Maano Ramutsindela

I intend to use the Mandela-Mellon Fellowship of the W.E.B Du Bois Institute to research the construction of Africa through regional and environmental lenses. The ultimate goal of the research is to understand how formal and informal regions are constructed and operate in the continent, and the impact they have on the reconstruction of Africa as a continental space. To this end, the study adopts a new regionalism approach which emphasizes regions as social constructions that are inextricably linked with broader social practices and processes. This approach to the study of regions is helpful in that it is attentive to the ways in which state-society complexes and formal and informal actors influence, and respond to, the process of regionalization. The interplay of formal and informal actors shaping Africa’s regions has elided the dominant state-centric research on regions which emphasizes the role of formal institutions and their trade regimes. There is therefore a need to rethink regions in Africa and the forms that they take in different contexts. The study proceeds from two premises. The first premise is that the emergence and functioning of Africa’s formal regional blocks should be explained in terms of colonial and neo-colonial ambitions, geopolitical moments, and philanthropic practices. The second premise is in line with the view that Africa’s micro-regions are an entry point to the study of regionalism and politics in the continent. These micro-regions have a strong cross-border character; unclear spatial delimitations; are underpinned by colonial legacies; and shaped by the collaboration between formal and informal actors and the mushrooming of cross-border informal networks.

The study will draw on material from approaches to environmental challenges in the continent to demonstrate the ways in which environmental issues contribute to the consolidation of existing regions or the formation of new ones, and to explore the intersections between conceptions of Africa’s regions and environmental politics. The main focus of the study is on how this link is expressed through strategies and programmes for protecting and conserving biological diversity. Taking the Convention on Biological Diversity and the subsequent introduction of new control measures, financial mechanisms and technological transfers as a starting point, the study seeks to establish why approaches to ‘saving the wild’ have adopted a regional focus in Africa and the manner in which these approaches contribute to inequalities and new forms of environmental injustice. With regard to micro-regions, the study will use experiences from transboundary natural resource management regimes and the creation of transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs) in Africa to understand the emergence of inter-state regions and their impact on ordinary citizens. Unlike most kinds of supra-national regions which are underpinned by one or two broad goals such as economic or political integration or both, region formation through TFCAs involves sets of objectives that converge from various angles. These objectives are supportive to the spatiality of a common region even though the actors involved often act independently of each other. The fact that TFCAs are created across international borders means that they engender new borderlands to which ordinary people respond. Borderlands are known to provide conditions for a deep sense of placement, particularly when communities use their interstitial power to assert and benefit themselves. Thus, trans-border conservation projects invoke the metaphor of the border and also create new borderland advantages that are exploited by locals and other interested parties. They promote spatial imaginaries that render the border irrelevant for conservation proper and which envision the connectedness of space across the border. It is hoped that the study will contribute to our understanding of regionalism through the environmental lens and how environmental factors and approaches play a critical cartographic role. The research seeks to engage with the following question:

1. How are Africa’s regions constituted?
2. What processes reinforced these regions?
3. How and why are environmental issues regionalized?
4. How do citizens engage with micro-regions and with what effects?

It is hoped that answers to these questions will go some way in challenging orthodox views of regions which are often used to assess the successes and failures of regional integration without paying attention to the ways in which regional worlds are continuously being constructed and fiercely contested in the continent. The new regionalism school of thought will benefit from engaging with the creation of TFCAs as environmental regions not least because micro-regions of various kinds have become a worldwide phenomenon. Most of these regions serve as a platform on which power, identities and resources are contested and new spaces of interactions created.