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理想未来的愿景，这些愿景是通过大规模绿色转型方案来实施的。该研究项目旨在通过研究绿化萨赫勒地区的想法是如何发展、持续和受到争议的，来探索非洲绿色未来的高端概念化。它将绿色转型的未来愿景理解为“社会技术想象”，即应用现代技术实现“技术绿色修复”。这些研究结果将被用来探索有争议的和不断变化的绿色变革愿景如何能够为关于想法的持久性的长期辩论做出贡献，并利用工具和方法开发一种跨学科的方法来研究环境社会技术想象。这项研究最终将有助于挑战根深蒂固的想象力及其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一次会议、学术出版物和制作漫画书来分享。这项研究将由一个跨学科小组在布基纳法索、塞内加尔和埃塞俄比亚进行，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.