Environmental movements in Sub-Saharan Africa: a political ecology of power and conflict

This paper critically examines environmental movements in Sub-Saharan Africa by drawing on two prominent cases: the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People of Nigeria's Niger Delta and the Green Belt Movement of Kenya.Its thesis is that environmental movements in Africa operate within a transformative logic in which struggles for power over environmental resources connect broader popular social struggles for popular empowerment and democracy.Its conclusions include:a conflict between extractive forces and those of popular resistance lies at the heart of on-going struggles for the control of the African environmentAfrican states have asserted more physical control over the environment in order to subordinate it to extractive and accumulative purposesAfrican states repress environmental movements that interrogate the exclusion of the majority from effective participation in the management and control of environmental resourcesthe African environment is experiencing serious degradation due to its position as a site of strugglesthere is as yet only limited success in horizontal networking among environmental movements in Africa, and even when it takes place these movements encounter a lot of hostility from the statethese movements also have to confront the strategies of Big Business that simultaneously create and use environmental NGOs to co-opt the movements' space and subvert them from within, while backing state's repressionexperiences of popular mobilization and participation in the management of the environment in Nigeria and Kenya show a partial success in using their blocking power to resist the further expropriation of their environmental spaceit is from these grassroots movements that alternative social and democratic agendas that are environmentally sustainable and guarantee participation of the people in exercising power over Africa's eco-systems would ultimately emerge