Can Law Prevent the Green Recourse Curse in Sub-Saharan Africa?

May 23, 2022 | Tracy Stein, Carl Bruch, and Jordan Dieni
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Over the past thirty years, the history of environmental law in Africa often reveals a lag between the adoption of the laws and their implementation and enforcement. Public interest litigation and civil society advocacy are often necessary, including to mobilize political will. In a growing number of instances, innovative and courageous government officials and judges have been critical to the success of first measures to implement and enforce the provisions.

Renewable energy requires land. Yet the demand for land to accommodate solar, wind, biofuels, and hydropower project can jeopardize natural resources central to livelihoods and land held by individuals and groups under customary land tenure. Under these traditional tenure systems, many people and communities in sub-Saharan Africa do not hold statutory or “legal” title to the lands they own or occupy.

Nations in sub-Saharan Africa are also establishing a growing legal trend to provide for benefit sharing from development. Numerous countries also have enacted laws that require project developers to pay compensation for damage caused from environmental contamination.

As a continent rich in raw materials and wrought with historical resource conflicts, Africa is particularly susceptible to these potential “green resource” conflicts. Despite the potential for disputes, a new review of the existing legal structures in Africa to address such conflicts by the Environmental Law Institute (ELI), in partnership with the Peace Research Institute Oslo, indicates that there also is cause for hope in preventing a green resource curse.