Good evening, welcome to tonight's Middle East Centre Friday seminar. My name is Walter Armbrister, I'm one of the fellows of the Middle East Centre and I'm chairing Tonight Session hosting our speaker. The theme for this series of lectures is environment in the Middle East, and I should say at the beginning that we will be taking questions through the Q&A feature. If you don't want your name to be identified when you ask a question, let me know that you want to be anonymous.
So tonight's speaker is Jamie Prenez, who is currently a researcher at the Institute for Research on contemporary Margaret Tunis. But he's on leave from his position as a lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh based DPhil from Oxford, where I knew him well years ago when he was a student in the Department of International Development. He conducted fieldwork in Egypt and was there when I was there as well, so we know each other quite well.
He researches primarily on topics pertaining to environment, waste and urban development is dissertation was titled Metaphors of Waste, Several Ways of Seeing Development and Cairo's Garbage Collectors.
And he's spun off quite a few articles from his dissertation, including one titled post-Revolutionary Land Encroachments in Cairo, Rhizome Attic, Urban Space Making and The Lion of Flight from illegality in the journal Tropical Geography, Alternative Framings of transnational waste flows, reflections based on the Egypt China petty, which means polyethylene terephthalate plastic trade.
That's an area the Journal of the Royal Geographic Society. He has a couple of entries in the Sage Encyclopaedia of Consumption of Waste, and he's curated a giant museum exhibition at the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations in Marseilles titled Lives of Garbage The Economy of Waste, which resulted in the sale of one hundred and twenty nine thousand tickets. The title of his lecture tonight is the blue clad Fennec authoritarian environmentalism in Tunisia and its afterlives.
You have the abstract already on our website, so you've already read that. I can confess that environmentalism isn't something I normally associate with authoritarianism, but it seems it was nonetheless a tool in the governmental repertoire of the now deposed Ben Ali regime in Tunisia. I look forward to hearing the details, and so with no further ado, I'm going to turn it over to Jeremy for this.
OK, thanks very much for the introduction, Walter, as well as having put me forward since I owe you, thanks for this invitation tonight, as well as the first to Michael Willis in absentia for having reached out to me, it's a pleasure to be able to join you and to be back, if only virtually amongst the Middle East studies crowd in Oxford.
So I wanted to start with just a brief word on my transition from from Egypt to Tunisia because I guess it's with the work that I did on waste collectors in Egypt. Was that what you had in mind when you invited me? And when I started doing research in Tunisia a couple of years ago, I basically thought initially that I would transplant the work that I had done from from Egypt here.
So I started taking an interest in what they called the big picture here, which are sort of a rough equivalent to the zabaleen in Cairo, although in fact they're really quite different. But these would be itinerant collectors of recyclable materials and then also the the fire or the gear or scrap metal collectors.
But one of the things that that sort of struck me from day one here, and it's almost kind of as simple as to be ridiculous, was the omnipresence of the boulevards of the environment in Tunisia. And at some point I thought, Gosh, I mean, if I'm if I'm someone who's working in the environment, I have to find out at least a little bit about what the story of these these boulevards is. And the other thing that was really striking to me was the amount of signage in public space.
Asking people not to litter so anti littering campaigns organised by NGOs by a lot of them are just spontaneous writings on walls. So people put these up in front of their houses or on the wall of their garden to try to discourage people from littering on their property. But you also find them like in public transit, pretty much everywhere you go. I mean, you almost kind of, you know, even if you're not looking for it, you sort of bump your head on these things as you're walking around here.
It's really extraordinary. And so I started kind of following these two avenues, and I've I've done sort of one book chapter now that should be coming out soon in the Routledge Handbook of Waste Studies on these signs.
And so tonight's papers sort of starts with the other of these two observations the boulevards of the environment, and I'm going to try to follow that sort of as a thread that's going to take us into a discussion of how the environment was used as a device for propaganda and as a political device in the 1990s and 2000s prior to 2011. So during the Ben Ali regime, and that's hopefully going to be kind of the first part of the paper.
And then hopefully the second part, the second part is going to be a little bit more messy. I'm going to try to sort of throw out through a series of examples an argument about what I think people are talking about when they talk about the environment. So the idea, I guess here is that the contours of the term environment, while not entirely unfamiliar to someone like myself who grew up in North America, are at the same time a little bit different in Tunisia.
And of course, they're constantly shifting over time around the world is as the term is consolidated and rises in political and everyday importance. But again, this is sort of it sort of echoes back to to my experience in Egypt and in particular, we were talking before starting in the summer about Nicolas Hopkins', a lawyer.
Hummel, who recently passed away, who who was the lead author on a book in the early 2000s called People and Pollution in Egypt, which was a survey based study of people's attitudes towards the environment and pollution in Egypt.
And one of the things that I'll never forget from that book was that when they surveyed people in Cairo about and I believe in some other cities in Egypt about what it was that threatened the environment, you got the series of usual answers like air pollution, waste and so forth. And then there were a whole series of answers that people gave, which related to religio moral purity.
So they said things like, for instance, boys and girls who were unmarried, holding hands and going out in public people drinking alcohol, foul language, bad behaviour are threats to the environment. And I said, isn't that curious? And what then do people have in mind when they're thinking about the environment?
So I guess the questions that I'm trying to ask in this research are what do people mean when they talk about the environment and then how is action in the field of environment constrained or oriented by these historical political uses, as well as sort of the general context for understanding the term?
And so I guess the interest, I mean, I'm pursuing this as a as an academic project naturally that I think has interest in Middle East and North African studies and anthropology, but also a sort of practical pitch for this is that in the kind of contemporary context where everyone is trying to federate political forces around the environment in order to save the planet and the future of our species, it's interesting to know to what extent you know,
the people who who are having these discussions may have differing notions of what it is that we're trying to save or what the environment consists of. And of course, that policy can be productive as well, because sometimes easier to get people to agree, they think they're agreeing to different things. So let me talk a little bit about the people who see the blue clad finish that you see there and the boulevards of the environment.
And I'll start with the boulevards of the environment, which are really omnipresent in the country. Every one of the larger cities. Well, I would say virtually every city in the country has one of these boulevards shut in would rather not democracy. Write it In French and in large cities, there'll be several poorer districts in Tunis, for instance. There'd be five or six of these things. And they tend to be sort of the pre-eminent avenue or boulevards of the neighbourhood or of the city.
They often have a divider in the middle with some plants. So these are some examples from my travels around the country that I've I've photographed. These are some examples from Tunis or the one on the left, for instance, is in that Goulet famous locale for a film on which you've written an article. And it's like the one on the right is that seated beside a kind of a touristic village in the capital? And as you can see, it's things tend to be quite rundown.
This one here, which was used on the poster for the talk, was taken in Algiers, which is in the northwest of the country, and you can see how it's got a bit of a tag on it and the rains has fallen from. It's fascinating. And no one has come around to repair it. So what this tells you, the fact that they're sort of left to ruin or in some cases even vandalised at a minimum, is that none of them has been created in sort of the last 10 to 15 years.
So all of these from prior to 2011 and some of them go back to the early 1990s. So the new streets or large boulevards that are that are named more recently tend to be named, for instance, for the the past President Beji Caid Essebsi and above all, for Martyrs of the Revolution. So it's very common to to name roundabouts and streets or even rename them, in many cases for martyrs of the revolution.
So I want to I want to talk just a little bit about the background of these many of the streets that were that are currently named boulevard of the environment that existed prior under a different name, and they tended typically to be the Bourguiba avenues. Bourguiba, of course, was the president of Tunisia from nineteen fifty seven to eighty seven, succeeded by Ben Ali.
And he was the hero of decolonisation. So when Benali came to power with his sort of aspirations to to replace Bourguiba, one of his political projects was to deal with a bias if I can invent that word, public space. But at the same time, to do so by putting up his own name in place of the hero of the anti-colonial movement and to replace the statue with the statue of himself would have been too crass and really kind of unthinkable because of the status of Uber in the country's history.
So in this context, something more neutral, such as the environment was a way of erasing or keep it from public space, while at the same time not sort of scandalising public opinion. It also served a purpose, and this is my second point of giving the impression that Tunisia valued the environment very highly. And when you talk, I've done a little bit of kind of oral history, work with people who were in the ministry and had sort of other public roles.
When you talk to them, it's clear that this was a deliberate political strategy of legitimisation in western eyes. And in that sense, it was comparable to Tunisia's position on family law and in particular, women's rights.
So this was sort of greenwashing or quashing the idea being that they were able to sort of paper over and cause Western observers to ignore to some extent the violations of civil and political rights within the country by presenting themselves as progressive on these sort of hot button or touchstone issues in that kind of hierarchy of Euro American values, if I can put it that way. And the other part of this, of course, was that it helped to open up a lot of channels for international funding,
which would flow to environmental projects. So that's sort of my interpretation of the use of these words. The third thing I might just add here is that here we could borrow, I guess maybe from James sites would seem like a state that these served as micro environments of apparent order. So if you remember in that book, he talks a lot about model villages, demonstration projects, new capitals and so on that are designed to transform society.
And I think it's clear, in fact, that these boulevards had this sort of exemplary role. So they were they were supposed to be kind of the one space within the city that would be beautiful and clean. And by demonstrating that, you know, it's possible for at least one space to be clean, they were supposed to have a beneficial effect on society and the city as a whole. They were sort of by contagion supposed to influence for the better.
And of course, they also were a space of appearance of order as Mitchell talks about and colonising Egypt, where they were a picture of something. So these were an avenue that, for instance, when you had a foreign dignitary who was visiting or perhaps even just, you know, a minister in the government that you could sort of whisk them down without embarrassment and give a positive impression of the country.
This is just a photo to tell you that that this idea of these sort of demonstration spaces is one that persists today, even if the boulevards of the environment are no longer created. This is a photo in downtown Tunis of the House Marseglia, the Marseilles, which they have baptised in the houses what they call a small street here, Shari'a ZG. So this is like an ideal idealised kind of space what they call in French.
Every team wants, or it's supposed to testify to the fact that at least one street in downtown can be kept clean, beautiful and orderly. Now, at the ends of these boulevards, and here we move on to the beach, the blue clad panic at the ends of these boulevards, typically at a roundabout. You'll find one of these statues now. This is a desert fox or Fenech. And he was the mascot of the environment.
So just as I was saying earlier, the boulevards were often renamed some people boulevard to boulevard of the environment. You would often find this statue today or in particular between 1990 and 2011, at a place where a statue of Bourguiba once stood. There's different versions of the statue, like the one on the left here where he's pictured with children and they're dressed kind of like Boy Scouts here on the right,
there's a giant version. I don't know if you can see the waste bin in the lower left of that photo. Gives you a sense of scale that's probably 25 feet high or something like that, and that's located. It's the largest one I've been able to find so far. I, of course, photograph these things in my travels as I go around the country. This is located in inartfully park, where there's a large number of them.
There's about four or five of them in a massive park in Anthony Park is actually a lovely space even to this day. It's a large park space semi developed. It's it's semi wild. It's not entirely maintained in the city of Tunis, and it was supposed to be a space of environmental protection, but also a space where you would take children's groups, for instance, to have an experience in nature. And therefore it was appropriate for there to be statues of all different sizes of be throughout this park.
But you you also find them at other locations, for instance, there's a kind of government run Epcot Centre here called Madina the Lume a city because it's like a planetarium where children's groups go and there is a large and the beep at the entrance to room as well. Now, as you can see, like the boulevards, these statues are also in disrepair. And part of that, as I say, is is simply that they're all, you know, 15 to 35 years old at this point.
And as I've come to in a moment, probably never. We're very well-maintained, but since 2012 have explicitly been left to neglect. But it's not merely that they've fallen apart. They've actually been, in many cases, intentionally disfigured and damaged, and that occurred in the aftermath of the 2000 11 revolution. And this photo here I particularly like because of the way it was disfigured in the genitals. It gives a sense of the the the meaning that people attributed to this figure.
This is more than just teenagers being arseholes. The symbol of the Beeb became a representation of the dictatorship and therefore was a kind of focal point of people's anger in 2011. So everyone that you talked to who was around at the time remembers that these statues were attacked and the explanation as to why tend to differ a little bit. So for instance, I was talking to a mayor of a city in the northwest who's been an elected official for more than 20 years.
I showed him this exact photo and I said, What do you think about the defacement of these the beast? And he said to me, Well, that's because the Beaver was a symbol of corruption. And so we began talking about this story, which is corroborated by a number of people, which pertains to the fact that the Minister of Environment, from nineteen ninety two to nineteen ninety nine was Ben Ali's nephew. So the ministry itself was a symbol of nepotistic appointment.
But also the second dimension of corruption here is that eventually, when he realised how important this sort of environmental communication and education was ended up firing the caricaturist who the ministry had hired to create the Beeb. And he created his own company, which was a public relations company that then obtained all of the contracts for the production of these statues and the paraphernalia that was used for environmental education.
So it wasn't just his nepotistic appointment. He also then became a symbol symbol of the kind of self-dealing that a lot of public figures under Ben Ali engaged in profiting from their public position. You know, he was the guy who decided that there had to be a hundred thousand of these statues put up around the country. And at the same time, he was the guy whose company then received the contract to produce 100000 statue.
The other interpretation that people have is which, you know, these are not mutually exclusive, they can they can be true. At the same time is that the Beeb was a symbol of the propaganda machine of the regime and therefore, I guess an attempt to to bamboozle people basically into thinking that, you know, because the country is progressive on environment and nothing else is wrong where, you know, we should ignore what's happening in the other realms of civil and political rights.
Now, one other comment about Libya. There's a lot of Libyan paraphernalia, as I mentioned, so these are some items that I photographed in the personal archives of Chandimal Hamza, who's the caricaturist who was hired to originally draw and create the Libyan figure. So you can see, for instance, the deep was central to the World Environment Day in 1994. He was printed on in the top right there. That's a brown paper bag for groceries or recyclable grocery bags in the bottom right.
A sticker encouraging people to sort through waste sort today and you'll find tomorrow. So sort of your waste today for the protection of tomorrow. He was then featured on a stamp, et cetera, et cetera. And eventually there was the idea that there would be a proliferation of these mascots. So in addition to there being a mascot for the environment, that would be one for water, the sun and so forth. So on the left, these are the initial sketches made by the artists of those different mascots.
And then on the right, this was his the way he imagined to float that would be used in a parade, the environmental protection parade of some kind. And in these television adverts, the figure of the Beeb is a kind of ambiguous one in the sense that he's a fairly disciplinarian kind of figure. So one, for instance, one nineteen ninety six Ministry of Environment publication described him as simultaneously an image of a sincere friend and a rigorous guide for children and the public.
So in the television ads, for instance, he he lashes out at people who litter by zapping them with lightning bolts. He causes a pile of rubbish that people have left on the beach to be piled on top of them, so they're buried in their waste. So he's someone who is feared and was designed in that way.
Now let me say a word about the Beeb after the revolution. In 2012, on the 13th of March, to be precise, the Minister of Environment at the time announced that the government would no longer be using the beef as a mascot, stating that this blue clad Fenech was too closely linked to the to the Syrian regime.
And so this association negative association between the Beeb and the authoritarian character that I've been describing of the previous regime was acknowledged publicly and led to the abandonment of the figure. And you can still find people's reactions online to this on Twitter. And they range from from people saying free at last, from this torture master and rest in peace to the Beeb.
Someone wrote, Rest in peace, live by love, aiming at your arse with my slingshot when I was a teenager to things like the Beeb is now a collector's item that's going to be worth a fortune on eBay. Or when I was the child, I didn't throw wrappers on the ground because I was afraid of the Beeb.
Rest in peace. And in an interesting turn of events just this week, actually the the new Minister of the Environment, and if you've been following Tunisian politics over the summer, there's been a lot going on. The new minister of Environment just this week announced that they would be resurrecting the beef and that there would be a new champion based around him, but they're going to be organising a national competition, inviting children to do drawings and produce stories.
So I don't know whether in what form [INAUDIBLE] be reborn, whether [INAUDIBLE] be recognisably the same or altered, but we'll have to see.
So I guess the argument that I'm trying to make here is that this political instrumental ization of the environment and its uses of propaganda, as well as the way in which it became a symbol of nepotistic corruption as well as self-dealing, it has a significant impact or afterlife in contemporary Tunisia and in particular in the ways in which environment can be used as or not as as a political category of action.
So that is that is the end of what I described as being the the first part of my paper. So in the interest of leaving time for questions, perhaps if I could just take about five minutes to kind of conclude haphazardly on the second part, but I'll just be sort of throwing things at the screen here and we'll see what sticks. And if some of it appeals to you, we can perhaps return to it in questions. So basically, what this history has has led me to to ask, I guess this is a question about.
So I guess this a question about what is content and what is context. So in a way, this political history of the Beeb and the Bill of Rights of the Environment is context for understanding how the environment is understood and can and cannot be used today in Tunisia. But at the same time, this history, I guess, is nested within a context of sort of cultural and linguistic meanings that are associated with the word.
And the category. And so what I've been trying to do through some other field work, which consists, for instance, of looking at how NGO and civil society organisations pitch environmental projects to donors, but also the signage that I mentioned earlier, some efforts at understanding the naming and evolution of the environmental institutions, including the ministry in Tunisia, and then also the ways in which environment in particular we sort of erupt into the
political sphere recently is to try to understand what it is people may mean by this term. That's a little bit unfamiliar to me. And I guess the argument, as I put it in the abstract, is essentially that the term is, I think, dominated by a kind of proximity individuality. So to put that in very simple and concrete terms, when you say to people, what is the environment consist of what threatens the environment, you really often turn up wastes as a response.
And I guess on one level, there's nothing surprising about that. But the point I'm trying to make is that it really eclipses a lot of other and in particular more large scale conceptions of what the environment would be. So, you know, the climate, planetary scale issues, even water, for that matter, tend to be neglected in favour of much more proximate and visual environmental threats. So I'll just give you two little pieces of evidence about that, and then I'll end it there.
One of them, I don't know if I can really even call this evidence, but I find it interesting. I always thought that the Arabic term for employment was that was sort of what I was brought up on when I was in Egypt. And when I got here, I found out that in the signage and even in some of the institutional names, you have this word and mohit, which I thought meant the ocean.
So, for instance, the the National Agency for Protection of the Environment is said we can Al-Watan nearly Houma and Mahi, whereas the Ministry of the Environment, as was it at the VA. And I've had some interesting conversations with people about this, and generally they just say, you know, they're synonyms. There's nothing too much to it. But if you dig a little bit more, here is is actually, I think, closer to what we would say in English or the environs.
It's environment in the sense of what actually immediately surrounds you. And I think that that way of thinking about the environment is significant in people's conception of environmental threats in Tunisia. And then here this is where I've ended. This was a opinion survey done by the foundation of the German Green Party in Tunisia. The surveyed about 1000 people, and when they asked people when the question here was When I say environment,
what are the first words that you think of? So these were spontaneous responses. There was nothing. It was not multiple choice. And you can see that. Fifty five fifty six percent of people said waste, dirtiness, cleanliness and only six percent of people said pollution. You can see the beep is number four there with with two percent, so he still lives on in people's memory. Now, when they gave that multiple choice, they turned up a slightly different result there.
So these were assisted responses and they were they got about one third of people talking about cleanliness and waste. And they elicited about one third of responses with respect to water. So people responded differently when they were given a list of problems related to the environment. And we're sort of poked in the direction of of discussing water pollution or other issues.
So that's very sort of anecdotal, perhaps, or at least sort of what do you call it as it's sort of more a suggested and then conclusive. But I think I'll stop there and I look forward to the discussion that we can have and perhaps going a little bit more in-depth on some of these points of possible. Thank you, Jamie. That was wonderful. Let me remind all of the attendees, if you want to ask questions, there's a Q&A button.
You can write your questions in and if you want to remain anonymous, say so and that I won't say your name when I read out the questions. We have a question from Matteo Renzi. First of all, thanking you for the excellent talk and he's asking Has a connexion ever been explicitly drawn between the environment and personal law or women's rights by the old regime? And I'm not really sure. I'm not really sure what the the answer to that is.
The connexion that I was drawing in the paper was an analytic rather than an empirical connexion. So from my admittedly limited knowledge of the, well, Tunisian history in general, but in particular of the the tools of legitimation of the Ben Ali regime, I interpret the environment and personal law and women's rights as as having functioned in a similar way. So, so that's me. Who's drawing the connexion now? To what extent was that done explicitly and where would you be able to find that?
I can't entirely answer that. Maybe one small element is that they are not evil. So I think that the the family law issue and the status of women in particular in the country came earlier than the environment issue. So I mean, when you think about it in the 1990s, this is relatively late, I guess you could say for I mean, the Ministry of the Environment was created in Tunisia in 1992 to the National Agency for the Protection of the Environment.
I think in 86. So I mean, just from an institutional history perspective, that's that's relatively later than the reform of the family code, for instance, and also fairly late, I guess. I don't know if this comparison is fair, but I mean, it's it's later than a lot of European or North American countries, I think, and many people connect that to the Rio summit in 1992 that that was supposed to have been kind of a watershed moment.
I guess that was said to have been the moment when that when Ben Ali and the people who were at the summit realised the significance that this team was going to have going forward and then to kind of get on the bandwagon. OK. Let me ask a question. I can't help listening to your talk and thinking about the sort of environmental discourse or potentially instrumental ization in Egypt, as I'm sure you must have since you've done fieldwork there as well.
And as far as I know, Egypt doesn't have anything like Libya, don't have a campaign like that. And of course, the campaign itself seems to be extremely unfortunate because the Ben Ali regime appears to have given environmentalism a bad name in Tunisia.
And I was also dismayed when you were talking about how you know, the post Ben Ali regime, the best they could do is to try to revive Libya, rather than to come up with an entirely new strategy for, you know, trying to raise environmental awareness in the country.
And as far as I know in Egypt, environmental is and doesn't have a very high profile, except in one way which I think does kind of echo what you're talking about, which is that you have a kind of waste and disorder is often used in Egypt as a pretext for moving people away from areas that the state or private interests wanted to appropriate for their own,
which is something you've written about as well. And was environment used in that way and in Tunisia, you know, as a as a pretext for the state doing things against people that you know otherwise wouldn't have been able to do? Well, yeah, that's a very good question. I think that this is, I mean, that is that is such a striking and repeated narrative in Egypt, and it's it's much less salient, I think, in in Tunisia by comparison.
One of the things that this isn't really an answer, but maybe I can buy myself some time with this, I mean, one of the things that in Egypt I learnt was that it can also be a pejorative term, so people sometimes will will refer to to other people as being nasty to illness. And I guess the full sentence, I think is is what they're from a low environment. And I guess the perhaps that's also a reference to environment in the in the social sense.
So. So they've been, you know, kind of debased or whatever by their exposure to to, you know, other low class people and that sort of thing. And I've asked many people in Tunisia about that usage or that that sort of range of meanings and it it seems to really not really not exist here.
So I think the the problem with taxation of chaos and disorder and kind of the negative environment of say, you know, the ESRI yet equivalent here is not something that I've really encountered, but it is true that that discourse is sometimes deployed. I mean, you know, for example, the salt lakes around Tunis, they tend to, you know, they're foreground and, you know, they're sort of half in the water and so on. And there's, you know, a lot of the land building takes place there.
And so, you know, one of the arguments that is used to explain, you know, why these are problematic is that they're damaging the the ecosystem there. But it doesn't take on the same sort of inflexion. I think I need to think more about them.
But that's that's my best crack at it for now. Yeah. OK. Here's another question, and this is I'm going to kind of adapt a question that we've got from Frank Timoney, who's asking about, again, the stuff that you don't really want to focus on very much on your project, which is, you know, actual environmental issues such as the state of aquifers or plans for renewable energy and air quality and so forth.
But you are focussing on, you know, sort of activity by NGOs, and they must have some problems with. I mean, I mean, you're essentially kind of subjecting environment to standards of cultural relativism and trying to understand what people mean by environment. But the NGOs presumably are trying to talk about, you know, what they perceive as facts and sort of real environmental issues. So what are they talking about and how do I mean to to the extent that you're following what I mean,
what sort of environmental issues does Tunisia face? Yeah. Thanks, Walter and Frank French, I think. Yeah. So I guess I can sense in questions in that perhaps this is true for some the other people who are here today that you know, they want to know about the actual environmental issues in a positive sense. Whereas I'm trying to come at this on a kind of second order level of abstraction where what I'm interested in, I would.
I mean, I struggle with this because I, of course, have an opinion about what is and is not part of the environment. And I also care deeply about the protection of the environment. I mean, it's not a coincidence that I've been working on these topics for for 15 years. But what I'm trying to do here is to treat the environment as a category that others used in their discourse at a particular place and moment in time without putting into it any positive.
This the content of my own, to the extent that that I can do that now. So, so much for my approach now about about these sort of international donors. I mean, that's a critical angle here. Obviously, as I mentioned, even going back to the 1990s, there's huge interest on the part of the international community and therefore, you know, money flow pertaining to the environment.
And that continues to be true today. And I guess I mean, that is contributing to a shift in the way in which people conceive of the environment. So there's like an iterative process through which ideas as they flow from the German Development Corporation or whatever USAID I mean, one of the huge USAID projects here is on demolition waste, for instance.
The ideas are moving at the same time as as money flows and one illustration I could give of sort of the misunderstanding, it's not it's not entirely a misunderstanding, but I found it interesting. I worked for the French Research Centre here in Sydney, invited me to be part of the what they call the jury.
So the committee that was evaluating projects to receive funding from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Environmental Projects, and they gave 24 grants of about 15000 euros each to civil society organisations in all the governments of the country. And one of the things that drove people crazy in this committee was that, like two thirds or more of the proposals were to do garbage pickup and to plant trees or tent gardens.
And everyone kept saying, Oh God, like, can't, can't they come up with something more original? Can't they get a more expansive notion of the environment basically now? I mean, part of that is just that these are small NGOs, so you know, they don't necessarily have the means to be able to tackle climate change in a meaningful way or the imagination to come up with an idea for how they can do that. But I think part of it is is also what I was talking about and is kind of part of this heritage.
So I think this is an illustration, I guess, of what I was trying to do. And so there's a process there where certain projects get funded and others don't, and that can lead to a shift in the, I guess, the landscape with respect to what's being done on the topic of environment in the country. OK, we have a couple more questions that come in. One from Manuel Shehab, who also thanks you for the excellent talk. And her question is that I'll read it verbatim.
I find the naming of the different characters in the caricature interesting the sun and water, etc. all had female names, except for Libby, who was also depicted as this authoritarian figure who scares people so they won't litter. This could be a coincidence, but feels like Libby was actually created to represent the state, the regulator in the imagination of the and authoritarian male. You said you don't know how the deed will be resurrected, but could we see a labour?
That's such a wonderful comment question that I think I think I will borrow from you now in trying to improve and continue working on this. I have to confess that I didn't actually cotton on to that myself until you pointed it out. But it's it's it's very true, which you point out. And I guess maybe following on from that, one of my questions would be, you know, is there anything?
Is there, as I mentioned, none of those other mascots really got much traction now, is that somehow related to to what you're pointing out? Or is it simply that they were invented kind of late in the game? And, you know, there's only so many, you know, so many of these things that you can put up, you know? So is it more of a practical sort of constraint? But it will be very curious to see. I mean, the gendering of nature and the environment is a fascinating question.
People tend often to gender in nature and the environment in the feminine. I mean, I'm speaking more broadly here than than just Tunisia, but I think that's also true in Tunisia. Just last week, I was at a conference about environmental law, and so these were all jurists. But they tend to give sort of a sort of introduction or conclusion.
There's a moment where there's a kind of rhetorical flourish on their part about, you know, why it's important to protect the environment and how you know, Tunisia is, you know, marginalised and so on. And they tend to invoke female metaphors in trying to describe the environment and the relationship that we have to the environment and why it's important to protect it. So it is funny that the mascot would be male in a way.
I guess he doesn't represent the environment, perhaps himself, but rather the protector. Perhaps, as you say, the state even. Yeah. And we have a question from Virginia McFadden, which again starts with an immature empirical question, which you probably want to engage with or but you could try. She's asking and picking up from a few of the comments in the chat box.
Have there been unusually high temperatures in Tunisia this past summer, as there have elsewhere, but perhaps more in line with what you're doing in this project? What are Tunisian views or political views, perhaps on environmental failings elsewhere in the world in this, I think, probably would be a kind of issue for public discourse, which might well articulate with the kinds of things that you're looking at.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I guess I have to acknowledge like as as Frank and Virginia and others have been pointing out, I mean, we're particularly high temperatures in Tunisia this summer, and it's it was a source of public discussion and concern. And I mean, it took a fairly predictable form, I guess. I mean, it's it's being interpreted and discussed, I guess, in much the same way.
Extreme weather events are all around the world. I mean, it's a kind of experiential confirmation of the reality of climate change for people. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to give the impression that these issues are not mobilising people or that they're not concerned about them, I mean, there's there's tons of mobilisations around pollution from the large factories and industrial sites, especially in the South and Gabi's and in gaffes around water.
I mean, the water issue is multifaceted. Many people don't have access to the grid, so it's about public service, but there's also people who do but whose water is polluted or about people who used to have wells that would supply water that no longer do. And you know, there's a conflict there, for instance, with agriculture. I mean, bearing in mind that much like Egypt, actually, Tunisia's agriculture is export oriented. So it's a cash crop oriented agricultural system that exports to Europe.
So, you know, people make the argument that that's a form of water exportation, basically where by sending melons and oranges and so on to Europe, we're selling the Tunisian water to Europe at a cheap price. So those those arguments certainly do exist. I'll be very curious to talk to people when they get back from the COP conference in Glasgow. I know someone who is in the Tunisian delegation. Actually, since you since you mentioned political mobilisation.
One other question that occurs to me is are there groups outside the government that are attempting to use environmental issues, although perhaps not labelled as such, but as you say, water air pollution and so forth in places like Gaza to form the basis of political opposition against the government? And if so, I mean, who would be doing this? Yeah, I think that's a that's a very important question. And it's it's an area that's sort of where the ground is shifting fairly quickly.
So there are there definitely are. I mean, the example that I'm most familiar with because of my continued interest in waste would be political movements around the siting of landfills. And that's a huge issue in Indonesia right now. In fact, several landfills since 2011 and including very recently, just in the last few weeks have been closed because of the mobilisation of the people who live around the site.
And this can create some huge problems because typically the agencies that are responsible for finding the new site, you know, are unprepared and are not able to locate one for several years or sometimes even at all. So like on the island of Djerba, for instance, or close to the city of Ministeres, they're dumps have been closed for almost a decade without there having been a new official site located,
and that leads to some, some terrible consequences. Now those I mean, those are complex cases because typically the people who are protesting believe that it's an example of environmental injustice that the site was placed there in the first place. So they consider themselves to have been, you know, already had to have been marginalised and ignored in the siting process.
And then also often the site has overflowed, so it's outlived its useful lifespan and is affecting them with bad smells or, you know, liquid that's leaking out or, you know, everything you could imagine. And then people on the other side react to say, Oh, well, you know, this is just nimbyism, not in my backyard. You know, the waste has to go somewhere and nobody wants it next to them, but somebody's got to take the hit.
So these people should just, you know, suck it up and stop being so selfish. OK. I don't have any more questions in the Q&A box. I'll give the audience one last chance to ask questions if they have any. I'm not seeing any. And so if that's the case, then I'm going to to thank you, Jamie, for a lively and fascinating presentation. And I look forward to seeing more of the results of your research, and I wish I could come visit you in Tunis.
Maybe I'll try and bring my son here or someone who's. Yeah, and don't hesitate to get in touch and actually an invitation that I would extended to to any students in the audience as well. Tunisia is a lovely place for fieldwork, and it's long been neglected in research. That's changing now. But there's a lot of unploughed fields here. Yes. I love to and I spent nine months there staring out.
So, yeah, it's a great place and thank you very much for your talk and thank you to all the audience who attended. And we will see you next week for another episode of our Friday seminar. Goodbye to All.