Scarcity reimagined: global green imaginaries, frontier-making, and resource conflict in Africa

This article develops the three concepts global green scarcity imaginaries, greening frontiers, and green conflicts, to revisit the resource–conflict debate in Africa under contemporary climate and biodiversity crises. Earlier debates contrasted resource abundance with scarcity linked to environmental stress, weak governance, and social fragmentation, yet tended to treat scarcity as a material fact. We argue instead that scarcity is increasingly imagined and politicized. Global green scarcity imaginaries frame ecosystems, resources, and time as vanishing, legitimizing urgent interventions in the name of planetary survival. These imaginaries produce greening frontiers: future oriented spaces where conservation, renewable energy, and carbon sequestration reconfigure land rights and governance, often in regions long cast as marginal. Within these frontiers, competing claims and exclusions generate green conflicts: disputes that arise not despite but because of sustainability projects, often manifesting as slow violence. Drawing on cases from across Africa, this article and the special issue it introduces examine how narratives travel across scales to intersect with local struggles, reshaping conflict dynamics in drylands and beyond. By setting these new concepts against earlier framings, we show how climate and biodiversity crises transform scarcity into urgent planetary claims that risk reproducing inequality and conflict under the guise of green transition.