“Let Them Eat Their Declarations”: Interrogating Natural Resource-Rich States’ Inertia Towards Biodiversity Conservation Treaties in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

AbstractBiodiversity is critically threatened in sub-Saharan Africa (hereafter SSA). Concerns in the form of declarations, conventions, treaties and communiques have been issued and held severally in SSA. Whereas these efforts are commendable, what is responsible for the inertia on biodiversity conservation by state authorities in SSA, especially resource-rich states? How many such conferences were to be held and declarations issued in the future to spur states of SSA into assertive action? Is it greening the environment unending? Worried by the foregoing questions, this chapter interrogates the sterility of assertive actions on biodiversity conservation by state authorities in SSA. This chapter relies on the Rentier State Theory (RST) as its theoretical handle and argues that to the extent that resource-rich states such as Nigeria, Angola, Gabon, Ghana, South Sudan, Equatorial Guinea and others are rentier states whose economic well-being and sustainability depend on economic rents/royalties which make them to have an asymmetry between economic development and biodiversity conservation, biodiversity protection remains rhetoric. The chapter is entirely qualitative. It concludes that while countless declarations, conventions, treaties and even communiques have been ratified and deposited by resource-rich states of SSA, these efforts remain ephemeral—as rentier states are ever reluctant to engage in sustainable resource extraction strategies in so far as economic rents accrue to their coffers. Therefore, this chapter recommends that resource-rich states of SSA should negotiate their economies away from the present knee-deep dependence on non-renewable resource exploitation to renewable resource extraction for the sake of biodiversity conservation; moreover, it is the international best practice.KeywordsBiodiversityConservationSSADeclarationsEnvironmentRentier states