sense that it has no interior. The state is nothing else but the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities’ (2008, p. 77). The

Foucauldian state is simply ‘the correlative of a particular way of governing’ (2008, p. 6; see also Jessop 2007).

Taking this biopolitical view together with seeing the state as an effect produced by particular ways of governing, we can suggest that the African state is actually a product of particular

11 attempts to govern land, species, human populations, water resources and so on. In this sense, the green African state is not ‘of quite recent origin’ (Mol and Buttel 2002, p. 6), but rather is the effect of long-standing and deep-rooted attempts to govern environmental resources

(Broch-Due 2000, p. 36; Iliffe 2007; McCann 1999; Neumann 1998). This includes efforts by colonial and postcolonial states to administer natural resources more profitably and efficiently (as in agricultural reform and modernisation, dam building, forestry schemes), but it also includes more ecological imperatives that seek to protect and sustain species (human and non-human) that can flourish in their environments. What else are vaccination campaigns

(for livestock and humans), the creation and management of biodiversity enclaves, urban sanitation reforms, programmes to eliminate alien invasive species, anti-poaching drives and wildlife conservation, if not ‘a form of politics entailing the administration of the processes of life of populations’ (Dean 1999, pp. 98-9)? As Raymond Bryant and Sinéad Bailey point out,

‘the historical development of states has been closely intertwined with the management of the local environments on which those states, and the people they govern, have been dependent’

(1997, p. 52).

The following sections provide some particularly apposite examples of biopolitical environmental state practices in the areas of colonial agricultural policy and postcolonial wildlife management and biodiversity conservation, ranging across Egypt, South Africa, and the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area in southern Africa. These are intended to demonstrate the presence of environmental and ecological imperatives at the core of state practices of government over long periods of time. They are not an attempt to suggest that these practices have remained static over time, nor that they are the same in different contexts and countries. However, these examples do highlight certain ‘homologies’ or similarities (Nadesan 2008, p. 1) in the arts of government across different social domains.

12 The biopolitics of colonial agricultural policy

For generations of colonial scientists and administrators, as well as postcolonial bureaucrats and aid workers, the inefficiency of the African peasant scratching away at the thin red soil has encapsulated the continent’s ever-looming environmental tragedy. Colonial administrators were obsessed with the problems posed by pastoralist and nomadic grazing, including deforestation, soil erosion, gullies and dongas, hunger, floods and famine

(Anderson 1984; Bonneuil 2000; Grove 1995; Leach and Mearns 1996; McCann 1999).

William Beinart’s account of the evolution of environmentalism in South Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shows how ‘agricultural production, environmental understanding, and the attempts to conserve natural resources were intimately linked’ (2003, p. xv), where from the 1880s to the 1940s, ‘environmental regulation became a far more central concern to the state both at local and national levels’ as fears of land degradation, soil erosion, deforestation, disease and overstocking became increasingly urgent (2003, p. 20).

Colonial states in Africa also began or intensified processes of codifying land and territory, and surveying the populations who lived upon them (Kuehls 2014; Scott 1998). Such practices were doubtless bound up with the control and exploitation of the colonies, but they also demonstrate how the governance of environmental issues (the life and health of populations) was central to core state imperatives of survival, maintenance of domestic order, generation of finance, capital accumulation and even, eventually, political legitimation.

Colonial Egypt is a powerful example of how state-building relied upon environmental management and agricultural biopolitics, and environmental issues are still politically contentious in contemporary Egypt (Verhoeven 2011; Sowers 2013). Timothy Mitchell’s detailed accounts of state-building and colonialism in Egypt draw attention to the

13 management of environmental resources and impacts and their role in producing, performing and representing the Egyptian state. He notes that, whilst control of the Nile valley from

Cairo was not new, ‘from the nineteenth century for the first time political power sought to work in a manner that was continuous, meticulous and uniform’, and to enter into the

‘process of production’ itself, rather than simply impose levies on agricultural produce

(Mitchell 1988, p. 35). The disciplining of society was attempted through conscription and villagisation programmes on a staggering scale, and should be understood as an attempt to mould society and individuals through control and regulation of the environments in which they lived (Scott 1998). Town planners in late nineteenth century Egypt were obsessed – like their European counterparts – with miasma and stench. Cemeteries, sewers, effluences, and cesspools were the problem, and light, cleanliness, air, and proper planning were the solutions (Foucault 2007, pp. 11-15; Gruffydd Jones 2012, p. 27; Mitchell 1988, p. 67). One scheme proposed in 1880 was that human excrement from the cities should be returned to the countryside as fertiliser: ‘The towns must restore to the countryside in the form of fertiliser the equivalent of what they receive in the form of consumption ... Every rotten smell in the house, in the street, in the town, signifies ... a loss of fertiliser in the countryside’ (Mitchell

1988, p. 67). Contemporary movements for Transition Towns in the UK may well sympathise with such ecologically-minded notions; irrespective of their feasibility, such ideas reveal a pervasive concern with governing lived environments, waste, and life processes (Barry 2012, p. 79).

After 1882 colonial authorities sought to map Egypt’s agricultural land in precise and scientific detail: ‘the colonial power set out to determine, for every square meter of the country’s agricultural land, the owner, the cultivator, the quality of the soil, and the proper rate of tax’ (Mitchell 2002, p. 9; see also Scott 1998). This produced ‘one of the most closely

14 mapped terrains in the world’ (Mitchell 2002, p. 86), all in the downstream shadow of the imposing Aswan Dam, built at the turn of the century and increased in height in 1933.

Through the supervision of hygiene and public health, the building of model villages, the construction of networks ‘to channel and control the movement of commodities, Nile waters, and tourists’, the surveillance of workers and ‘the opening up of towns and cities to continuous inspection with wide thoroughfares, street lighting and police forces’, the politics of the modern state in Egypt was produced. This was a state pre-eminently concerned with managing and regulating the environments in which the population lived, worked and farmed

(Mitchell 1988, p. 175).

Many would no doubt respond that the colonial Egyptian state is far from what is meant by a green state. Certainly, it is not exactly a state that sought to ‘facilitate both more active and effective ecological citizenship and more enlightened environmental governance’ (Eckersley

2004, p. xi), although it did regard itself as enlightened in the nineteenth century meaning of the term. But if an environmental state is where there is ‘a significant governmental focus on managing environmental burdens’ (Meadowcroft 2005, p. 4) then colonial and postcolonial

Egypt qualifies. Dryzek et al. (2003) see the main criteria for a green state as the linking of environmental projects to core state imperatives of survival, domestic order, finance, accumulation and legitimation: Egypt’s attempts to control the Nile flood, monitor its population, survey land, provide sanitation, and present a certain image of itself internationally are clearly all linked to core state imperatives. If not quite a ‘hydraulic civilisation’ (Whitehead et al. 2007, p. 57), colonial Egypt can certainly be seen as some form of an environmental state.

15 This is also true for many other colonial regimes in Africa (Anderson 1984; McCann 1999;

Neumann 1998). Moving from Cairo to the Cape it is possible to see similar imperatives in both colonial and apartheid South Africa. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s the apartheid government pursued policies of ‘Betterment’, villagisation and land reform which had environmental logics at their heart (Beinart 2003; Ntsebeza, 2005). Whilst racial supremacy and the protection of the white population were increasingly paramount, environmental concerns and ecological knowledge were deployed on significant scales to reshape the South

African countryside: both in the expansion of farmland and in the creation and intensive management of vast national parks such as Kruger (Carruthers 1995). Such measures cannot be easily dismissed as pre-environmental. Beinart concludes that ‘at various moments in the twentieth century the South African state enacted far-reaching measures for environmental regulation, and initiated propaganda drives to encourage conservation’, in the process spending millions of pounds and passing wide-ranging laws (2003, p. 380). As such, agricultural programmes and policies – which are fundamentally about how to manage and control environments in sustainable and productive ways – should be more central to accounts of the historical development of ‘green states’ in Africa and elsewhere (Kuehls

2014).

The biopolitics of postcolonial conservation

There are clear continuities in the practices of environmental governance from colonial eras to postcolonial and contemporary politics. Issues related to land, food and agriculture remain important concerns for environmental activists in movements over food sovereignty, genetically modified crops, land rights, deforestation and consumption (Barry 2012;

Dauvergne and LeBaron 2013; Sowers 2013; Verhoeven 2011). Wildlife policy and conservation are seminal issues in green politics, but also tend to be underemphasised in

16 much of the ‘green state’ literature (Dryzek et al. 2003; Eckersley 2004; cf. Ramutsindela

2007, pp. 6-7). Theorists of ecological modernisation have tended to focus on curbing industrial pollution, hi-tech ‘green’ industry, advanced transport systems, large-scale renewable energy systems and other ‘techno-fixes’ (Buttel 2000; Mol and Buttel 2002;

Weidner 2002). In contrast, the relevance of African cases to debates about the production of green states can be emphasised by considering the politics of contemporary conservation practices.

Africa’s significance in the global politics of biodiversity conservation is clear: according to

UNEP in 2010, 11.5 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s land and territorial waters were protected areas (UNEP-WCMC 2013), and parks such as the Serengeti, Kruger, Okavango delta, and the Maasai Mara have a worldwide status and reputation (Beinart and Coates 1995;

Brockington et al. 2008; Duffy 2006b; Dunn 2009; Garland 2008). If protected forest reserves are taken into account, countries like Botswana and Tanzania have over 30 percent of their land under some form of ecological protection, high up in the international rankings

(Beinart and McKeown 2009, p. 448). Gabon, for example, scores highly on several international environmental indexes, coming 12th in the 2005 ESI and 40th in the 2012 EPI due to its extent of forested land (88% of the country) and commitment to high-profile international conservation projects (Garland 2008, p. 57).

Programmes to govern alien invasive species (IAS) provide another example of how core state imperatives (in this case water security and employment, through public works) become linked to environmental concerns. In 2004 the IUCN ‘identified 81 IAS in South Africa, 49 in

Mauritius, 44 in Swaziland, 37 in Algeria and Madagascar, 35 in Kenya, 28 in Egypt, 26 in

Ghana and Zimbabwe, and 22 in Ethiopia’ (Chenje and Mohamed-Katerere 2006, p. 332).

17 One of the largest ‘green’ public works programmes on the continent, South Africa’s

Working for Water, employs millions of people in searching for and eradicating water- intensive alien species such as the Australian acacia (Resnick et al 2012). Bennett reports that

‘Australian trees are hunted down and exterminated by government employees funded by

Working for Water’, and ‘popular discussions of Australian trees in newspapers sometimes display a powerful combination of ecological nationalism and xenophobia’ (2011, p. 279; see also Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Neely 2010). At one point President Thabo Mbeki even declared that alien plants ‘stand in the way of the African renaissance’ (Comaroff and

Comaroff 2001, p. 644). If the apartheid state was obsessed with racial classification and the segregation and control of dangerous populations, the post-apartheid state has on occasion displayed an ecological fervour in the attempt to control dangerous species.

In important ways such conservation practices work to produce African states (Brockington et al. 2008; Büscher 2013; Duffy 2006b; Garland 2008, p. 62; Peluso and Watts 2001).

Beinart and Coates (1995, p. 77), for example, observe that ‘game animals became a recurrent motif in white South Africa’s conception and projection of itself. Assorted wildlife were emblazoned on postage stamps – the springbok’s head became the watermark soon after the Union in 1910 and first displaced the king’s head in 1926, the year that the Kruger national park was founded’. The springbok and the protea are the symbols of South African rugby and cricket, respectively, and the national currency is emblazoned with the ‘Big Five’; thus ‘today’s parks remain a powerful cultural statement fusing notions of nature and nation’

(Beinart and Coates 1995, p. 90; see also Carruthers 1995; Ramutsindela 2007). Kevin Dunn draws attention to the role of contested national park spaces in policing territory, populations and resources, as well as in performing particular idealised scripts of statehood. For example,

‘[i]n Uganda’s Mgahinga National Park, soldiers always escort foreign visitors in the park,

18 and perform very public drills … clear public (and masculinized) social practices that are meant to call into being Uganda’s stateness and sovereignty’ (Dunn 2009, p. 437). In the context of a continent where only around a quarter of national borders are fully demarcated

(Engel and Olsen 2012, p. 64), it is often through conservation areas – and their fences, entry gates, roads, park fees, tourist facilities and so on – that borders are actually brought into being and territorialised (Mitchell 1991, p. 94; see also Brockington et al. 2008; Büscher

2013). Rosaleen Duffy discusses how conservation practices have helped produced a

‘governance state’ in Madagascar, where the World Bank funded and wrote a National

Environmental Action Plan (NEAP) and a Charter for the Environment; international and local NGOs and multi-national corporations sit on advisory boards for environmental management; the WWF and Conservation International arranged US$8 million-worth of debt for nature swaps, donors and NGOs directly run elements of national parks, and the extent of land with protected area status was tripled in six years following the 2003 Durban World

Parks Congress (Duffy 2006a). As Roderick Neumann suggests (1998, p. 35), ‘[n]ational park and conservation laws are at once one part of the wider process of land and resources seizure by the colonial state, and a symbolic legitimation of that process.’

Significantly, some of these ‘conservation states’ are exactly the low-income, weak-state countries about which ecological modernisers are most sceptical. Tanzania depends on development aid for around 40% of its total budget,9 and analysts point to endemic and apparently ‘long-term private sector “capture”’ of the Department of Wildlife in the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism, producing an overall picture of ‘uncoordinated and collectively dysfunctional rent-seeking’ in Tanzania’s natural resource sectors (Cooksey

2011, pp. 66 and 84; Death 2013). Freedom House rate Gabon as ‘not free’ (ranking 5 out of

7 for infringement of civil liberties and 6 out of 7 for abuses of political freedom), and note

19 that ‘[c]orruption is widespread, and rampant graft prevents the country’s significant natural resource revenues from benefiting most citizens’.10 Yet it is precisely because of Tanzania’s status as a least developed country, or Gabon’s position within the international political economy, that countries like these are so profoundly shaped by international conservation norms, discourses and practices (Garland 2008). Indeed, development aid is often specifically intended to build state capacity and strengthen state structures, and to promote the practices and techniques of international environmental governance. The DAC ‘Aid to environment

Development Co-operation Report 2012’ found that over the last decade ‘[a]id targeting environmental sustainability as the “principal objective” grew more than three-fold over the period, amounting to USD 11.3 billion in 2009-10’ (DAC 2012, p. 1). In many cases ‘green conditionality’ means that funds for development projects will only be released if environmental safeguards, institutions, policies or ‘offsets’ can be guaranteed (Bryant and

Bailey 1997, pp. 57-8; Leach and Mearns 1996, p. 23; Meadowcroft 2007, p. 153). Richard

Schroeder (1999, p. 370) observes that as early as 1995, 42 of 54 African countries had either adopted national environmental action plans (NEAPs) or had them in preparation, in direct response to World Bank pressure. These have subsequently been augmented by national strategies for sustainable development, which were mandated by the Millennium

Development Goals (target 7A) and have often been combined with Poverty Reduction

Strategy Papers (Meadowcroft 2007). Conservation and environmental governance in Africa is profoundly shaped – and indeed often delivered – by international NGOs, epistemic communities of scientists and ecologists, and funded through ecotourism or carbon offset revenues (Leach and Mearns 1996; Miller 1998; Mitchell 2002). Green state effects are therefore being produced even in some of Africa’s weakest or poorest countries, and in the continent’s most apparently ‘ungoverned’ spaces.

20 A good example of this is the emergence of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier

Conservation Area (KAZA-TFCA), which is set to be the largest conservation area in the world and ‘will eventually span an area of approximately 520,000 km2 (similar in size to

France)’.11 The park stretches across Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, and its rationale is to provide the elephants of Chobe and the Okavango parks with access to far larger areas of protected grazing, marketed under the slogan ‘Boundless Southern Africa’

(Büscher 2013, pp. 76-7). The project is animated by a belief that ecological corridors should traverse national boundaries and borders, and the health of wild populations requires safe passage across state frontiers. It therefore has a clearly ecological motivation at its core – it is a form of biopolitical governance with the health and vitality of animal populations

(particularly elephants) as its focus. Of course one of the major motivations here is to increase tourist revenue, but there are also symbolic and representational motivations.

Moreover, the project also has implications for the policing of borders, as a key element of the TFCA is the possibility of free movement for international visitors across the five states.

The ‘univisa’ scheme would allow tourists

freedom of movement, much like the movement and migration of non-human animal

populations within the TFCAs across internationally acknowledged boundaries while, in so far

as it can be monitored, restricting the freedom of movement of each country’s indigenous

human population. Such restrictions would also include limitations in terms of land use,

circumscribing foraging areas for livestock, water management and unmonitored shopping

rights in a neighbouring state (Cloete 2008, p. 271).

This example shows how ecological concerns – the flourishing of elephant populations – are becoming closely bound-up with core state imperatives like security (border policing),

21 finance (taxation), accumulation (tourism), and legitimation (conservation). Initiatives like the KAZA-TFCA will legitimate new, intensive and often violent forms of policing and counter-poaching interventions that will empower new state structures and agencies

(Brockington et al. 2008; Duffy 2010; Ramutsindela 2007). Through such practices new transnational green state effects are being produced in Africa, but in ways that have many similarities to older colonial state formations.

Conclusion

I have argued that the green state debates, which have hitherto neglected developing states and particularly African states, would be enriched by a closer engagement with African cases and accounts of state development. A biopolitical perspective shows how African states have been produced in important ways, over the longue durée, by environmental and ecological governing practices. These are not the green states normative theorists like Robyn Eckersley advocate, but they should have a more central place within empirical accounts of the ways in which states have sought to govern natural resources and the life and health of human and non-human species.

Two particular conclusions emerge from a biopolitical perspective on green state practices in

Africa. The first is to stress the importance of international and transnational forces and relations. Colonialism – whether imperial rule as in nineteenth century Egypt or settler societies as in apartheid South Africa – is a vitally important determinant of the type of green state practices that have been embedded in Africa. This is true with respect to urban planning, conservation parks, modernist engineering, and racial classifications. Since formal independence, Africa’s environmental governance – and particularly conservation – continues to be powerfully shaped by the interaction between external and domestic actors

22 (Conca 2005; Schroeder 1999). Charles Tilly famously argued that in the European context

‘war makes states’ (1985, p. 170). In contrast one might suggest that, at least in part, transnational environmental governance and monitoring makes African states. Some accounts of the production of green states have underemphasised the transnational and international dimension (e.g. Dryzek et al. 2003), and for this reason the stress upon transnational forces and the international system in this special issue (see Duit et al. 2015) is to be welcomed.

The second particular contribution of a biopolitical approach is to introduce a note of caution into the green state debate. Theorists like Eckersley and Barry produced powerful responses to green theorists more sceptical about the potential for a ‘green leviathan’, yet in some manifestations of the ecological modernisation literature the assumption seems to be that a more efficient, responsible and effective state is a self-evident good. In many respects – considering the scale of threats posed by runaway climate change, and by unregulated financial markets and multinational capital – this assumption is plausible. However it might also be described as overly optimistic. A biopolitical perspective on the evolution of the state in Africa highlights that environmental and ecological imperatives have often functioned to extend the power of state institutions and political elites when articulated in terms of core state imperatives of capital accumulation, state security, or legitimacy. The expansion or consolidation of state practices and effects is not neutral, but is rather political, and it often comes at the expense of other groups, social orders, and power relations (Bryant and Bailey

1997, p. 65; Conca 2005, p. 201; Nadesan 2008, p. 201; Peluso and Watts 2001; Scott 1998).

In Africa many are right to be sceptical about the progressive role of the state, and the reinvention of development as ‘state-building’ in Africa has precipitated critical concern. One of the potential consequences of revived interest in the green state is the legitimation of a new environmental state-building project in Africa, which would have political dangers and risks

23 as well as opportunities. The biopolitical history of environmental governance warns that the future transnational green state might, in some respects, have some family resemblances to the colonial or authoritarian state.

24 1Acknowledgements

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.

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 doesn’t 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).

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