In The Green State in Africa, political scientist Carl Death approaches the study of environmental politics in Africa by writing against two distinctly different bodies of scholarship. He rejects the premise of neoliberal theorists that globalization has made nation-states marginal actors in global politics, while he also wants to push beyond certain threads of radical environmentalism and political ecology that see ‘the state’ as an inherently destructive force in the struggle to combat the effects of, or even reverse, climate change. Instead, Death draws from recent research on ‘green states’ and argues that in Africa, and in other parts of the world, states remain central figures in the construction, circulation, and implementation of political practices ‘that evoke green, environmental, or ecological discourses’, and that they have the potential to assume consequential roles in shaping the future of the globe's climate (63). Methodologically, though, Death departs from the overt optimism of high modernist statecraft that underlies much green-state literature, and he alternatively proposes a critical postcolonial-governmentality approach. This allows Death to situate green states alongside other types of states that have been complicit in, and active producers of, inequality, exploitation, and violence, while further arguing that states’ legitimacy and access to resources position them well to combat climate change. Death also theorizes the attributes that differentiate green states in Africa from other regions. In ways more pronounced than those elsewhere in the world, African green states are focused on issues of land and conservation, peasants, and agricultural development, the centrality of natural resource extraction, as well as the existence and potential of transnational solidarities, such as Pan-Africanism, to serve as a vehicle for eco-political mobilization.

Death lays out these arguments in an introduction, two theoretical-literature review chapters, four empirical ones, and a conclusion. He structures his empirical chapters by identifying what he sees as the systemic inequalities and coercive aspects of historical and current green-state configurations in Africa, while also focusing on those politics and movements that promise a more equitable and just ecological future. For example, he argues that the practices of ‘exclusive territorialization’, marked by sharp borders and individual ownership of property, have tended to facilitate the expropriation of land from rural Africans as part of conservation schemes. Alternatively, he views more fluid forms of ownership and bordering, or ‘hybrid territorialization’, which some states have adopted or which already exist in practice, as better suited to protecting both the environment and the people who live in these areas. In another chapter, Death shows how debates about green economies are dominated by neoliberal economists seeking to promote a green capitalism, an emphasis that precludes consideration of more fundamental questions about whether capitalism itself is reconcilable with reversing climate change. Death's assessment is that such neoliberal approaches to green economies in Africa may generate wealth, but little of that prosperity would be equitably distributed, and that such economic policies would furthermore make minimal impact on climate change. Ultimately, Death contends, ecological inequalities will not be effectively ameliorated until more radical and transformative ideas become part of how African economies are greened.

In his concluding chapter, Death writes with regret that he did not adequately assess the ways in which ‘indigenous African knowledge, discourses, and practices have contributed to the governance and contestation of African environments’ (239). He cites various reasons for this limitation, from his language training to the wide scope of the book. However, had he incorporated recent work by historians of precolonial Africa, Death may have come closer to achieving a more inclusive analysis without having to himself conduct local ethnographies across the continent. For example, he could have sharpened his argument by considering David Schoenbrun's insight that modern African societies and polities are best understood when seeing the ways in which ‘durable bundles of meaning and practice’ from the deep precolonial period continue to shape them.Footnote ¹ Death's ideas would have also benefited from considering specific work by Schoenbrun and others, including Steven Feierman, that has considered the relationship between political authority and control over the environment across the longue durée in Africa, questions that lie at the core of Death's study.

Nonetheless, this book should be required reading for environmental historians of Africa. It provides a rich and critical overview of the ways in which people in and outside the continent have engaged politically and created ecological policies in the context of the ever-increasing threat of climate change. Death writes with an urgency appropriate to the enormity of the crisis that faces Africa. For historians, the book is a reminder that we must pay heed to and consider in our own scholarly endeavors how the past shapes the present, and future, of the continent.