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Paper short abstract

Drawing on two decades of research in Central Africa, we examine how environmental knowledge in extractive zones is produced through compromised regimes of expertise involving social scientists & intermediaries, shaped by racial capitalism, technocratic governance, & precarious academic labour.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on two decades of research on extractive industries in Central and West Africa, this paper argues that environmentalism in African extractive zones is a historically situated field of struggle shaped by racial capitalism, technocratic governance, and uneven regimes of expertise, including corporate, academic, and grassroots forms. Focusing on the roles of social scientists, consultants, and expert intermediaries embedded in mining and oil economies, we examine how environmental knowledge is produced through compromise, ambivalence, and coercion within extractive projects themselves. We show how such knowledge is frequently depoliticised and mobilised to render extraction governable. Instruments such as environmental impact assessments, community consultations, and sustainability discourses acknowledge ecological harm while simultaneously foreclosing more transformative environmental futures. Based on forty interviews with social scientists and long-term engagement with extractive projects, we trace historical and geographical patterns of social science participation in extraction and develop a typology of motivations and roles. These include career advancement, disciplinary consolidation, explicit alignment with extractive objectives, efforts to mitigate harm through expert intervention, and financial incentives shaped by gendered and racialised precarity in academic labour markets. Across these positions, social scientists often describe contributing to outcomes understood as merely acceptable or preferable to worse alternatives, revealing the constrained ethical and political horizons within which environmental knowledge is produced. Communities, activists, and scholar-activists engage these constrained terrains strategically, generating forms of environmental politics that do not conform to dominant corporate or racial capitalist imaginaries.