Presentation short abstract

I present a background to the Great Green Wall initiative, designed to combat desertification in the Sahel zone by increasing plant cover, launched in 2007 by the AU and following several previous large initiatives against desertification in the Sahel zone going back at least to the 1970s.

Presentation long abstract

The Sahel zone is an environmentally, economically and security-politically challenging region that has experienced a plurality of related interventions. An example is the Great Green Wall initiative, designed to combat desertification by way of increasing plant cover. It was launched in 2007 by the AU, following several large initiatives going back at least to the 1970s. Several major organizations became involved, including the African Forest Forum, the World Bank, the Global Environment Facility, and the World Resources Institute, and the initiative has been declared one of the 10 UN World Restoration Flagships, intended to attract greater attention, after France’s president Macron already talked about an acceleration process in 2021.

Several reports and academic studies observed the progress in different countries; a 2020 report by a Germany-based non-profit organization found implementation to be lagging, for instance. One of the central observations has been the wide gap between different areas, from comparatively low results, for instance in Sudan, to substantial results, for instance in Senegal. This had often to do not only with the approach but also with the extent to which individual projects and programs were embedded in existing environments, economies and political conditions. Still, the traditional approach of relying on self-documentation by governments limited the depth of understanding the broader socio-political and ecological aspects of the different outcomes. Concomitantly, a critical view on such large-scale environmental programmes is also relevant, as the seemingly straightforward ‘making things green’ is set against contradictory visions of what green transformations are supposed to achieve.