Ecological Themes in the Developmental Thought of Ismail-Sabri Abdallah

• In Event: Marxist Ecology and the Problem of Non-Western Development

Abstract

This paper uses the figure of Ismail-Sabri Abdallah to bring in two arenas of thought heretofore marginalized in current ecological debate: the problems of socially and ecologically “appropriate” planning and technologies, and the quandaries of national liberation and post-colonial planning writ large. Abdallah was a senior official in the Egypt National Planning Institute under Gamal Abdel Nasser and then Anwar Sadat; he was also a central figure in arenas like the Third World Forum. He faced as theorist and practitioner the multi-scalar problems of planning in a post-colonial state. His work wove together the problematics of the appropriate technologies to use for supplying basic needs for a primarily rural or slum-dwelling population; the pressing problem of unemployment; the nascent problem of immediate ecological degradation; the incipient problem of rapid depletion of exhaustible natural resources; and the existential problem of national defense as a component of third world development. This paper therefore reads his ouevre as a syncretic example of Third World ecological thought within the national liberation tradition, while placing it in associated debates concerning basic needs, the right to development, delinking, and the particularities of the Third World encounter with the ecological crisis.

Author

• Max Ajl, University of Ghent