Greening African ports: environmental governance transformations in a network society

Abstract

West and Central African ports have historically not paid much attention to environmental issues. However, since the year 2000, economic globalisation that has brought about an institutional and infrastructure restructuring of the ports, in an era of global environmental change, has triggered a gradual but still fragmented and limited process of port environmental reform. This thesis investigates how the environmental reform of the ports is being institutionalised. Environmental interactions among actors and institutions and their interplay across multiple levels of governance - within individual ports at the sub-national (local) level, within nation-states at national level, and at the regional level - are analysed within a global setting. Differing sets of theoretical perspectives from the environmental reform and governance literature are applied as analytical lenses. A mixed bag of qualitative research techniques, including case studies and action research, are used. Primary data was generated through face-to face interviews, closed and open-ended questionnaires, and participant observation while secondary data was obtained from the review of relevant literature, policy documents and reports. Findings highlight an emergent re-scaling of port environmental governance, for West and Central Africa, from the sub-national moving beyond national and statist environmental politics towards territorial environmental regionalisation in a transnational port environmental governance. The emergence has however not homogenised environmental policies in West and Central African ports nor replaced existing statist institutional environmental arrangements.