Environmental Related Mobilizations in Post-Revolution Tunisia: Questioning and Reshaping "Development"?

This presentation focusses on environment related mobilizations in the regions of Gabes and Sfax in Tunisia that contest industrial facilities. It articulates social movement and political ecology approaches to examine the variety of actors, their demands and forms of collective action in relation to local and historical contexts and their recent transformations. A major questioning is how the mobilizations differently engage with development and environment related issues and in which way they influence the production of the territory. The erection of phosphate transformation plants in Gabès and Sfax as part of planned industrial policies the in post-independence era has generated environmental disturbances, which have negatively affected the livelihood of farmers, fishermen and local residents’ health, fuelling popular discontent that remained long discreet. 2011 regime change resulted in political opportunity change for mobilizations. First the fall of president Ben Ali regime made the expression of demands, the creation of associations easier and expanded the scope for action for political organizations. This facilitated the rise of local mobilizations that question public policies and development strategies. Imbued with demands for social justice, they echo claims for re-localization of politics. Second, the increasing extraversion embodied by bigger cash flows from international organizations to local authorities and certain NGOs, especially for the “good cause” of environment, helped to reconfigure collective action at the local level. The increasing enrolment of local actors in national and transnational networks has resulted in new power relations and sometimes dynamics of competition among local actors already inscribed in conflicting wefts. It is important to note that international support for local actors is contingent on organizational and individual resources and on forms of collective action that foster dialogue at the expense of open conflict and expression of power relationships. However, the mobilizations that managed to prevent their territory from hosting a phosphogypsum dump or to force public authorities to create jobs for the community in return for environmental disturbances have often engaged in confrontational forms of action – blocking access to the plant, organizing massive demonstrations. They have tended to draw on community ties and thick local networks but have sometimes been supported by local or national unions or associations, giving way to some hybridity of modes of action and framing. As a result, the stage of local actors appears fragmented. For the sake of simplicity, a divide can be outlined between, on the one side, actors that mainly draw on local community-based networks, engage in confrontational actions and whose claims lament the broken promises of post-independence “development” policies, target an interruption of environmental disturbances and compensation – in terms of jobs and local investments – for the localities affected by environmental degradation, and on the other side, ONGized actors enrolled in transnational networks that refer to key concepts of dialogue between stakeholders, raising awareness and expertise and contemplate alternative visions of “development” for the region coined as “green economy” or “new technologies”.