Environmental struggle is increasingly salient in the Arab region. From protests over land use in Egypt or fracking in Algeria, to garbage handling in Lebanon and Tunisia, to water mismanagement in Iraq and Morocco, we have witnessed the rise of environmental mobilization born out of environmental harm and degradation. In some instances, environmental issues have triggered mass protests at the national level or become intertwined with broader demands for socioeconomic and political change. In Tunisia, many of the mobilizations in early 2011 embraced the environmental agenda as a tool of resistance against the political system.1 Iraq’s 2019 Thawrat Tishreen, in addition to its more familiar political and socioeconomic dimensions, can also be seen as an ecological rebellion by Iraq’s youth who demanded a sustainable future.2 Also in 2019, Lebanon’s mass uprisings featured environmental grievances not as niche or localized concerns, but as an epitome of widespread indignation at the status quo.3 During Algeria’s Hirak in 2019-2020, activists took up the demands of an earlier anti-fracking movement, linking the issue of shale gas to questions of democracy and national sovereignty.4
Environmental nongovernmental organizations, a more institutionalized form, have also proliferated across the region. Other civil society organizations that focus on economic policy or human rights are now more active on the environment, their members campaigning at home and representing the region more regularly and visibly at international meetings on environmental causes.
Moreover, activists and scholars alike are increasingly drawing environmental connections to long-standing political-economic issues that have created social conflict. According to the Global Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas), a collaborative data collection platform launched in 2012, there have been at least 239 cases in 21 Arab countries of contentious mobilizations of civil society actors in which explicit social-environmental claims were made against a specific project or economic activity.5 Considering that the EJAtlas is non-comprehensive and relies on self-reporting, the number of socio-environmental conflicts in MENA is likely significantly higher.6 Amid the resistance to Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians and its indiscriminate bombing of Lebanon, condemnations of ecocide have surfaced, showing how Israel’s warfare also causes severe, widespread, and long-term damage to the natural environment in order to destroy all possibilities of life.7
At the same time, the discourse about environmental and climate action at the state level has shifted in the region. Over the past decade, all Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) have set net-zero targets and announced national development plans and strategies to meet them – though they continue to expand fossil fuel production. Saudi Arabia and the UAE – the world’s largest exporters of crude oil and liquified natural gas – are also seizing leadership positions in international climate negotiations and in the new market of carbon offsetting and carbon accounting mechanisms.8 In North Africa, governments are positioning themselves as champions of sustainability and the green transition with schemes for large-scale production of energy through solar, wind, and green hydrogen. The fact that two Arab cities, Sharm El-Sheikh and Dubai, hosted the last two editions of the largest international summit on climate action, the COP (Conference of Parties), symbolizes the ascendancy of the environment in the political landscape of the region. What these “green and energy transition” shifts at the state level will mean for the conditions that face environmental activists is an open question.
In another development, Green Deal policies introduced by powerful nation-states, particularly in Europe, are raising concerns about a new green colonialism.9 Arab activists and their Global South counterparts are warning that energy transitions and “green technologies” to power clean infrastructure in the Global North will intensify resource and wealth extraction from nations of the Global South, increasing “sacrifice zones”.10
Taken together, these trends denote a process of “environmentalization” of the public sphere in MENA, a term that refers to both the adoption of environmental discourse by different social groups as well as the concrete incorporation of environmental justifications to render legitimate specific institutional, political, and scientific practices.11 Ecological issues are becoming increasingly important in themselves, but are also being used to contest political and scientific structures and practices.12 Environmental struggle, however, remains an understudied element. Empirically grounded research that delves into the various modes of resistance to environmental warfare, damage, and neglect – particularly among the impoverished and marginalized – is scarce.
The Developing Inclusive Research through Activism and Informed Advocacy (DIRAIA) is a collaborative research project that explores the dynamics of environmental mobilization in the Arab World. Led by the Arab Reform Initiative (ARI), in partnership with the Moroccan Institute for Policy Analysis (MIPA), the project has received funding from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and will be implemented over three years, starting in November 2023. The project seeks to generate knowledge on the various forms, demands, and expressions of environmental struggle and activism, understand its modes of organization, and how actors find spaces for action in severely asymmetrical power relations. A priority is to link and strengthen trans-regional networks of activists and movements advocating for environmental justice, as well as linkages between activists and multidisciplinary networks of researchers. The hope is that, as we have seen in cases around the world, an alliance between critical scholarship and social struggles can radically reconfigure environmental policies.13
To those ends, this paper is conceived as an introductory guide that unpacks conceptual and definitional issues relating to environmental struggle and proposes categories and frameworks for understanding actions, motivations, and threats faced by environmental activists and social movements in the region. The paper also lists questions meant to guide a forthcoming series of country reports and case studies on Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia, to be completed by 2024-2025. Based on original qualitative data collection – including interviews, surveys, and focus group discussions – the country-specific reports will map the landscape of environmental activism in the four countries along the conceptual lines laid out in this introductory paper. Building on these country studies, the second stage (January to December 2025) will identify and research additional case studies of specific instances of environmental mobilization from these four countries and additional ones.
Running concurrently with the research components, and spanning the entire project, ARI will convene diverse activists and social movements across the region through regional conferences, working groups, and participant action workshops with activists. The aim is to collaboratively chart courses of action against environmental harm and towards environmental and climate justice.
2. Who Counts as an Environmentalist in MENA? What Is an Environmental Issue?
Environmental activism, in its broadest meaning, encapsulates non-state actors engaged in a struggle over how the environment is understood and valued, over who has access to, use of, or control over the environment, and over how environmental issues are politicized or depoliticized. This expansive definition encompasses diverse struggles, from those against the negative impacts of large-scale infrastructure projects (dams, highways, pipelines, mines, fracking) to those against the privatization of natural resources such as the commodification of water and the expropriation of green spaces, to resistance to land enclosures and land grabbing in urban and rural areas.
In addition to the diversity of its content, environmental activism is diverse in form, too. For one, it can be either public or private. As we know from feminist political ecology, the household is a central domain for struggles over environmental resources and access.14 In this research agenda, however, we limit the scope to struggles that take place in the public realm.
Within the public realm, activism also takes different forms; it can be individual or collective, institutional or informal, overt or covert. Individuals and collectives that engage in overt forms of environmental activism – with varying degrees of institutionalization – are now recognized by the United Nations as “environmental defenders,” or “individuals and groups who, in their personal or professional capacity and in a peaceful manner, strive to protect and promote human rights relating to the environment, including water, air, land, flora and fauna”.15 The category of environmental defenders typically includes a broad range of actors: professional environmental advocates employed by transnational or national nongovernmental organizations; other professionals, such as lawyers or journalists who work on environmental issues; or communities threatened by lack of water, land grabs, or large-scale resource extractions, dams, and agribusiness.
Social movements that may not explicitly identify as environmentalists can also become critical environmental defenders. For example, Algeria’s anti-fracking coalition, the Popular Committee Against Shale Gas, which emerged in the Sahara city of Ouargla in 2014, originated with a movement of unemployed or precariously employed young men, the National Coordination for the Defense of the Rights of the Unemployed. Though worries about the negative environmental consequences of fracking do not seem to automatically fit the immediate preoccupations of jobless individuals – especially given the fact that fracking could represent a potential source of employment – the public health dangers and concerns over regional marginalization and exploitation mobilized thousands in the movement.16 Similarly in Iraq, when protestors routinely gather outside the major oilfields in Basra to demand jobs in the sector, they do so on the basis that they, as residents of the area, are vulnerable to the pollution and public health hazards of the industry and therefore especially deserving of being employed.17 They also demand access to clean water.18 By including social and distributional conflicts that have an ecological content, the concept of environmental defenders recognizes the material context of much environmental mobilization, or what is sometimes referred to as the “environmentalism of the poor”.19
Adopting an expansive definition of environmental activism is critical. For practical and strategic reasons, scholars often focus on a narrow research area, and movements coalesce around specific struggles. Yet, the broad definition adopted here purposefully connects different environmental struggles for three reasons. First, from a knowledge production perspective, these struggles are analytically connected; underlying them is an opposition to how current politico-economic models treat nature and the impacts on everyday life, from subsistence to health to quality of life. Second, environmental activists across issue spaces have not engaged with each other as thoroughly as needed. We hope that a broad understanding of what constitutes the content of environmental activism can encourage a greater exchange of theoretical analyses and practical experiences about agendas, demands, and successful strategies.20 Third, adopting a wider lens helps identify less-publicized organizations and movements that are battling for local environmental issues. As the case study literature shows, focusing on too narrow a concept or discursive narrative of what constitutes environmentalism can miss environmental struggles in impoverished rural areas,21 and it can miss socio-environmental struggles and conflicts that engage with ecological elements primarily as socio-economic rights.22 In a highly urbanizing context such as MENA, it is especially crucial “that definitions of environmentalism include urban residents’ everyday experiences and struggles with their own definition of the environment,” as geographer Noura Wahby argues.23 There, like in marginalized rural areas, marginalized residents resort to informal strategies, social networks, and social relations to respond to environmental negligence and damage, to reassert their relationship to nature, and to resist and build alternatives.
| Themes |
| • Climate change • Destruction of habitat • Environment (Sustainable) • ESC rights • Human rights • Land rights • Norms and standards • Regional • Research |
