The necessity to address the challenges of climate change and environmental degradation is usually expressed in terms of visions of desirable futures, which are implemented through large-scale green transformation programmes.

This research project aims to explore high-end conceptualisations of African green futures by studying how ideas of greening the Sahel region have developed, persisted and been contested. It understands future visions of green transformation as ‘socio-technical imaginaries’, i.e., as the application of modern technologies for a ‘technical green fix’.

Green imaginaries are becoming powerful drivers of change globally, including across Sub-Saharan Africa. However, they often do not materialize as originally envisioned and remain in most cases a quick socio-technical fix, thus raising questions concerning how the performativity and persistence of ideas in the context of societal transformation can be explained. This leads to our central dilemma which is how materialized visions of the future enable and enact political imaginations by challenging or justifying policy choices and the persistence of an idea and delaying or furthering the search for alternative transformative strategies.

To study this question, the project takes the example of the Great Green Wall (GGW), which is currently the most prominent green transformation project on the African continent. This research project therefore aims to focus on the politics of “green transformations”, asking how environmental discourses and narratives are reproduced through different temporalities and become invested in particular political economies of the environment; what they obscure in terms of local rationalities about living with land and trees, and the social and political processes involved in contestation.

Key project objectives are as follows:

• Theoretically, provide a contribution to long standing debates on the persistence of ideas, linking the idea of socio-technical green imaginaries, with political histories, discourse coalitions and vernacular practices in the context of major green transformation projects.
• Methodologically, share within and beyond the consortium, and in particular early career researchers, the tools, and methods to develop an interdisciplinary approach to studying environmental socio-technical imaginaries.
• Discursively, challenge entrenched imaginaries, and their associated governance and political economic relations in order to allow a more objective representation of solutions to pressing environmental challenges.

The findings will be used to explore the ways in which contested and changing visions of green transformations can provide a contribution to long standing debates on the persistence of ideas, with the tools and methods to develop an interdisciplinary approach to studying environmental socio-technical imaginaries. This study will ultimately help challenge entrenched imaginaries, and their associated governance and political economic relations. This will be achieved through a participatory exhibition, focus groups, interviews and archival research and the research findings will be shared through a final conference, academic publications and the production of a comic book.

For more about the Great Green Wall, listen to: The Great Green Wall Project with Prof Jeremy Allouche on CapeTown radio

For more information (in French) read: « A travers l’accélérateur de la Grande Muraille verte, c’est bien une forme de néocolonialisme vert qui émerge » (lemonde.fr)