New publications

This article by Agnieszka Kazimierczuk in Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews provides a review of the latest status and policy framework for wind energy in Africa. It takes a close look at Kenya, one of the most successful African countries in terms of attracting renewable energy investments, including the largest wind farm on the continent. However, international private participation is critical in wind energy expansion in Kenya.

This new article by Mayke Kaag (ASCL) and Griet Steel (Utrecht University) in Built Environment highlights the role of transnational migrants in urban land investments and claim making on urban land. Using case studies in Khartoum and Dakar, the authors investigate the ways in which transnational migrants contribute to speculation, rising land values and processes of socio-spatial inclusion and exclusion.

Jan-Bart Gewald, Harry Wels and Frans Kamsteeg present a grim picture of South Africa as an emerging stagnant political economy that seems to conform smoothly to the conspiracy of authoritarians. ‘South Africa's BRICS partnership seems now stronger than ever, as the “Rainbow Nation” shares the “my country first” credo supported by the politics of authoritarian leadership’, they write in a contribution to Clingendael Spectator.

This is the latest volume in the African Dynamics series. In this volume scholars from Southern Africa and Europe take a refreshing look at (the history of) nature conservation in Southern Africa. On the basis of overwhelming scientific evidence, they suggest that we should enter a new phase in nature conservation: sentient conservation. For although the subjectivity of people has been rendered visible in earlier publications on histories of conservation in Southern Africa, the subjectivity of animals is hardly ever seriously considered or explicitly dealt with.