A new article by CuHeMo team members Annah Lake Zhu, Amadou Ndiaye, and Ingrid Boas, together with Ruben Dahm (Deltares) and Margaux Mauclaire (Bordeaux Montaigne University) has just been published in Land Use Policy. The paper asks a pointed question: why does Africa’s Great Green Wall (GGW), despite billions of dollars in donor pledges, produce so little ecological change on the ground?
Drawing on satellite imagery analysis of 36 reforestation parcels in northern Senegal and extensive fieldwork with Fulani pastoralists and project personnel, the authors find that only one parcel shows vegetation recovery beyond what rainfall alone would explain. They argue that both global financial pledges and local planting campaigns operate as “spectacle” — symbolic performances that serve political and rhetorical functions more than practical ones — while it is the mundane everyday elements of project implementation (employment, community gardens, medical care) that deliver real benefits to local residents. A central finding for CuHeMo’s concerns: the project’s sedentary, fenced-parcel design is in direct structural conflict with the mobility needs of transhumant pastoralists, reproducing a colonial logic of sedentarisation that undermines both ecological and social outcomes.
Zhu, A. L., Ndiaye, A., Dahm, R., Mauclaire, M., & Boas, I. (2025). Africa’s Great Green Mirage? Assessing the disconnect between global finance and local implementation in Africa’s Great Green Wall. Land Use Policy, 157, 107670. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2025.107670 (Open Access)
