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When the southern African country of Rhodesia was reborn as Zimbabwe in 1980, democracy advocates celebrated the defeat of a white supremacist regime and the end of colonial rule. Zimbabwean crowds cheered their new prime minister, freedom fighter Robert Mugabe, with little idea of the misery he would bring them. Under his leadership for the next 30 years, Zimbabwe slid from self-sufficiency into poverty and astronomical inflation. The government once praised for its magnanimity and ethnic tolerance was denounced by leaders like South African Nobel Prize-winner Desmond Tutu. Millions of refugees fled the country. How did the heroic Mugabe become a hated autocrat, and why were so many outside of Zimbabwe blind to his bloody misdeeds for so long? InA Predictable Tragedy: Robert Mugabe and the Collapse of ZimbabweDaniel Compagnon reveals that while the conditions and perceptions of Zimbabwe had changed, its leader had not. From the beginning of his political career, Mugabe was a cold tactician with no regard for human rights. Through eyewitness accounts and unflinching analysis, Compagnon describes how Mugabe and the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) built a one-party state under an ideological cloak of anti-imperialism. To maintain absolute authority, Mugabe undermined one-time ally Joshua Nkomo, terrorized dissenters, stoked the fires of tribalism, covered up the massacre of thousands in Matabeleland, and siphoned off public money to his minions-all well before the late 1990s, when his attempts at radical land redistribution finally drew negative international attention.A Predictable Tragedyvividly captures the neopatrimonial and authoritarian nature of Mugabe's rule that shattered Zimbabwe's early promises of democracy and offers lessons critical to understanding Africa's predicament and its prospects for the future.

This article explores the issue of the temporality of climate change from the angle of the formulation and implementation of local public policies which profess to address this fundamental political challenge. Empirically, it draws upon an analysis of the appropriation of Local Climate Plans (LCP) in twelve ‘intercommunal’ bodies in New Aquitaine. In France, virtually all such bodies are now required to develop LCP. Through interviews and documentary analyses, we studied the political work that the implementation of this obligation has entailed, in particular regarding two obstacles to legitimating climate action at the local scale. Firstly, we show that for local authorities, despite the work of ecologically committed administrative staff, political backing is only given by a minority of isolated elected councillors. Secondly, each locality has its own historical trajectory of environmental action and, more generally, of public policymaking at the intercommunal scale. The sedimentation of this past into local configurations consistently affects the content and meaning of each LCP. More generally, we show that actors have great difficulty pinning down, prioritizing, and legitimating climate change as a ‘public problem’ that deserves to be acted upon locally. As with the two non-drivers of political change listed above, this again contributes to creative and significant climate initiatives not being framed as urgent at the local scale.

À propos de Jean Foyer (dir.), Regards croisés sur Rio+20. La modernisation écologique à l’épreuve, Paris, CNRS éditions, 2015, 312 p. ; et de Stefan C. Aykut, Jean Foyer, Édouard Morena (dir.), Globalising the Climate. COP 21 and the Climatisation of Global Debates, Londres/New York, Earthscan/Routledge, 2017, 198 p.

Many Chinese economic actors in Africa have come under harsh criticism for the alleged environmental impact of their activities. This impact is not always documented, is uneven across the continent, and should be compared to that of business actors from other countries--in particular from the OECD. One major factor accounts for the recorded differences: the policy and regulatory framework within which these business actors operate. The African weak state is not conducive to the adoption of robust standards and their subsequent implementation. However, the shift in Chinese policy at home on environmental issues is already producing some changes for the state-owned companies, and there is a growing concern in China's leading circles about the international image of the nation and its companies turning global.

Many Chinese economic actors in Africa have come under harsh criticism for the alleged environmental impact of their activities. This impact is not always documented, is uneven across the continent, and should be compared to that of business actors from other countries—in particular from the OECD. One major factor accounts for the recorded differences: the policy and regulatory framework within which these business actors operate. The African weak state is not conducive to the adoption of robust standards and their subsequent implementation. However, the shift in Chinese policy at home on environmental issues is already producing some changes for the state-owned companies, and there is a growing concern in China's leading circles about the international image of the nation and its companies turning global. Environmental Practice 15:220–227 (2013)

Many Chinese economic actors in Africa have come under harsh criticism for the alleged environmental impact of their activities. This impact is not always documented, is uneven across the continent, and should be compared to that of business actors from other countries-in particular from the OECD. One major factor accounts for the recorded differences: the policy and regulatory framework within which these business actors operate. The African weak state is not conducive to the adoption of robust standards and their subsequent implementation. However, the shift in Chinese policy at home on environmental issues is already producing some changes for the state-owned companies, and there is a growing concern in China's leading circles about the international image of the nation and its companies turning global.

Our technicians and industrial societies are rooted in practices and lifestyles which generate high dependence has the respect of certain fossil energies, massive gas emission sources of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Rooted in the habits of modern life, and beyond in the production and mass consumption structures, these practices condition. Adapted from the source document.