Power, politics and pollution: The political economy of environmentalism in Egypt

Environmental problems have emerged as global issues that are taken up around the world in different ways. In many developing countries, issues of quality of life, health and well-being in the context of rapid drives to industrialize, the expansive growth of urban areas, and the rise in consumption levels have made environmental problems increasingly visible. In Egypt, the globalization of environmental discourse tied to World Bank reforms created the environment as a new political object, or a new public good, with the passage of the country's first comprehensive environmental law in 1994. This new political object intersected with the shifting boundaries of non-electoral politics in Egypt. For example, some reform movements gained traction for pre-existing agendas and problems by linking their calls for reform or their legal strategies to the state's new environmental agenda.; Divisions within the Egyptian state, formed through battles between the judicial and the executive branches, led to specific openings that activists could exploit in this context. This structural aspect of non-electoral politics was complemented by rhetorical strategies that framed concrete problems faced by rural and urban communities within environmental frameworks promoted by international development institutions and the Egyptian state. The state also began to utilize environmental rhetoric to legitimate its policies, for example in its presentation of arguments for a massive irrigation project in Upper Egypt and in its contestations over urban land use in Cairo. Non-electoral politics around the environment in Egypt were shaped both by domestic political structures and divisions as well as by internationally sponsored norms. Environmentalism in Egypt became a way for the state to legitimize its policies in a new language, as well as a discursive opening that reform groups could use to press the state to enforce its own new environmental standards.