The Great Green Wall and Sahelian Environmental Imaginaries: Green Fix and the Persistence of a Policy Idea

应对气候变化和环境退化挑战的必要性通常表现为对美好未来的愿景，并通过大规模的绿色改造方案加以实施。本研究项目旨在通过研究萨赫勒地区绿化理念的发展、持续和争议，探索非洲绿色未来的高端概念。它将绿色转型的未来愿景理解为“社会技术变革”，即，作为一个“技术绿色修复”的现代技术的应用。研究结果将被用来探索如何在有争议的和不断变化的绿色转型的愿景可以提供一个贡献的持久性的想法，与工具和方法，以开发一个跨学科的方法来研究环境的社会技术体系的长期辩论。这项研究最终将有助于挑战根深蒂固的官僚主义，以及与之相关的治理和政治经济关系。这将通过参与性展览、焦点小组、访谈和档案研究来实现，研究成果将通过最后会议、学术出版物和漫画书的制作来分享。这项研究将在布基纳法索、塞内加尔和埃塞俄比亚由一个跨学科小组进行，其中包括政治历史学家、人类地理学家以及社会和文化人类学家。

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’. 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. The study will be conducted in Burkina Faso, Senegal and Ethiopia by an interdisciplinary team involving political historians, human geographers, and social and cultural anthropologists.