The popular image of the African conservation scene is dominated by the perception of foreign environmental organizations and community-level efforts driven by civil society organizations. The awarding of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize to Kenya’s environmental champion Wangari Maathai may have inadvertently reinforced this image, given her constant confrontations with the government (Maathai, Unbowed: A Memoir, 2006). In contrast, African states are often viewed as paying too little attention to environmental issues. Their general performance is often considered lackluster despite the magnitude of their ecological challenges, the vastness of the continent, and the shortage of human capabilities. This perception is particularly important given that the United Nations Environment Programme, a leading champion of environmental diplomacy, is located in Nairobi, Kenya (see Mostafa K. Tolba with Iwona Rummel-Bulska, Global Environmental Diplomacy: Negotiating Environmental Agreements for the World, 1973–1992, 1998). This location gives African governments ample opportunities to influence international environmental negotiations and determine how treaties are implemented.

In The Green State in Africa, however, Carl Death offers a bold and novel challenge to this view. Drawing from original data, Death challenges European theoretical transplants that are used to explain the origins and evolution of the African state. The book argues that what is called “the African state is actually the effect of the governance and contestation of territories, populations, economics and international relations” (p. 2). This puts environmental issues at the heart of the character and functioning of the African state.

This masterful analysis has at least two profound implications. The first concerns the need to challenge the Weberian worldview where “many environmental activists frame their role in terms of applying pressure to states in order to persuade them to regulate, legislate and enforce environmental protections” (p. 45). This would entail a review of the relevance of received theories of the state for countries whose governance is shaped largely by ecological and allied factors. It would also seem to suggest that the book’s theoretical framework ought to be tested in other regions whose governance systems are rooted in analogous ecological contexts. Such scholarly work has potentially universal appeal, which should establish the standing of The Green State in Africa as a key source of research guideposts and heuristics for future work in this area.

The second implication of the book relates to contemporary statecraft in Africa in relation to the work’s core themes of territories, populations, economy, and international relations. Much of conservation work is place based, which tends to define local settings as the key units of analysis. Death shows that this view may itself stand in the way of thinking of the state as a platform for collective social learning and scaling of lessons learned from local experiments.

New approaches to the idea of territory are being articulated in the form of regional economic integration driven by political guidance from the African Union. Africa’s unique approach involves the strengthening of nation-states as nodes in a wider web of networked communities of nations. These efforts raise questions concerning whether they are in fact guided by deeper normative considerations informed by ecological jurisprudence (as discussed in Calestous Juma and J.B. Ojwang, eds., In Land We Trust: Environment, Private Property and Constitutional Change, 1996).

In recent decades, a number of African nations have revised their constitutions to expand environmental rights. However, these changes were largely externally driven and not adequately rooted in the sort of contestation outlined in this book. The provisions, therefore, have largely enabled states to create additional laws that give effect to various clauses of the constitutions. Death’s analysis suggests that African nations need to revisit their constitutional orders to reflect the ecological nature of their states. The political guidance for this endeavor would need to come from a high-level body such as the African Union.

Death’s argument also points to the need to reform African government structures to reflect the centrality of the green state. Such reforms would give greater environmental coordination authority and execution capacity to the highest levels of the various branches of government in order to implement system-wide environmental policy measures. Such coordination powers would in turn need to be vested in the offices of presidents or prime ministers, akin to practices in some South-East Asian countries that are described as “entrepreneurial states” (in the sense of Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking the Public vs. Private Sector Myths, 2013).

A green state would not only shape the design of government institutions but would also influence modes and patterns of interactions with other actors such as civil society, the private sector, and academia. The impact would include shaping the character of social capabilities through such measures as education in, and overall expressions of, human competence regarding ecological matters.

Death’s analysis also necessarily extends to the economy, especially with respect to how ecological issues could provide the framing for development strategies. Such an approach could shape the choice of technologies needed for economic transformation, emphasizing long-term ecological efficiency rather than short-term economic cost-effectiveness.

A fresh look at the rapid diffusion of mobile infrastructure in Africa illustrates the implications of the author’s point. This has been achieved while reducing the ecological footprint of telecommunications. Ecological barriers would have made it difficult to provide the same level of connectivity using landlines that rely on the massive use of copper wires and poles. An explicit ecological framing of this issue would encourage the identification of analogous applications in other sectors, such as energy, transportation, agriculture, and health. Technologies such as drones that have the potential to expand the transportation network while reducing the potential impact of traditional infrastructure would receive priority under such a development outlook.

A final theme issue arising from Death’s analysis is how Africa can harness its collective green-state identities to shape international diplomacy. This requires going beyond simply forging common negotiating positions. The positions would be guided by the shared ecological worldviews of individuals, states, regions, and the continent as a whole. Such diplomatic leadership would need to be backed by examples of achievements that make it possible for the continent to project soft power (as spelled out by Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means of Success in World Politics, 2005).

The Green State in Africa helps us to understand that clashes between Wangari Maathai and the Kenyan government may in fact have been informed by rivalries arising from some shared, rather than competing, interests (Maathai, The Challenge for Africa, 2009). For example, it is no accident that when Maathai later joined the government as assistant environment minister, she championed changing the typing and printing of government reports in 14-point fonts double-spaced to 10- or 12-point fonts using single spacing and double-sided printing. In this case, Maathai herself was implementing ideas that reflected the ethos cultivated by a green state.

It is rare to find books that blaze new intellectual ground while carrying the seed for the pragmatic implementation of the ideas they contain. This work competently achieves both goals, and I would highly recommend it to scholars, students, development practitioners, and others interested in the future of the global environment. But above all, it forces us to rethink politics in this age of rising global ecological uncertainty. It is an excellent primer for the perplexed and a source of guidance for the initiated.