ABSTRACT
Neoliberal ideology has expanded into environmental management and Africa has suffered as a result. The most serious eco-social contradiction may well be the extraction of non-renewable resources—minerals, oil, gas and old-growth forest resources—at a pace far in excess of returns to source countries, especially in the wake of the catastrophic commodity price crash from 2011 to 2015. Even during the 2002–2011 commodity super-cycle, extraction left a net negative ‘adjusted net savings’ once natural capital accounting is applied; in other words, countries are demonstrably poorer the more they face resource extraction by multi-national corporations. Most serious of all environmental problems is the extreme vulnerability Africans face due to human induced climate change, with estimates of unnecessary deaths approaching 200 million and large parts of the continent expected to be unliveable by the end of the twenty-first century, if not well before. In addition, African climate justice advocates and progressive conservationists have often found themselves confronting the adverse impacts not only of resource ‘extractivism’ and neoliberal socio-economic policies, but also of specific market-environmentalist strategies such as Clean Development Mechanism projects, forest offsets and proposed trading systems for rhinoceros horn and elephant ivory (Bond, 2012).
