The Green State in Africa offers the most comprehensive conceptual and empirical assessment of the environmental politics of the green state and its applications. It is situated in state-centred global environmental politics and its implications for the present and future of the society and the state in Africa. Carl Death draws on a broad range of multi-layered environmental problem areas from land appropriation, to urbanisation, from climate change to blue and green economy and from global environmental politics to nationally and regionally networked environmental public. The author has succeeded in plugging-in the ‘absence of the state’ employing post-colonial theory and unique biopolitical and post-colonial governability. The making and remaking of African notions of border, territory and environmental spaces crucial for human survival is presented within a historical context informed by the partition of Africa and its present-day influence on the relationship between state and citizen. It also informs as inter and intra-state relations in respect to border communities and trans-frontier ecological interventions (for example, the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park which straddles the borders of Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe) aiming at engineering and rationalising (in a neoliberal market-based) rather than softening the state control over lived-spaces. In other words, it privileges the ‘wilderness’ as an environmental market over people and profit over community.
The Green State in Africa comes to life in the last three chapters which stitch together three major themes underpinning the African state's pervasive and unrelenting efforts to introduce environmental markets (through carbon markets, the Clean Development Mechanism and carbon tax) and the proliferation of green economy projects in many a country in the continent (pp. 173–81). The jury is out as to whether the ultimate goal of the creation of environmental markets is green growth and transforming the African economies through sustainable development or land grab in the name of ecological modernisation.
The centrality of IR within the realms of the African state and the production of territory, population and markets (environmental or otherwise), is tempered by ecologically coercive international development policies and interventions and their critical role in the production and reproduction of a variety of African green states. Carl Death is not satisfied with the notion that ‘conditionality’ is an economic, market or ‘political behaviour’ regulating instrument separable from environmental politics. The two are intrinsically linked. Despite African power asymmetry in environmental production and regeneration, capacity is compensated with Africans' environmental solidarity (through the African Union) which subsequently shaped its continental environmental jurisdictions and practices. Africa's position in the global market economy, its demands, booms and busts are shaped by global market dynamics over which it has no influence.
The Green State in Africa is revealed as an expression of Afro-ecologism's contestation of land and land-based resources, post-colonial biopolitics and populations, the last frontier of development and Africans' solidarity both at the continental and local levels (pp. 235–56). According to Death, the notion of an African green state should not be misconstrued for uniform governmentalities immersed in homogeneous ecological discourses and practices, but represents rather a generalised notion of several shades of green. This book is topical, stimulating and extremely important, and is a must read for academics, policymakers and NGOs and civil society organisations and activists engaged in environmental politics in Africa and elsewhere. It is particularly useful for graduate and postgraduate students who wish to challenge orthodoxies and claim new understanding of the promise and tribulations of the environmental politics of the green state in Africa.
