Sustainable Development and Environmental Justice in African Cities

Abstract

AbstractThe rhetoric of sustainable development has substantive impacts in African cities, through programs like the United Nations Sustainable Cities Program. Discussions of urban environmental justice are comparatively rare in African cities, with notable exceptions in South African policy and research. I examine the sustainable development and environmental justice literatures in African urban studies, largely around South African and Tanzanian cases. My goals are to understand the out‐sized presence of sustainable development rhetoric and the general absence of environmental justice debates in sub‐Saharan African urban studies, and to speculate on possibilities for regional cross‐fertilization in research and movements for urban environmental justice.