Allocation and accountability: State-business relations and environmental politics in Egypt

This dissertation explores how relations between state and business actors shape environmental politics and policies in developing countries. Most academic and policy discussions attribute environmental policy failures in poor countries to poverty, overpopulation, and weak, patronage-ridden states, whereas they ascribe successful reforms to international influences and social activism. This study complicates such interpretations by analyzing how state-business relations affected the framing and implementation of environmental initiatives in Egypt. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the dissertation demonstrates how specific forms of business-state interaction structured environmental degradation, constrained reform options, and influenced policy implementation.; The study identifies three prominent types of state-business relations that informed Egyptian practices and discourses of environmental management. ‘Regime-business exchange,’ in which elite business groups traded resources, favors, and ideas with leading state officials, contributed to state initiatives that relied on weak, voluntary initiatives by business actors in lieu of state enforcement actions. The institutional attributes of bureaucratic ownership, exemplified in relations between the state apparatus and state-owned enterprises, made pollution an asset for public sector firms, which successfully bargained with the state and international donors for environmental aid. Distribution of aid and external rents contributed to the development of oversight agencies with highly developed capacities for allocating resources and issuing central directives, but with little ability to regulate or monitor environmental outcomes. Neither regime-business exchange nor bureaucratic ownership provided incentives for firms to engage in significant environmental restructuring, but supplied strong incentives for them to cultivate an environmentally friendly image. Finally, adversarial state relations with small and medium producers, characterized by petty regulation and marginalization from policy-making, legitimated sporadic and coercive campaigns by state officials to close ‘polluting’ or ‘wasteful’ small operations. The study suggests that political repression and unequal asset distribution constrained the evolution of state-society relations more conducive to substantive environmental reform.; The dissertation includes in-depth case studies documenting efforts to control industrial pollution in the public and private sectors, create protected areas in the Sinai (such as Ras Mohamed National Park), and manage conflicting claims about the viability and water requirements of the massive Toshka (New Valley) land reclamation project.