7 Environmental politics in revolutionary times

In early 2011, mass street protests across Egypt forced Hosni Mubarak out of office after three decades in power. The revolution or thawra, as it was termed in Egypt, broke the regime’s ability to instill fear and suppress dissent, as the internal security forces were unable to contain or control collective disobedience in multiple cities simultaneously, while the army chose not to intervene. With Mubarak placed under hospital arrest in Sharm el-Sheikh, the senior security and military generals took control of the country in the form of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). This rapid shift in government but not in regime initially left intact much of the hierarchies of the internal security services and the military.

In the subsequent year, as protesters continued to demand fundamental political change, the ruling military junta increasingly employed lethal violence against activists in several Egyptian cities, using snipers as well as beatings and detentions. Over 12,000 civilians were subjected to military trials. The SCAF, several Mubarak-era ministers, and the state-owned media also employed many bitterly familiar tactics to intimidate and harass civil society organizations, including mobilizing the media to portray a diverse array of protesters as threats to national security and economic stability. These trends prompted some commentators to observe that these were the actions of an unaccountable “deep state” in Egypt, illustrating the limits of what the military–security apparatus would tolerate in a new political order (El Amrani, 2012).

Yet as in Turkey, where the notion of the “deep state” has been widely employed by political scientists, the retrenchment of the military–security apparatus is only part of the unfolding political transformation unleashed by mass protest. Parliamentary elections for the Majlis al-Sha‘b, the lower parliamentary house, in the fall of 2011 saw Egypt’s largest and oldest organized movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, banned from formal political participation for decades, compete as the Freedom and Justice Party, winning 47 percent of the seats. The more conservative Islamist party Al-Nour and its affiliated parties won roughly 25 percent of the seats, and the old liberal party Wafd Party took close to 9 percent (“Egypt’s Brotherhood Wins 47% of Parliament Seats,” 2012).

Prior to the election, new political parties proliferated rapidly, particularly those organized by youth and liberal activists. Many candidates stood for each seat, as individuals or on party lists. In the third, concluding electoral round, for instance, 2,754 candidates competed for 150 parliamentary seats (“Citing JFP Violations, Judge in Qalyubiya Halts Voting,” 2012). Most of these aspiring politicians and political currents lacked an organized infrastructure and constituency to support their political campaigns and, not surprisingly, could not compete in getting out voters compared with the grassroots infrastructural capacities that the Islamists had long cultivated. After three decades of electoral fraud and manipulation to ensure that the government’s ruling party dominated even a weak Parliament, the autumn 2011 elections were historic. For supporters of parliamentary politics, the challenge remains of revising the constitution to grant Parliament more authority vis-à-vis the executive branch.

The impacts of Egypt’s revolutionary year, however, have gone far beyond changes in electoral politics and repeated bouts of repression and accommodation from the SCAF. Instead, the uprising transformed how many Egyptians think about, and engage in, the everyday conduct of politics. As Bayat suggested in the quote that opens this chapter, there has been a revolution in expectations and an explosion in social mobilization. The importance of the activist networks analyzed in this book is now abundantly clear in light of the repeated popular marches, protests, sit-ins, and strikes. But the tactics and claims once employed primarily by relatively small activist networks and organized groups in the years before the uprising—from striking textile workers to demonstrating judges to petitioning lawyers—have been adopted by a much broader array of groups and communities across the country (Figure 7.1).

The SCAF presumes to govern a more mobilized society than before the 2011 uprising. Many Egyptians have been willing to engage in direct action that directly impacts official business and economic activity despite the risks. These actions—blockades of transport routes and infrastructure, sit-ins at government offices, railway tracks, highways, subway stations, and public squares—did not start with the January 25 uprising, but have by most accounts intensified as a result. The Egyptian National Railways, for instance, reported that, during 2011, railroads were blocked 1,720 times by protests, sit-ins, and demonstrations (“Railways Authority Estimates 2011 Losses at LE70 Million,” 2012).

Contentious politics around many issues, including environmental ones, is thus no longer the exception but the norm in Egypt. As a result, many policy arenas formerly closed to public input and monopolized by governmental authorities now have to respond to the claims and tactics of a deeply mobilized public. While repression makes headlines, these proliferating protest campaigns

Figure 7.1 Bedouin protest on the anniversary of the January 25 uprising, Martyr’s Square, Sheikh Zoweid City, North Sinai, January 25, 2012 Mohamed Sabry, 2012

regularly win concessions from governmental authorities, even as these same authorities often employ force to disperse, detain, and injure those engaged in direct action.

Since the 2011 thawra, environmental issues and policies are thus increasingly contested by a broader array of actors taking a variety of direct actions in the public sphere. These changes have altered the character of environmental networks and signal deeper changes in the landscape of popular participation and political decision-making. This chapter explores how changes in political institutions and popular mobilization have already begun to impact the politics of the environment in Egypt, marked by intensified social protest around pollution issues and increased demand for access to resources, such as agricultural land and fisheries. Activist and managerial networks have sought to adapt to these new political realities. Managerial networks of experts have begun to adopt activist framings more proactively and to make use of emerging infrastructures of protest. Activist and expert networks alike increasingly recognize the need to work with mobilized communities to better address industrial pollution, protection of habitats, and conservation of resources.

Looking back: continuities amidst change

In analyzing how environmental networks mobilized forms of authority in different places and at multiple scales of governance during more than three decades of Mubarak’s rule, this book contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the constraints and possibilities of political change in Egypt more generally. While Egyptians term the events of 2011 a revolution, the restructuring of the political order underway has not led to dramatic rupture in state–society relations, the overturning of old state and business elites, or a protracted period of civil conflict. Indeed, the structures, institutions, and personnel of the central ministries—and their institutions and staff deconcentrated in the provinces—remain intact. This means the design and implementation of all kinds of environmental policies and projects will be to some extent path-dependent, relying on existing institutions of governance. Similarly, the dominant narratives and discursive framings used by state officials, experts, and activists to debate environmental problems and challenges of economic development will change only slowly. Efforts to address Egypt’s environmental challenges will build on existing discourses, legal frameworks, and forms of infrastructural authority already elaborated by environmental networks of experts and activists in specific places and around particular policy domains.

By focusing on the agency of networks, this book was written against the grain of conventional accounts of Egypt’s environmental problems, which cast the country and its inhabitants as prisoners in a neo-Malthusian scenario. In a grim future marked by increasing population growth, water scarcity, and intensifying urban densities, the severity of environmental problems can seem overwhelming. Yet as the empirical cases in this book illustrate, physical scarcity and population increase do not figure as straightforward “causes” of the environmental problems analyzed in the case studies. Instead, the analysis here calls attention to the complex ways that state policies and business privilege, ranging from allocations of property rights to subsidies and investment incentives, shape environmental problems. Physical resource scarcity and population growth, a lack of financial resources and shortages of human capital, are “real” constraints in developing countries such as Egypt, but ones that are partially constituted by distributions of power, patterns of political inclusion and exclusion, and state policies.

To summarize and revisit some of the key findings from the case studies of industrial pollution, habitat protection, and water management in previous chapters, we can return to the notion that networks have spatial contours (Mann, 1986: 10). That is, different environmental issues located in distinctive places shaped opportunities for managerial and activist networks to build forms of authority. While legal and discursive authority could be constructed and enacted from the center, often by limited numbers of experts, infrastructural authority requires constructing on-the-ground linkages. For managerial networks, this enables project implementation; for activist networks, it is the key to coordinating effective collection action. Thus, some environmental issue areas and places posed greater challenges of coordination for experts and activists than others.

In the case of industrial pollution (Chapter 3), managerial networks focused their efforts on concentrated “hotspots” of severe industrial pollution, produced by old state-owned enterprises and partially privatized firms. These clusters of heavily polluting large firms are relatively few in number, but their emissions and effluents contribute significantly to pollution loads in Cairo and Alexandria as well as other cities. Pollution control experts, working as consultants and staff for international donor-funded projects and at the Industrial Compliance Office of the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA), sought to induce firms to pursue pollution reduction. Promoting market-based approaches such as pollution prevention and clean production, they sought to build tangible, cooperative linkages with firms—infrastructural authority—by providing managers with pollution inventories and suggested remediation measures (“compliance action plans”), tools that were used to leverage donor assistance and financing.

While the relatively small numbers of large firms would seem to facilitate coordination with pollution control networks, the entrenched, privileged position of large state-owned and quasi-privatized firms in Egypt’s political economy instead allowed them to engage in protracted negotiations over compliance with environmental regulations. In the absence of effective enforcement mechanisms and faced with uncertainty about the pace and scope of privatization, managers responded only half-heartedly to market-based approaches to pollution control. Instead, firms bargained with donors and government ministries for more comprehensive, costly assistance packages in order to modernize their plants and upgrade their production lines. In lieu of more systematic enforcement, the Ministry of Environment intermittently undertook highly publicized, targeted campaigns against small groups of firms (as with public sector enterprises discharging directly into the Nile or the cement factories of Helwan), while the Cairo and Alexandria sanitation organizations imposed their own fines on industrial wastewater discharges. Aside from these activities, however, managerial pollution control networks and donors found they had inadequate leverage with large polluting firms, particularly those in the military, state, and hybrid public–private “investment” sectors. The overall result was that firms complied only slowly and partially with environmental regulations, leaving industrial pollution as a significant environmental problem, almost two decades after comprehensive legal standards were imposed.

Inadequate control of industrial pollution had long produced sporadic attempts by local activists to challenge urban pollution, through petitions to local officials, media coverage, demonstrations, and lawsuits. These efforts grew in scale and intensity as the Mubarak regime sought to increase foreign direct investment in chemicals, fertilizers, cement, fossil fuels, steel, and other industrial sectors. The activist networks that emerged in response relied upon the density of urban social linkages, existing state-sanctioned organizations, and coverage by state and private media outlets to publicize their cause and sustain protest.

In Chapter 4, I compared two such activist campaigns, one opposed to sea disposal of sewage in Alexandria, and the other opposed to building yet another fertilizer plant in Damietta. In contrast to most of the literature on “civil society,” which focused on the expansion of voluntary organizations under Mubarak and constraints on their activities, these campaigns did not emerge from NGOs or formal organizations. Instead, initially a small network of activists, catalyzed by perceptions of specific environmental threats, launched public campaigns that steadily increased pressure on the central government.

In Alexandria, a relatively narrow circle of middle-class professionals, academics, and public intellectuals were able to keep the question of sea versus land disposal of Alexandria’s sewage in the public eye primarily through media coverage, meetings with provincial officials, and framing their criticisms in resonant discourses with wide popular appeal. The eventual endorsement of their position by USAID and American consulting firms was only partly a function of organizational “success,” however, as the Mubarak regime and many environmental experts shared the activists’ goal of reusing treated wastewater for land reclamation.

The Damietta campaign a decade later, in contrast, drew on a broader social and political coalition, which not only employed mass, sustained street protest but also lawsuits, work stoppages, strikes, and administrative decrees. From a small core of activists, which organized themselves into “popular committees” to coordinate outreach and protest, opposition rapidly spread to participants from a number of state-sanctioned institutions. These organizations provided an infrastructure to legalize the concerns of activists, mobilize broader constituencies, and undertake direct action. Participants from universities, professional syndicates, unions, chambers of commerce, business federations, and municipal and provincial public employees took actions that directly affected the routine work of the city. These forms of “infrastructural authority” or power had concrete effects. For instance, strikes and work stoppages blocked construction work at the proposed fertilizer site long before the Mubarak regime annulled the investment agreement with the Canadian firm Agrium.

While the immediate target of the campaigns seemed to be foreign donors (USAID in Alexandria) and foreign firms (the multinational firm Agrium in Damietta), the campaigns were just as clearly trenchant criticisms of the centralization, neglect, and corruption of the government. In their condemnation of the dismal performance of al-masuleen, the “responsibles,” local activists in Damietta and Alexandria castigated the regime in Cairo even as they appealed to Mubarak and appointed provincial governors to bring pressure to bear on USAID and Agrium. Discursively, they framed their criticisms of sea disposal for sewage and new fertilizer factories as threats to public health and economic livelihoods. Both campaigns highlighted that their cities were masayif, summer coastal destinations for many middle- and lower-middle-class Egyptians, where pollution would destroy an important part of the local economy.

For the creation and management of protected areas (Chapter 5), a small network of conservation scientists and protected area managers used a strong legal framework to build some infrastructural authority in the South Sinai protected areas. They sought to build linkages with leading figures in the military, provincial governors, tourism investors, and tribal communities located in and around protected areas. Discursively, the conservation network successfully marketed the idea of protected areas to the Sadat and Mubarak regimes by framing conservation in terms of its contributions to preserving heritage, promoting tourism development and facilitating population settlement in frontier border regions. To leverage international support, however, conservation experts employed a different discourse, emphasizing the global significance of Egypt’s marine and terrestrial protected areas to safeguarding biodiversity and preserving rare habitats.

When the Mubarak regime enacted new laws and created new governmental agencies to promote rapid tourism development during the 1990s, the challenges of building infrastructural authority became more complex. With an explosion of land claims along the Red Sea coast as well as South Sinai, the challenges of negotiating with such powerful actors as Egypt’s military, the Tourism Development Authority (TDA), and ever larger and more politically influential real estate firms deepened. Protected areas located in sensitive border or frontier areas remained in the first instance the domain of the state’s military and security complex. The regime also increasingly extended ownership rights to coastal land along the Red Sea to the TDA, undermining the reach and effectiveness of conservation experts working on donor projects and in the Nature Conservation Sector at the environmental agency. Consequent environmental damage to reefs, shorelines, and local communities from untrammeled tourism development in turn prompted the formation of activist networks such as HEPCA, the small group of activists and experts pursuing on-the-ground conservation efforts in Hurghada and along the Red Sea coast.

As the politics of protected areas has unfolded largely along Egypt’s coastlines, where lucrative land speculation and resort development clashed with conservation goals, interventions by expert environmental networks in the water-agricultural sector have also had a specific spatial focus, in the “old” lands of the Nile Valley and Delta. Managerial water networks, based in donor projects and in new administrative enclaves within the Ministries of Irrigation and Agriculture, have sought to reshape the physical infrastructures of the irrigation and drainage systems, create new communities of users, and implant new technologies and practices of water management in ever-expanding pilot areas. Within these areas, these interventions have thus restructured roles and responsibilities of cultivators and the thousands of public sector workers employed by the Ministry of Irrigation in the provinces. At the same time, however, the ambitious scope and high costs of these irrigation and drainage improvement packages have meant that geographic expansion in the old lands has been gradual. In addition, these interventions have been complicated by contentions over changing legal jurisdictions for water and land. Proposed changes in law by experts, such as legislation to legitimate the roles of user associations in participatory irrigation management, have faced protracted delays at the national level. Expert discourses framing water reforms in terms of urgent needs for decentralization, participation, and resource conservation have found limited support in national political institutions.

Consistently, managerial water networks encountered significant difficulties in building infrastructural authority and “reaching” small-scale cultivators. Entrenched mistrust and avoidance of state institutions from decades of command-and-control policies in agriculture are reinforced by coercively applied rules, such as fines for cultivating rice. Small agricultural producers remain adversely affected by national policies favoring large-scale agrobusiness, whether in the new land reclamation areas or in the “old” lands of the Nile Valley and Delta.

For many cultivators, expert discourses about integrated water resource management (IWRM), decentralization, and participation have only limited bearing on their day-to-day challenges. As managerial networks and international donors promote such interventions as “integrated water management districts,” which combine the establishment of formal user associations and the redrawing of irrigation and drainage boundaries with investments in infrastructure, it is possible that cultivators will be more actively involved in setting irrigation rotations and other water management decisions. That is, the discourses of integrated, participatory, and decentralized water management may eventually have an infrastructural grounding in institutions.

Environmental issues in a democratizing polity

Popular concern with environmental issues has already emerged as a politically salient issue in Egypt’s emerging system of competitive politics. In 2011, environmental issues appeared in electoral party platforms and campaign speeches of candidates for Parliament from across the political spectrum (Baraka, 2011). Parties ranging from the liberal party Free Egypt to the Salafi Al-Nour Party, which headed a coalition of fourteen Islamist parties as the Islamist Alliance, incorporated environmental issues into their electoral platforms. The Islamist Alliance platform listed their top environmental priorities as the relocation of industries outside densely populated areas, enforcing mandates for pollution control equipment in urban industries, controls on the use of dangerous pesticides, and the promotion of clean energy to lower pollution levels (ibid.). With the seating of a new, emboldened Parliament, activist networks may find new opportunities to work with sympathetic parliamentarians on environmental issues.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) is no exception. The FJP includes some members with direct experience with urban pollution issues. One such parliamentarian is Ali Fath al-Bab, recently elected speaker of the Shura Council, Egypt’s upper parliamentary chamber, in early spring 2012. In 1995, Fath al-Bab had been elected to the Majlis al-Sha‘b, the lower house of Parliament, as an independent candidate affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood for the industrial district of Helwan. Fath al-Bab served on the Parliament’s Environment and Health Committee during this period. He has long argued that environmental issues affecting public health merit immediate governmental attention, including health threats from air pollution, sewage, clean drinking water, and soil pollution from adjacent polluting industries.¹

Fath al-Bab’s interest in environmental issues stemmed from his work with the state-owned Iron and Steel Company in Helwan. Helwan had long been considered a pollution hotspot given the large number of state- and military-owned industries in the area, and Helwan Iron and Steel has been one of the worst offenders. In his view, state-owned enterprises pollute intensively because they employ antiquated technologies (model bit’ahu adeem), sustain excessive numbers of workers, and lack funds for inadequate reinvestment.² His views thus correspond fairly closely to those of Egypt’s pollution control experts about the causes of pollution in state-owned firms, as explored in Chapter 3.

As Fath al-Bab and others in Helwan recall, concrete improvements in air quality only began in the late 1990s. The environmental agency targeted Helwan’s cement plants specifically, installing devices to deliver real-time monitoring of emissions directly to the office of the environmental minister (or so the agency claimed). In ensuing years, revenues from privatization of some cement plants, such as Tora Cement, were combined with donor aid to finance some improvements in production lines and pollution control equipment.

Industrial pollution, privatization, and state-owned enterprises

The Helwan cement factories provide a good example of how gravely polluting firms improved performance only when the costs of pollution became politically unacceptable at the highest levels of the government. Most firms continue to pursue delayed, soft compliance with environmental laws, as argued in Chapter 3.

The challenges of addressing industrial pollution in an effective and timely manner in state-owned enterprises and quasi-privatized firms remain significant. Even before the 2011 uprising, Egypt’s privatization program had been halted amidst mounting worker protest and criticism that only the wealthy and well connected had reaped the benefits. As government officials admitted openly in 2010, privatization was stopped primarily because the remaining state-owned firms were unlikely to find private buyers. Deeply indebted, these firms were thought to require comprehensive restructuring and upgrading in order to become profitable. Despite the sobering environmental as well as economic performance of state-owned enterprises, a significant proportion of industrial production remains under state ownership.

Continuities in the military-industrial sector

Military-owned firms were never among the initial 314 state-owned enterprises targeted for privatization. Since the 1970s, the military has not only operated its own handful of large firms, but also pursued a number of joint ventures with foreign and domestic capital. Investment by military and state-owned firms and their multinational partners in sectors such as fertilizers and chemicals has only increased in recent years given ample natural gas reserves and attractive export revenues. The SCAF’s approach toward private capital thus represents continuity with much of the Mubarak period, reinforcing what Waterbury aptly termed “a public–private symbiosis” (Waterbury, 1993).

This symbiosis has been particularly apparent in lucrative sectors such as fossil fuels and associated industries. The military-owned Nasr Company for Chemicals, for instance, inaugurated three new factories to produce fertilizers and sulfuric acid in Fayoum in 2010. Farmers living nearby complained to the local governor about the effects of air pollution on their date palms, olive trees, and crops (Osman, 2011). The governor, according to one press account, responded that the military sector simply was not under his jurisdiction. While farmers had discussed undertaking more direct action—such as blocking a main road leading into the area—an activist network working to sustain a coordinated campaign is not yet evident. “We are poor people,” one farmer told the press, “and most of us are not educated. People still fear the authorities. We are not in Damietta” (ibid.).

Industrial facilities, direct action, and activist networks

As this farmer noted, the city of Damietta emerged again as a leading site of environmental activism in 2011. While the activist campaign in 2008 called for the relocation of the proposed plant outside of Damietta, the Mubarak regime quietly made other plans. While the government cancelled approvals for Agrium to build on the proposed site, the Mubarak regime offered the company a 26 percent stake in the state-owned enterprise MOPCO, located directly across a small canal from the original site. The government pledged to build two additional production lines at MOPCO, making the plant’s total production similar to that planned for EAgrium. It was thus predictable that renewed protest would break out once residents realized that the MOPCO—Agrium expansion was underway and that they had, in effect, gained very little from their 2008 campaign.

In late November 2011, angry residents from the village of Senaniya, near MOPCO, took direct action. They staged a sit-in, blocking the main roads leading into Ras al-Barr and the industrial port, and cut off power to the port from the main power station (El-Kashef et al., 2011). They issued a statement saying that the government had deceived them, since the plant had not been relocated. In the early hours of the morning, the military attacked protesters camping out in the road, injuring a number of them and shooting dead twenty-one-year-old Islam Amin Abu Abdullah (“One Killed, 12 Injured…,” 2011). Several hours after Islam’s death, Field Marshall Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the head of the SCAF, ordered the factory closed pending an environmental investigation on November 13.

Several prominent figures, including the provincial governor, local politician Essam Sultan, and well-known engineer Mamdouh Hamza, negotiated with the villagers to open the port. The protesters agreed to allow the port to open, and in doing so sought to counteract attempts by the SCAF and other state agencies to depict them as lawless hooligans disrupting the local economy. As one activist told Reuters, “unblocking the road does not mean that our protest is over. This is merely a goodwill gesture to prove we are not thugs or a mob, just people fighting for their right to live” (Reuters, 2011b). The protesters wanted the plant immediately dismantled; as a middle-aged furniture worker told the press, “We don’t trust the government. They never responded to our demands or cared about our environment and health. They attacked us with live ammunition rather than listening to our complaints” (Sabry, 2011).

MOPCO demanded that the government allow the factory to resume production. In a memo to the prime minister, MOPCO claimed that the plant was losing US$3.2 million daily in lost production, and that if the company was forced to move, it would not be able to pay back US$1.05 billion in debt borrowed from twenty international and Egyptian banks to finance the expansion (Aref, 2011; Reuters, 2011a). MOPCO filed a lawsuit arguing that the prime minister had incorrectly ordered the firm to suspend the expansion of production lines, and that the Damietta governor and the SCAF had illegally halted company operations pending environmental review (“Administrative Court Rules in Favor of Mopco…,” 2012). MOPCO and Uhde, the German firm that had built eight similar plants in Egypt already, also embarked on various attempts to improve their public image in Egypt. MOPCO created a Facebook page (“Yes Mopco”), while Uhde representatives gave presentations showing that their fertilizer plants were built in close proximity to residential areas in developed countries, including the Netherlands, Austria, and Belgium. In its 2011 annual report to shareholders, Agrium noted it fully expected that MOPCO would move ahead with its expanded production lines.

In the midst of these developments, residents of Damietta went to the polls in the fall to elect parliamentary representatives. Similar to returns elsewhere in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party won a majority, with 86,608 votes, followed closely by the Salafi Al-Nour Party with 80,936. However, in Damietta the moderate Islamist Al-Wasat Party did reasonably well, with 60,814 votes. A leading Al-Wasat candidate elected to Parliament was the lawyer Essam Sultan. Sultan had filed several lawsuits challenging the government’s contract with EAgrium in 2008, and emerged as one of the principal figures negotiating between the armed forces and emboldened villagers during the street clashes in November 2011.

A year after Mubarak was deposed, in January 2012, the SCAF-appointed environmental inspection committee declared that MOPCO met Egyptian and international environmental regulations and was not significantly polluting the local water or air (“Damietta’s Controversial Mopco Factory…,” 2012). In stark contrast to the 2008 parliamentary committee of inquiry’s report, the 2012 report focused narrowly on actual pollutant loads, rather than the risks of siting fertilizer plants next to urban areas. The composition of the committee also differed significantly. While the parliamentary committee sought out nationally respected environmental scientists, the SCAF-commissioned committee was delegated to the syndicate of scientific professions and chaired by an administrator from Mansoura University (ibid.).

In a further blow to the protesters, the Administrative Court in Mansoura found in favor of MOPCO in March 2012. The judge ordered that the plant be allowed to resume production immediately and complete work on the expanded production lines. It further imposed legal fees on the state, and dismissed a lawsuit filed by civil society organizations in Damietta. According to press accounts, while the verdict was delivered central security forces cordoned off the courthouse, admitting only MOPCO workers and select journalists inside, while citizens and lawyers from Damietta were shut out (ibid.).

The second environmental fact-finding committee focused on the question of whether MOPCO and the expansion in production posed a direct public health threat. This emphasis echoed the activist claims that the plants were directly polluting local air and water. Yet this pollution framing serves to obscure some of the key issues at stake for the activists. Environmental and social protest in Damietta can be understood more broadly as a question of center–local relations. Under Mubarak, the Cabinet in Cairo designated a new industrial zone, a large cargo port, and approved a number of large-scale petrochemical and fertilizer plants in Damietta without local consultation, compensation, or upgraded investment in public services. Damietta’s activist network has challenged the monopoly of central governmental ministries and the Cabinet to promote concentrated industrial investment without local consultation.

The government’s centralized approach to land use and industrial siting is exemplified in the National Plan for Petrochemical Industry, adopted by the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources, for the period 2002–20. The plan “reserved” lands for petrochemical facilities totaling 33 million square meters in Alexandria, Damietta, Gulf of Suez, Ismailia, Kafr El-Sheikh, and other coastal cities. The government selected these cities for their port, transport, and industrial infrastructures, continuing a long tradition of fostering greater industrial concentration on the peripheries of expanding and densely settled urban areas near ports, waterways, and transport lines. These patterns of investment are contrary to the government’s formal commitments calling for decentralization of industrial investment to “greenfield” desert areas.

In effect, the Damietta activist networks took on the impunity of the state-owned industrial sector and its close ties with foreign investors. The emerging coalition of protesting villagers, civil society organizations, sympathetic journalists, and parliamentarians thus face an uphill battle in trying to relocate a lucrative state-owned enterprise backed by foreign investors and heavily indebted to Egypt’s banks. With such stakes, the more civic, civil, and inclusive style of environmental campaign waged in 2008 might simply have encountered endless delays and prevarications, while MOPCO completed construction on additional production lines. Instead, angry workers and villagers sought to capture governmental attention directly, by closing the port, the roads, and the power plant.

Direct action by environmental activist networks has diffused to other campaigns against industrial facilities in several Egyptian cities. In Idku, east of Alexandria, activists organized against a proposed natural gas processing plant owned by British Petroleum (BP), demanding a full review by the environmental agency (Marroushi, 2011a). The BP project had been approved by the SCAF, but other agencies had not yet completed their reviews. As in Damietta, the city already contained several fossil fuel operations jointly owned by state and foreign companies. These included Rashpetco, a joint venture between the state-owned Egyptian General Petroleum Company (EGPC), the UK’s BG Group, and Italian power company Edison, and the Burullus Gas Company, a joint venture between EGPC, BG Group, and Malaysia’s state-owned petroleum company Petronas. As in Damietta, the emerging activist network in Idku included middle-class professionals, particularly lawyers, and local residents concerned about the impact on agricultural land and fisheries. The campaigners blocked roads, raided BP’s office in Idku, conducted a sit-in at the site, submitted legal complaints to the SCAF, and met with the governor (ibid.).

In another instance of locals taking direct action around central plans for land use, residents displaced from the proposed site of Egypt’s first nuclear reactor reoccupied the site in January 2012. The residents dismantled existing buildings, built new houses, and announced that not only would they reoccupy their land, but also that they would distribute some to those who could not afford housing (“Protests at Nuclear Power Station…,” 2012).

Contested coastal lands and corruption charges

Just as at the center of the conflict in Damietta is a dispute over who determines land use, conflicting land use claims on Egypt’s coastlines have lost none of their salience in the post-Mubarak era. As we saw in Chapter 5, rapid development of Egypt’s coastlines for tourism and luxury housing under Mubarak largely benefitted leading Egyptian business conglomerates and well-placed officials. Popular outrage against these privileged relationships and corruption prompted the SCAF to review some of the more controversial land acquisition deals shortly after it took power in early 2011. The anti-corruption campaign has been selective, however; it has been unclear why some businessmen were charged with corruption, price-fixing, and suspect business dealings, while others were exempted from scrutiny. In some cases, the junta simply quietly re-negotiated land deals with influential foreign investors, such as Saudi prince Al Waleed bin Talal’s stake in the New Valley (Toshka) land reclamation project. But others were not so fortunate.

A previously moribund agency, the Illicit Gains Authority, as well as public prosecutors, began systematically investigating some of Mubarak’s associates, their private fortunes, and their acquisition of lucrative real estate on the Red Sea and Sinai coastlines (El-Din, 2011). The legal dossiers held at the Ministries of Environment and Tourism documenting land acquisition on the Red Sea and Sinai coasts were suddenly of great interest to public prosecutors.³ One of the first members of the old regime to be charged was Zuhayr Garrana, the last Minister of Tourism under Mubarak, sentenced to five years in prison in May 2011 pending an appeal. Public prosecutors also charged businessmen known for being close to the Mubarak family, such as Hussein Salem and Kamal Shazly, with illicit acquisition and development of coastal land. Noticeably lacking from these prosecutions, however, were cases against the many military, police, and internal security officers who had acquired and often resold large tracts of coastal land.

To classify these land transactions as illicit, state prosecutors invoked an obscure 1998 legal provision that required all state land to be sold through competitive bidding. This rule had never been applied to tourism land previously. As a result, decision-making on land transfers ground to a halt in many governmental authorities after the spring 2011 uprising, amidst fears of corruption charges.⁴ This included the TDA, which temporarily stopped allocating land for tourism development along the Red Sea altogether. In an interview with Reuters, Samih Suweiris, the owner of Orascom Development Holdings, one of the largest tourism development companies in Egypt, accurately captured the ramifications of invoking this little-known legal requirement for all land transactions in the country: “The biggest problem the state is facing now is the lack of clarity on the legal status of all of Egypt’s land,” he observed. “The problem is the rule can apply to any land which has been sold in Egypt” (Zayed, 2011).

Suweiris and his firm were particularly concerned with the criminalization of land transactions conducted by the TDA and other governmental agencies under Mubarak. Orascom had built a niche market in creating new luxury towns, featuring villas, apartments, and hotel rooms integrated with leisure offerings, such as marinas, sailing, diving, and shopping. The first two such towns built—Taba Heights on the Gulf of ‘Aqaba and El Gouna on the northern Red Sea—were successful enough that the company had built integrated resort towns in additional Middle Eastern and European countries, including Switzerland. According to the firm’s own promotional material, Orascom’s success was built upon acquisition of a “land bank of 127 million square meters” in “some of the most breathtaking locales in the region” (Orascom Development Holdings, undated).

Tourism development and protected areas clash in Lake Qarun

In 2008, Suweiris’ Orascom Development Holdings had announced it would build a luxury resort on the northern shores of Lake Qarun in the Fayoum oasis. The company had obtained 1.3 million square meters in the protected area a decade earlier from the TDA, and planned on developing 400,000 square meters into a new resort, the Byoum Residence.⁵ Marketed with a Western theme and the logo of a shotgun, the Byoum Residence was to include 158 villas, a marina, a four-star hotel, and a hunting lodge, all located within the boundaries of the Lake Qarun protected area (Kasinof, 2008).

Located only a few hours by car from Cairo, the Lake Qarun protected area is one of two protected areas in the Fayoum depression. Declared by prime ministerial decree in 1989, Lake Qarun and Wadi al-Rayan protected areas include several manmade saline lakes (fed primarily by agricultural drainage water), unique marine and primate fossil remains, Pharaonic basalt quarries, and archaeological sites dating from the Neolithic period forward. The numerous villages and towns in Fayoum, along with three cities, sustain a sizable permanent population of 2.48 million people. The area also includes an industrial area and a large salt extraction factory on the southern shore of the lake.

Popular with artists, resident foreigners, and Egyptians looking to escape Cairo’s cacophony, the numbers of visitors to Lake Qarun and Wadi al-Rayan protected areas have steadily increased. In 2005 alone, the Fayoum Tourism Authority recorded that 56,206 Egyptians, 18,288 foreigners, and 879 Arabs (non-Egyptian) visited the Fayoum protected areas, with 32,962 hotel guests (Protected Area Management Unit, 2001: 14). Since the early 2000s, conservation experts had leveraged international assistance to build organizational capacities to cope with rapidly rising numbers of visitors. With support from the Italian government from 1998 through the mid-2000s, conservation experts and staff from the Nature Conservation Sector had developed a management plan, hired and trained rangers, constructed a visitors’ center, and began monitoring existing industrial and land reclamation activities within and around the park (ibid.).

These steps in creating infrastructural authority, however, were overtaken by central government plans to market much of the rest of Lake Qarun for mass tourism, along the model of Egypt’s coastlines (Hateita, 2010). Orascom’s Byoum Residence was thus only one project in a larger “world tourism zone” planned for the Lake Qarun area by the last Mubarak-era Minister of Tourism, Zuhayr Garrana (Werr, 2011). In 2004, the TDA marketed eighteen plots of land on the northern shores of Lake Qarun as the “Qarun Tourism Center” under a twenty-five-year concession. The center included a target of 2,850 hotel rooms and 4,200 secondary housing apartments and villas, covering 2,760 feddans (Environmental Design Group, 2006: 13).

The No Porto Fayoum campaign

In December 2010, one of the parcels in the Qarun Tourism Center was bought by the Amer Group, another large Egyptian real estate developer. The group announced it would build the “Porto Fayoum” resort on 2.8 million square meters under a ninety-nine-year concession agreement with the TDA (Zayed, 2010).⁶ Amer Group had already completed two similar luxury developments, Porto Sukhna in ‘Ayn al-Sukhna on the Red Sea coast and Porto Marina on Egypt’s north coast. A member of Nature Conservation Egypt wrote that the two completed Porto projects consisted of “towering, endlessly expanding holiday apartment complexes… When viewed from afar, Porto Ain Sokhna’s gigantic beehive of holiday homes rises as high as the gigantic mountains behind it” (Gauch, 2011). Indeed, Porto Sukhna is clearly visible across the Gulf of Suez from the main north–south coastal highway in the Sinai Peninsula.

With 2010 net profits of LE557.1 million, the Amer Group had plans for additional “Porto” projects throughout Egypt and the Arab world. These included luxury resorts at Porto Cairo, Porto Pyramids, Porto Aswan, Porto Matrouh on Egypt’s north coast, Panoramica North Coast, Porto Tartous in Syria, and Porto Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.⁷

The small network of conservation experts involved in protected areas believed that the Porto Fayoum project set a dangerous precedent. If tourism development continued to proceed unhindered around Lake Qarun, it would set a legal and practical precedent for encroachments on other protected areas. Local conservationists had already sought to intervene, unsuccessfully, to halt Orascom’s Byoum Residence on Lake Qarun. In 2011, several met directly with Orascom’s director and majority shareholder, Samih Suweiris, who promised to review the project, but few changes in the design of the resort materialized, and it was constructed largely as planned.

The association of conservation professionals, Nature Conservation Egypt, and a local association called Friends of Lake Qarun combined their efforts, launching the “No Porto Fayoum” campaign. Each organization had small, overlapping memberships of conservation experts, birders, and local residents (both Egyptians and resident foreigners). They established a Facebook group, launched an online petition that garnered 2,000 signatures in a few months, wrote blogs, letters, and op-eds for the international and local press, and gave TV and online interviews.⁸ The result was a spate of critical media coverage in Egypt and abroad regarding the Porto Fayoum project during the spring and summer of 2011.

With former regime stalwarts and ministers under arrest for corruption, and an increasing number of land deals frozen and under review, the Fayoum activists sought to capitalize on post-revolutionary outrage about cheap allocations of land to wealthy private investors. They framed their campaign to the local newspapers and TV stations in terms of reversing ill-advised land sales approved by the TDA under Mubarak.⁹ Their online petition to stop the Porto Fayoum project highlighted that “Amer Group Chairman Mansour Amer is a former member of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party and reportedly has close ties to former president Hosni Mubarak.”¹⁰

To the international press and transnational conservation networks, however, these conservation experts invoked long-standing framings of protected areas as safeguarding Egypt’s natural heritage and preserving international biodiversity, as explored in Chapter 5. The director of the Friends of Lake Qarun told Reuters that Porto Fayoum represented “the destruction of Egyptian natural heritage for future generations” (Werr, 2011). In their public communications, members of Nature Conservation Egypt also highlighted the global importance of Lake Qarun.

As the spectacular marine reefs and archaeological sites of Sinai had stimulated international interest in their conservation, the extensive, unique fossil remains and archaeological sites in Lake Qarun were of great interest to small transnational networks of researchers interested in archaeology, Egyptology, ancient quarry sites, paleobiology, and paleontology. In 2003, Egypt’s conservation network had requested that UNESCO designate part of the northern shore of Lake Qarun, the Gabal Qatrani (Tar Hills), as a World Heritage site. In this escarpment, researchers had uncovered rare primate, mammal, and marine fossils, as well as remains of ancient basalt and gypsum quarries and settlement sites from at least 3000 BC.¹¹ In 2005, conservation networks successfully applied for Wadi al-Hitan (“valley of the whales”), within the Wadi al-Rayan protected area, to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This site contains unique and extensive fossil remains of an extinct suborder of whales, in the last evolutionary stages of losing mammalian hind legs, dated to 40 million years ago. Egypt’s conservation networks had further arranged for Lake Qarun to be designated an internationally recognized wetland under the Ramsar Convention to Preserve Wetlands, as well as an Important Bird Area (IBA) by Birdlife International. Lake Qarun, like the manmade Lake Nasser to the south, is a significant stopover for bird migrations from Africa to Europe.

These international designations confer no legal or infrastructural authority within Egypt’s political system, of course. International designations helped publicize the case of Lake Qarun to an international audience; domestically, however, the conservation network emphasized the economic contributions of protected areas for developing the Fayoum oasis. They repeatedly invoked a 2006 report by the Fayoum Tourism Authority and the Egyptian–Italian Cooperation projects in Fayoum, which critiqued the Ministry of Tourism’s focus on cheap, mass-marketed tourism. The report concluded that:

In 2010, participants in an international conference on the Fayoum adopted a written declaration that embraced an even more expansive notion of “heritage” than that customarily used in Egypt’s conservation circles. The conference participants urged immediate intervention to protect Lake Qarun.¹² Moving beyond the prevalent discourses of natural and cultural heritage, the declaration argued that Fayoum’s “heritage” included “geological, environmental, archaeological, historical, rural, and traditional resources.” In framing heritage as resources, the declaration argued that these should not only be conserved and documented, but also sustainably exploited to promote local economic development. Participants proposed that the Egyptian government allow the formation of a “heritage consortium” to implement a participatory regional development plan.¹³

Such innovative land use planning, however, required finding a government authority or popular constituency to serve as an advocate within the state. As a HEPCA member argued in Chapter 5, activist networks in Egypt are more successful when they enlist support from a governmental authority to intervene against other state entities. In the case of the Lake Qarun protected areas, conservation experts pinned their hopes on Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), based on its authority to exclusively manage Egypt’s cultural heritage and antiquities under Law 215 for 1951.¹⁴ In 2009, the SCA’s internationally known, controversial director, Zahi Hawass, ordered the Amer Group’s Porto development in Aswan halted, on the heels of complaints from local villagers that they had not been consulted and after an archaeological survey found antiquities. Conservation experts knew that the SCA had already conducted an archaeological impact assessment for Lake Qarun, driven by reports that the Ministry of Tourism intended to develop the area.¹⁵

In their online petition, the No Porto Fayoum campaign thus called on the SCA to cancel the project on the basis of findings from its recent archaeological excavations. In a telling response posted on his blog on May 20, 2011, Zahi Hawass responded directly, highlighting the fragmented legal jurisdictions governing land use in Egypt more generally:

Hopes that Hawass might personally intervene in the Fayoum dispute were further dashed when he was removed from his position in the post-revolutionary churn of Cabinet shuffles that marked the spring of 2011. Targeted by young activists and ministry employees for perpetuating the closed, centralized, and opaque decision-making that epitomized the Mubarak regime, he was accused of close relations with the Mubarak family and corruption (Lawler, 2011).

In contrast to the environmental campaigns waged in Damietta and Alexandria, the No Porto Fayoum campaign lacked a popular constituency from the cities and villages of Fayoum. It also lacked substantive linkages to the governor, a former general appointed by the SCAF. Despite these limitations, however, the conservation network was clearly more successful in politicizing the Porto Fayoum project in 2011 than it had been in trying to counter Orascom’s Byoum Residence in 2010. As one activist blogged, “Within hours of launching our campaign via a press release, Internet petition, and the Facebook site No Porto Fayoum, local and international reaction and outrage began… How different from a year ago, when we launched a similar campaign against Byoum” (Gauch, 2011). By summer 2011, the new tourism minister, Munir Fakhri ‘Abd al-Nur, assured the BBC that the Porto Fayoum project had been sent back to the environmental agency for consideration, while Al Hayat TV announced that Egypt’s attorney general, Mahmud ‘Abd al-Magid, had promised to review the Porto Fayoum project.¹⁶

Demanding rights to resources on the periphery

Conflicts over land use and land rights have further intensified as marginalized groups have moved to reassert access to places and resources. Most assertive have been communities directly dependent upon access to natural resources for their livelihoods and systematically marginalized by the regime in Cairo, such as Nubians and villagers in upper Egypt, and the Bedouin in the Sinai.

The Nubians, displaced decades ago when the Aswan High Dam submerged most of their lands, launched a series of protests in 2011 demanding the right to return to the shores of the dam’s reservoir, Lake Nasser (Figure 7.2). Development around the lake is supposed to be restricted to ensure Nile water quality, as the reservoir supplies most of downstream Egypt’s water. In practice, a number of uses, including fish stocking, fish farming, and land reclamation on the shores of the lake, are tolerated and have already had deleterious impacts on water quality. As in Damietta in 2011, the Nubian protesters took direct action. Activists blockaded roads in Aswan, burned the governorate office building, and launched a sit-in in front of the burned building, while far to the north in Cairo, a simultaneous demonstration was conducted outside the Cabinet building (“Nubians Will Finally Go Home…,” 2011).

Protesters employed discursive claims that focused not only on the restitution of property rights, but also invoked the Egyptian revolution’s demands for more inclusionary decision-making. The protesters demanded an open meeting with the then-prime minister, Essam Sharaf, who had been scheduled to meet with thirty Nubian delegates hand-picked by governmental authorities (Al-Gaafari, 2011). The protesters refused to participate in the long-standing pattern of Cairo selecting its favored intermediaries on the periphery. After a week of the sit-in, the government promised to grant Nubians access to land around Lake Nasser, though it remains to be seen if such promises will be fulfilled.

Figure 7.2 A member of the El Salam Nubian village prepares coffee. The Nubians were relocated during the construction of the Aswan High Dam and are seeking to return to adjacent lands David Degner, 2012

In the Sinai, where Cairo’s approach to Bedouin tribes has long been dominated by security concerns, conflicts between Bedouin and the state intensified. As the International Crisis Group warned in 2007, heavy-handed security sweeps, indefinite detentions, and “a development strategy that is deeply discriminatory and largely ineffective at meeting local needs” had produced widespread disaffection in the years before the uprising (International Crisis Group, 2007: i). Years of drought, which affected most of the eastern Mediterranean, had decimated livestock and grazing along the northern coast, prompting greater migration and competition into South Sinai for limited jobs. In addition, the international isolation of Hamas in the Gaza Strip created a black-market economy of tunnels and smuggling in which northern Sinai was the key transit route.

As a result, protest and insecurity escalated in Sinai. Armed tribesmen attacked police stations, where torture and indefinite detention were routine practices, and surrounded courthouses. In May 2011, armed tribesmen shut down the main road leading into Sharm el-Sheikh, the city near Ras Mohamed National Park on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, demanding the release of relatives imprisoned by Egypt’s security forces (Aboudi, 2011). The pipeline supplying Egyptian natural gas to Israel and Jordan, which runs through northern Sinai, was sabotaged fourteen times from January to May 2011, amidst mounting public criticism that the government should cancel the sale of gas to Israel.

As in the environmental campaigns in Damietta and Idku, public criticism centered around the claim that the regime in Cairo was selling Egypt’s natural resources for the benefit of foreign firms and foreign countries. This criticism gained even greater currency as ordinary Egyptians found that they faced shortages of locally used fuels—diesel, propane, and butane—in the spring of 2012, leading to long queues at gas stations and bakeries. As a result of public pressure, the Egyptian state-owned petroleum company cancelled its contract supplying gas to the private multinational consortium that supplied gas to Israel in May 2012. By this time, the Egyptian government had already doubled the price of natural gas sold to Jordan.

Protected areas in Sinai were not immune from intensified mobilization among Bedouin communities. In the spring of 2011, sixty Bedouin conducted a sit-in at the South Sinai governor’s office, demanding that they be allowed to fish in Ras Mohamed National Park during the spawning period for emperor fish, a valuable and lucrative species for local fishermen. Faced with a mobilized local constituency, the governor capitulated, issuing a decree allowing angling in an important spawning area within the boundaries of Ras Mohamed.

When Ras Mohamed was established in 1983, fishing inside protected areas was legally prohibited, as fish are an integral part of coral ecosystems. In practice, protected area rangers had long allowed small numbers of Bedouin to discreetly fish using lines, at night, to supply the local tourism market.¹⁷ Yet increasing numbers of fishing boats, moving into the Red Sea and Gulf of ‘Aqaba from depleted fisheries in the northern lakes and Mediterranean coast, threatened this informal arrangement. These boats often used large nets and dynamite, destroying coral habitat and decimating fish populations. In population surveys of the Red Sea reefs, some fish species had declined precipitously (Charbel, 2011). Net fishing in the Red Sea and Gulf of ‘Aqaba was already formally banned during spawning season from May to September, by order of the Ministry of Agriculture’s fisheries department (ibid.).

To oppose the governor’s unexpected decree legalizing fishing inside the boundaries of the national park, long-standing members of the conservation network working on the Red Sea and Sinai mobilized quickly. These included a few well-known ecotourism and dive operators, representatives from HEPCA, and the Ras Mohamed park manager.¹⁸ As with the No Porto Fayoum campaign, the network started online petitions and alerted domestic and international news outlets and conservation organizations, which ran scathing coverage of the governor’s decision (Al-Awami et al., 2011). Conservationists also used their positions in a variety of non-governmental and governmental organizations to issue appeals to the Ministers of Tourism and Environment to intercede. The Egyptian Federation of Tourism’s Chamber of Diving and Water Sports, for instance, issued a press release arguing such a decision would hamper protected coral ecosystems and hurt the tourism industry (Chamber of Diving and Water Sports, 2011).

A turning point in the campaign arguably came in a televised debate between Amr Ali, managing director of HEPCA, and the then-governor of South Sinai, Mohamed Shosha, on the popular talk show “Biladna Bil Masr.” The talk show, hosted by well-known TV personality Reem Maged and carried by Orascom Television (OTV), the private satellite TV station owned by the Suweiris family, has become a forum for spirited political debate since the revolution.

Both men cast their positions in terms of scientific expertise and economic development. The governor noted that he had convened an expert committee to investigate the issue. HEPCA’s director countered that the consensus of Egypt’s conservation community was clear, as the Ras Mohamed Park authority and the environmental agency opposed the governor’s decision, while existing laws on fisheries issued by the Ministry of Agriculture clearly banned angling in spawning grounds.¹⁹ Ali also argued that the issue was not simply a local one, but an international one, as negative press would affect Egypt’s tourism and diving industry. The next morning, the governor rescinded his decision.

Conservationists knew, however, that efforts by protected area rangers and the coast guard to enforce the ban risked direct confrontation with Bedouin fishermen.²⁰ Meeting at one of the few Bedouin-owned hotels in Sharm el-Sheikh, conservation experts met with Bedouin leaders to discuss monetary compensation for affected fishermen. They then contacted the Ministry of Tourism, the EEAA, and the South Sinai governorate to establish a compensation fund, and asked local Bedouin to collectively agree upon a list of boats impacted by lost fishing revenue. The Ministry of Tourism quickly paid into the fund, but neither the environmental agency nor the South Sinai governorate were as forthcoming. In interviews, participants indicated that they would continue to pursue the development of a longer-term financial mechanism to compensate local fishermen seasonally excluded from critical spawning areas.²¹ They viewed this effort as one step towards incorporating community rights into the management of protected areas and natural resources.

Integrating rights into water and agricultural policies

Putting inclusiveness and rights as the centerpiece of an environmental agenda has long been championed by a handful of activist networks and voluntary organizations working in Egypt. As discussed in Chapter 4, advocacy organizations persisted in Egypt under Mubarak despite the Emergency Law and legal restrictions on rights of association, as well as raids, detentions, and trials of leading activists and their organizations. These organizations included Markaz al-Ard li Huquq al-Insan (the Land Center for Human Rights), which had filed several legal cases to contest illegal quarrying near protected areas in the late 1990s. The discourses and organizational strategies of the Land Center provide one example of how environmental issues, economic livelihoods, and community mobilization may increasingly fuse with broader campaigns for socioeconomic and environmental justice.

Since 1996, the Land Center has provided legal aid to small agricultural producers, migrant laborers, children, women, and tenant farmers. It was one of the first organizations to try and document the numbers of tenant and smallholding farmers displaced after 1994, when the government lifted legal restrictions on how much rent landlords could charge tenant farmers. The center also documented labor activism among industrial workers, linking problems of agricultural welfare to a broader exploitation of poor laborers, whether industrial or agricultural.

In its research reports, press releases, court cases, and episodically issued magazine, Al-Ard, the Land Center’s discourse drew on its roots in leftist politics and middle-class activist networks. The center’s legal advocates recast neo-Marxist arguments about labor exploitation and inequality into the context of rural Egypt’s small producers. “Egyptian history…will remain for the foreseeable future a history of struggle for the soil of agricultural land and a drop of water for irrigation,” noted a summary of one report issued in June 2011 (Land Center for Human Rights, 2011c). The plight of small and landless agricultural producers was caused by corrupt land deals and government policies, particularly neoliberal agricultural reforms, which took the country back to the “worst eras of poverty and injustice, tyranny and corruption, banditry and looting” (ibid.). The center thus situated agriculture and rural issues as part of the broader struggle of the Egyptian people for a decent livelihood and a just society. These discursive themes thus dovetailed well with the revolutionary claims of 2011 for justice, dignity, and bread, as the Land Center activists were well aware. Most of their press releases and report summaries after January 25 concluded with the taglines “Long live the struggle of the Egyptian people!” and “Glory to the martyrs!”

The center also attempted to build infrastructural authority among small producers, by encouraging them to form unions independent of the Ministry of Manpower’s restrictive rules and distinct from existing corporatist structures sanctioned by the central government, such as the Ministry of Agriculture’s farmer cooperatives. In workshops and training sessions, the lawyers and handful of researchers who staff the center laid out the practical and legal steps required for small-holding farmers, fishermen, and squatters on government-owned land to form independent associations. These included obtaining legal recognition, conducting elections for boards of directors and assemblies, collecting dues, and establishing qualifications for membership.

The Land Center’s efforts to create independent small producer organizations drew upon intensified union organizing among workers in public sector firms and employees in government ministries during the 2000s. One lead article in the September 2010 issue of Al-Ard, for instance, highlighted the achievements of the real estate tax collectors, among the first such groups to successfully establish a union outside of government control.²² The ability to establish independent political parties and trade unions, along with abolishing the Emergency Law and ensuring rights of association and expression, were among the central demands of the January 25 revolution. Despite assurances from post-Mubarak Cabinets that independent unions were to be allowed, attempts to legally register such unions encountered numerous delays and obstacles. For instance, the governmental authority designated to receive such registrations, the Ministry of Manpower and its local provincial offices, simply refused to accept many of the registration papers.

Workshops and meetings held to form independent unions illuminated the concerns of small agricultural producers. For small farmers from villages in Fayoum and in the Beheira governorate, these included gaining ownership of land farmed for years but owned by large landlords, improved support of production and marketing of agricultural crops, and improved public services for irrigation and drinking water (Land Center for Human Rights, 2011b). For the fishermen of Lake Edku and other lakes, large fish farms had deprived small fishermen of their fishing grounds. They also called for halting land reclamation and other activities that destroyed aquatic habitat, and demanded that water police stop arresting and fining small fishermen (Land Center for Human Rights, 2011a).

Other NGOs, including Sons of the Soil (Awlad al-Ard), are undertaking similar organizing efforts among agricultural producers. As in the Sinai and Nubia, a focus on redistribution and rights thus figures prominently in emerging bottom-up mobilizations for land, water, and resources in the Nile Valley and Delta.

In the wake of the 2011 uprising, activist networks have thus proliferated and diversified in terms of the participants that they attract, the issues that they tackle, and the geographical spaces in which they emerge. Many activist networks working on environmental issues still draw upon the infrastructure of contestation and legal advocacy channels established by state-sanctioned organizations, universities, labor and human rights associations, and the courts. Yet as the numerous examples of direct action show, activist campaigns and collective protest draw in much greater numbers of ordinary people, from villagers blockading roads and conducting sit-ins at governorate and ministerial offices, to Nubians seeking compensation for lost land, to urban residents protesting in Idku and Damietta.

Managerial networks of experts, moreover, have begun to play a more autonomous role as environmental advocates, outside the confines of donor-state projects and private consultancies. In doing so, they have begun to adopt the discourses, tactics, and organizational forms of activist networks, as shown in the No Porto Fayoum campaign. In the case of the Bedouin claims to fish in Ras Mohamed National Park, the local conservation network sought to mediate between mobilized local communities and the executive institutions of the state, including the governor, the Ministry of Tourism, and the environmental agency.

Environmental networks will likely build upon the variety of new political openings and increased social mobilization, adapting their discursive framings and organizational tactics to reach broader constituencies. As a result, they may build more effective forms of infrastructural authority, which had been difficult in a broader authoritarian context of sustained mistrust and avoidance of state authorities, particularly in rural areas. Environmental networks will continue to participate in a more vibrant public sphere and lively media scene, to seek alliances with elected parliamentarians and advocacy organizations, and to file lawsuits with the relatively autonomous judiciary.

It is unclear whether the intensified popular mobilization and willingness to take direct action chronicled in this chapter will be sustained. Many of the legal restrictions and institutions designed to contain and coopt dissent have not yet been dismantled, and proposed revisions to many laws provide inadequate protection of civil liberties. Yet in light of Egypt’s ongoing political transformation, we can expect further democratization and contestation in Egypt’s environmental politics. The advent of this more mobilized, participatory, and dynamic phase in Egyptian environmental politics does not stem from the calculations of political elites or the pressures of international donors. Instead, it is the product of ongoing, sustained political engagement by environmental networks of activists and experts—and by thousands of ordinary citizens participating in Egypt’s revolutionary moment.