On the Margins: Civil Society Activism and Climate Change in Egypt

In October 2015, a small Egyptian village, 80 kilometers (about 50 miles) from Alexandria, was swept by an extreme flooding event that killed twenty-seven people and submerged hundreds of acres of agriculture land. The initial hours and days of managing this crisis were ad hoc, and community associations rapidly formed and took the leading role, navigating relief networks and coordinating resources. In the weeks that followed, the Egyptian government committed 35 million Egyptian pounds to a relocation plan to rebuild the shattered community and help move dozens of families away from what was deemed a dangerous flood plain. But by November 2017, an investigative piece in a local newspaper had confirmed that less than half of the 320 families of the village had moved to the new site, named Qaryat al-Amal, or “Village of Hope.” Al-Amal had no schools, electricity, water pipes, or sewage facilities because of contractor delays. Many of the villagers, unable to afford commuting dozens of kilometers for services, opted to remain on the flood plain, naming it the “grounds of mass destruction” but unable to leave. The investigative piece went on to detail that the villagers who refused to move to the incomplete site were visited by local officials who forced them to sign an eviction form that demanded they leave during the winter season for their safety or accept remaining at their own risk.

Several years on, few of the conditions this small village faced are exceptional. Like hundreds of communities across the Nile Delta facing changing climate conditions, its recourse to civil society support is not self-evident. Egypt is one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to climate change: estimates suggest that under the scenario of a one-meter sea-level rise (SLR), up to 10 percent of Egypt’s population would be affected and nearly 15 percent of agricultural land could be lost. Egypt’s own national communications to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) reference analysis that positions the country as the second-most-exposed country in the world in terms of coastal populations affected and third for the proportion of its gross domestic product (GDP) at risk under a one-meter SLR. For a country in such dire straits, a thriving civil society network of advocates and intermediaries may be expected. Yet, national strategies offering nods of recognition to the importance of civil society, are silent about how to meaningfully enable a strong ecosystem of civil society partners to champion citizen action around climate change and mediate public policy and societal interests.

It is widely understood that civil society advocates can act as an “essential bridge” between the public and the state. They can hold governments accountable to act on “behalf of citizens,” facilitate citizen action and advocacy around climate change, and ensure the independent collection and tracking of data. As climate change and its long-term impacts may imply policy shifts or costly investments, participatory planning is proposed to make better decisions, support collective problem-solving, reflect citizen needs, and achieve equitable outcomes. Much of this planning depends on the existence and strengthening of a diverse spectrum of stakeholders that are capable of transparently and fairly sustaining engagement with the public and supporting the tailoring of policy design to meet various actors’ needs.

But in a context like Egypt, where restrictions, limited resources, and underdeveloped connections shape the scope of what civil society advocates are capable of achieving, how much of that role can civil society organizations (CSOs) play? When Egypt hosted the UNFCCC’s twenty-seventh Conference of the Parties (COP27), the country’s human rights record and security engagement with civil society received a huge amount of media attention. In a mainstay of Western press, calls for solidarity with Egypt’s “embattled civil society” resounded, alongside analysis that spotted the ways in which discourses around civic space in Egypt threatened the credibility and the image of the COP27 host, dampening faith in the Egyptian leadership’s capacity to fully engage key partners in addressing the climate crisis.

Against these concerns and broader lamentations of restrictive civic space, Egypt’s comprehensive 2011 Climate Adaptation Strategy, and its latest National Climate Change Strategy 2050, clearly mention vital partnerships with civil society, offering them the particular duty of engaging the public and promoting climate-resilient social behavior. Draft language in the new strategy argues in its introductory pages that the “implementation of the national strategy for climate change in Egypt requires the participation of all sectors of society, including NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and civil society, not just government agencies.” In the earlier 2011 Climate Adaptation Strategy, the “weakness” of civil society and its “resistant” attitudes to “advancement” is critiqued, but these statements declaring the essential role of civic groups nonetheless offer clarity on the Egyptian state’s desire to work in alliance and coordination with nonstate actors.

From within this context, this piece explores the challenges faced by Egyptian civil society groups. They operate in one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to climate change but appear relatively unable to mobilize public attention and advocate for wide-reaching climate policy change. Yet, while it may seem that civil society groups have little voice and ability to work on climate change in the Arab world’s most populous country, in practice both the restrictions and the possibilities for policy and societal engagement are far from uniformly distributed. One must exercise caution in describing a singular, homogenous civil society field. This piece will first contextualize the landscape from which climate-minded civil society actors may operate in Egypt, focusing on a range of legal and security restrictions and long-standing state discourses that question the legitimacy of civil society actors. These dynamics in turn shape the nature of opportunities for civil society mobilization. It will then examine some of the tactics, spaces, and narratives adopted by civil society groups working on climate change by looking at how organizations routinely benefit from the relative policy marginality the climate change issue occupies. In doing so, it will reveal the ways in which local groups may find windows of opportunity in response to local crisis or through policy openings. This piece draws on a variety of civil society responses, dozens of interviews conducted between 2017 and 2022, and the author’s own professional and participatory research experience.¹ It further explores the calculated disavowal of combative politics and the tactical ways in which nonstate actors may become embedded in closer, often informal, contact with official policy networks. Through careful effort, some groups may appear to be able to escape the worst of a challenging political and security environment and leave a tangible imprint on policy design, defying what may be assumed about civil society activism under current political circumstances. More research is needed, but the piece argues that much remains to be understood on how disparate and fragmented civil society groups can galvanize grassroots solutions and hold governments to account in different political settings. This is especially important when considering the Middle East and North Africa region, where few works have attempted to understand social and political responses to the climate crisis.

Sanctioned Environment?

Since the 2011 political upheaval in Egypt, the landscape of civil society activism has witnessed fundamental transformations. As the country is home to a rich and expansive number of registered CSOs, there is considerable existing research on Egyptian civil society, documenting numerous organizational inefficiences, fragmentation, and decades of adapting to challenging political circumstances. Large swaths of Egyptian civil society often have lacked domestic constituencies that support their missions; have operated under an overall environment of restriction; and invariably have depended on foreign funding, which repeatedly has exposed them to attacks that aim to discredit them domestically.

In recent years, international rights group have described “unprecedented” and renewed restrictions on NGOs in Egypt. Civil society groups have been characterized as being on “life support” and facing the risk of “obliteration.” Human rights groups describe a landscape in which a combination of repressive tactics, combining legal and bureaucratic restrictions with threats of arrests and crackdown, have constrained the scope of activities and issues on which NGOs can work. Some critics points out that vaguely worded bureaucratic and legal restrictions sanctioning the activities of nonstate groups have hampered the spaces in which CSOs function and interact.

Until recently, Law 84 of 2002 regulated Egyptian civil society. Observers have long noted that its ambiguous language often enabled selective implementation of its provisions. Subsequently, at the drafting of Law 70 of 2017, groups like Amnesty International argued, renewed, deep restrictions on CSOs were once again imposed. Amnesty and others proposed that changes to the law provided the government with “extraordinary powers over NGOs,” particularly limiting their independent ability to fundraise.

In the decade since the political upheaval that swept across the Arab region, pressures on civil society have ebbed and flowed, with some moments of escalation and others of relative calm. But for the most part, some Egyptian civil society groups have had to grapple with an array of travel bans, new rules on bureaucratic red tape, arbitrary arrests for interrogation, and a general climate characterized by critics as one of “unpredictable escalation.” Observers note an overall sense of fear and, most importantly, uncertainty that has come to define CSO calculations on where the redlines may be, at least for politically focused advocacy. This is especially true if such advocacy is framed around human rights.

The government routinely emphasizes that restrictions are meant to regulate NGOs, rather than prevent their operations. Yet the net result of this environment has largely been that many civil society activists find themselves operating in hostile terrain, with opportunities for mobilization circumvented and fears of surveillance and security harassment shaping their calculations. Most notably, some observers have described restrictions on receiving foreign funding as a tactic of control, encouraging competition and fragmentation among Egyptian civil society actors in a manner that prevents them from building cross-sectional alliances. Although these dynamics are far from static, one long-term activist, interviewed for this analysis, described a “state of sanction of activities unwitnessed before.” For him and others, not only are CSOs grappling with the limitations of a restrictive environment—either having to unilaterally retreat or being forced into closure—but also, some large organizations operating out of Cairo and other major urban centers describe security meddling in the events they organize, the partners they collaborate with, and the topics they choose to work on.

Holding this context in mind, the following section will turn to the specific contours of civil society engagement around climate change in Egypt, highlighting the myriad ways in which some groups, aware of the overwhelming pressures facing CSOs, work on the topic—often by adopting alternative operational models and tactics.

Civic Engagement, Climate Engagement

They may cover the windows with black drapes and block the entrance with a sign that you are not allowed to enter or record. But, if you just walk around the building, you might find a broken window and watch every detail. . . . Maybe even, without them noticing, you can enter the room.
                                                    —Pioneering environmental civil society activist

There is limited research on CSO engagement with climate change in Egypt, and efforts to map and understand current patterns of national and regional policy advocacy and public awareness–facing initiatives are nascent at best. The infancy of this research agenda also mirrors the relative lack of knowledge on broader public awareness and engagement with climate change in the country; a series of recent surveys offered mixed and inconclusive results. The largest international survey of public opinion on climate change ever conducted, which included Egypt, showed broad-based support for ambitious climate action—even though the portion of surveyed Egyptians who supported major policy shifts lagged other countries. Against that, an Egyptian survey, conducted by Baseera, in 2022 indicated that only 65 percent of Egyptians had heard the phrase “climate change.” The survey indicated that while most Egyptians understood that something is changing for their agricultural systems, water resources, and weather, their articulation of the causes and their understanding of climate change did not seem to match. But equally, all recent surveys seem to indicate an awareness of shifts in weather patterns, crop variability, and broad articulation of the lived realities of a changing climate, with another survey even suggesting that 92 percent of Egyptian respondents said climate change was already affecting their everyday life.

Among CSOs, some of these discrepancies are mirrored. One recent mapping, produced by Egyptian environmental organization Greenish in collaboration with the UK-based Climate Outreach, covered 283 CSOs around the country, aiming to identify a climate engagement ecosystem. The study found that a mere 8 percent of organizations referenced climate change in their organizational vision, mission, and objectives, but around 24 percent documented climate engagement work. The latter figure is probably influenced by a burst of activities prior to COP27.

An earlier mapping exercise, produced by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), similarly documented a proliferation of civil society work around environmental issues.² Both studies indicate there is a broad-based network of groups with an environmental mission, but they equally identify the extent to which this remains a small and loosely held together network of NGOs, often highly place-based and focused on single-issue environmental matters. It is also clear that observers have no in-depth understanding of the differences between urban-based CSOs and rural associations, and how those two groups may operate.

Despite Egypt’s rich history of associational life, environment-focused activists are such a small group that they circle between organizations, and civil society professionals with environmental credentials invariably know one another both socially and professionally. Broadly speaking, public engagement on climate action has limited material budgets. Essentially, Egyptian CSOs face myriad challenges in working on climate change—most centrally, in accessing funding, with smaller and rural CSOs unable to systematically participate in national policy dialogues and tap into funding streams. The longevity of initiatives and their capacity to scale and grow are also limited, with activities routinely being project-bound. For example, comparing EIPR’s 2016 mapping against current realities would indicate that roughly two-thirds of the rights-driven environmental advocacy platforms they identified either no longer exist or are largely inactive.³

But against that, Egypt’s national adaptation strategy and work on the ground together indicate that many CSOs play a role in climate change engagement efforts and in supporting community-led adaptation initiatives and projects. Overall, however, spaces for civil society engagement largely appear atomized and often highly reactive, even though these can materially translate into some nonstate representation in policy dialogues and project programming for donor-funded climate activities. One project, for instance, implemented by the World Food Programme and supported by the Adaptation Fund, focuses on southern Egyptian agricultural zones and adaptation efforts there. According to the World Food Programme’s description, the project has been designed and is implemented through a multidimensional stakeholder-driven effort in which national, regional, and local authorities work closely with and rely on community groups and associations to deliver agricultural adaptation programs. It uses participatory appraisal techniques and is dependent on the support of local NGOs and nonstate groups to enable outreach and public engagement.

Interested observers, thus seeking to identify organizations working on the climate agenda at a national level, may find it difficult to assemble a comprehensive list of entities with this focus, and instead they come away with a perception of a fragmented civil society landscape. In many ways, the civil society groups working on climate change in Egypt resemble the government response to the climate crisis, with decision making around climate change distributed across multiple ministries, each holding separate and often competing mandates. This dynamic in turn has consequences for environmental NGOs, which must learn to identify suitable allies across a loose government structure.

It also appears there are numerous models of civil society engagement around environmental and climate issues in Egypt. The first of these models involves working below the radar and often deliberately adopting noncombative forms of advocacy. Many environmentally minded activists in this model choose to reinvent themselves into social enterprise modes, makerspaces, and community hubs. At the same time, they rely on workshops and other convening spaces for dialogue and connection, focusing on networking between atomized groups and building deeper forms of solidarity for learning and knowledge exchange. These groups may rarely, if ever, interact with official policy circles.

A second model of engagement is the one invoked in response to moments of crisis—with civil society groups forming the backbone of relief networks first to respond to incidents like extreme weather events. In those moments of crisis, they can be capable of determining policy approaches to relief. This is not merely a humanitarian response role but one in which associations and local organizations may have strong capacity to influence the government’s understanding of the climate issue, helping to shape official analysis of climate vulnerability and potentially steer the direction of resources.

Finally, a third tactic and pattern of climate policy engagement is the one shaped by highly informal modes of cooperation with officials, in response to specific policy windows. In this process, organizations are invited or may find themselves able to contribute their views in drafting key policy outputs. Alternately, they may be supporting officials within government, as consultants and advisers.

One example of the first model is an organization in Alexandria, Egypt’s second-largest city, which runs dialogue-driven simulations and debates. By putting Alexandria’s issues and its record of environmental governance on “public trials,” it draws in volunteers to enact what resembles a collective visualization exercise and offers spaces for public engagement and awareness-raising campaigns. Some of this public engagement–facing work on climate change is routinely led by organizations formally labelled as “social enterprises,” but many of the staff members of these organizations see themselves as serving a broader public agenda on climate action and regularly pursue opportunities to find a corner into conversations on the climate agenda.⁴ In private, many such social entrepreneurs interviewed for this research would even describe themselves as “civil society activists.”

These sentiments echo Yomna ElSayed’s exploration of a trend showing social enterprises emerging in Egypt as a “hybrid” space for activists to “transition back to civics,” drawing on the revolutionary movement of 2011 but within the current state of sanction. She finds that despite the social enterprise label, few groups successfully generate a real profit. Instead, they maintain the work that allows them to engage in advocacy campaigns, in which the ideas of politics are kept strategically vague and ambiguous to practice “politics by other means” shaping “win(s) without attrition.” One entrepreneur rationalized in an interview: “The restrictions are overwhelming. So, I am thinking of it instead as a puzzle, which means I’ll work on another part of the piece.”

Makerspaces, or groups that offer a community venue equipped with a variety of tools to give people an ability to physically experiment with their ideas, are another modality growing in appeal. One makerspace, housed within a cultural center associated with a local church in Alexandria, worked with a group of youth from an informal area to build emergency lighting units for households. This project was a learning lesson to cope with electricity outages like those experienced after the 2015 flooding across the Nile Delta. “Climate change is here, and the government needs to do its part to protect this city, but with or without them, there will be solutions at the public level,” one of the founders described.⁵ This initiative is not registered, a purposeful decision that allows them to work in their “individual capacities.” By “not existing on paper,” the group can “avoid problems.”

A subcategory of social enterprises focuses on facilitating workshops and community learning. Founders of this type describe social enterprises as offering the freedom to invert the power dynamic that has forced groups to be dependent on donors and government approvals for this funding. Instead, groups now can be hired to facilitate workshops, with donors becoming their clients, and as a result the work no longer requires state authorization. One such group works with rural villages to enable participatory learning around water management and climate adaptation. Another enterprise has in one project toured the country and facilitated dozens of workshops in coastal cities and villages.

In the second pattern identified, civil society groups may find themselves the main responders to localized crises, including around extreme weather events. In repeat episodes across the Nile Delta, and in Alexandria, local charities and place-based NGOs are often the main respondents and distributors of relief packages. This service delivery role can be in some cases highly depoliticized and reactive, rather than one designed to shape Egypt’s climate policies. Many charities responding to climate events have neither policy specialization nor deep understanding of climate change, nor even the lexicon to attribute events to a changing climate. However, in some cases, including one example in Alexandria after the 2015 flood that displaced the villagers mentioned at the start of this piece, one local charity ended up working directly with the city’s municipal authorities, building on their credentials and relief networks to review and audit flood management practices in Alexandria. Much of this work is rarely credited, and the CSOs advising municipal authorities on ways to improve practices do not always have visibility of reach of their diagnostics. Nevertheless, local charity groups may have a critical role in forming knowledge and preliminary analysis, which in turn may have influence in determining government understandings of the nature of climate risks in the country, along with ways to address social vulnerability.

In this case in Alexandria, the local charity’s analysis helped deliver the message that part of the city’s vulnerability to the 2015 flooding incident was caused by poor information exchange and minimal public outreach that meant meteorological models were not circulated to or among other stakeholders, whether in or outside government. In the months that followed, a municipal committee was formed to help coordinate between various local government authorities and to manage drainage through a more coordinated and streamlined committee that involves local CSOs, according to the author’s interviews with municipal authorities in Alexandria.

The third and final pattern of civil society tactics seen here relies on targeted informal networking, working directly with officials to support the production of key climate policy documents and strategies. Opportunities for such networking also may exist around key international conferences and multilateral negotiations, like COP27 or COP28, in which individual civil society experts have face time with key government officials and negotiators and can help support their positions and offer technical expertise and advise. Holding banquets and workshops falls on one end of the NGO-led lobbying spectrum, but more widely, individual environmental activists routinely are called upon and recruited into policy circles to help produce key knowledge documents. Examples of such documents include national reviews on climate action or the routine submissions to the UNFCCC, such as drafts of Egypt’s Nationally Determined Contributions. Egypt’s Sustainable Development Strategy 2030, for instance, provided several opportunities to leaders of the enterprises. For example, when the Egyptian Ministry of Planning began to organize consultations in governorates across Egypt, it worked with NGO partners and social enterprises specializing in workshop facilitation to organize those sessions. As another illustration, the ministry also partnered with a cofounder of one social enterprise focused on environmental education, effectively inviting a civil society partner to “coach” a panel of more than 200 high-level state officials on strategies to incorporate climate planning into their daily work.

With security and political restrictions both shaping what is possible for advocacy and curtailing any ability to work at the grassroots level, a pragmatic resignation that “it’s not the right time to mobilize people” has given way to these tactics, premised on what one CSO project manager described in an interview as “constructive dialogue with the right people.”⁶ Ties with officials are personality-driven and contingent upon fragmented policy openings. But they also are shaped by a mutual perception across government and civil society dividing lines that climate change occupies a marginal place in national conversations. In this context, specialized government officials, tasked with navigating their own burdensome bureaucratic structures, are aligned with their civil society counterparts on advancing attention around climate action. One environmental justice activist proposes that in a context where a “community of interested parties” around climate change is so small, “allies” within government—specifically mid-level bureaucrats and officials in local government offices—are crucial. Put simply, officials need support to deliver their policy objectives, and well-networked CSOs must identify key leverage points to capitalize on this need.

The challenge, of course, to all these models is that they may have little institutional continuity. CSOs must be mindful of not appearing to be the “competition.” Instead, they must show themselves as relevant enough that state actors choose to work with them “because there is no alternative,” yet without disrupting an official’s desire to not “want someone in the room that understands more than them” or that appears too openly combative and critical of the government’s political choices.⁷ In allying with government actors, activists also work to strategically and consciously frame their contributions as mere “technical” interventions, a theme to be addressed in the next section.

Practicing Politics in Disguise?

Everything is politics.But when you are working with the government, you must avoid politics or at least pretend to. You need to play the game.
                                                    —Environmental researcher and advocate

In the current security environment and with concerns around arbitrary restriction, many activists propose that attracting state attention is a risky tactic. Instead, activists purposefully make environmental work look so little like politics that it inspires no security meddling. At the very least, they exploit the ambiguity of climate change issues. Previous sections explored how nonstate actors pursue alternative organizational strategies or are pulled into closer contact with state officials, lobbying elite decisionmakers directly through informal avenues. This section will highlight how both approaches may rest on the perception of climate change as a “scientific” issue, thereby giving activists a framing tool that allows for substantive critiques of political arrangements that are proposed simply as technical advice and not political or contentious condemnation.

This tactic has a long history in environmental activism and mobilization, not just in Egypt but across the region and in a diverse set of political contexts. As Jeannie Sowers puts it, the “rhetorical feint of disavowing political claims while actually revealing local mismanagement” is a well-recognized strategy in environmental circles. Although environmental campaigns on their own rarely are capable of prompting structural reforms, they have routinely extracted tactical gains from corporations, local officials, and the central state.

In the cases described earlier, maintaining vital networks with officials means that civil society activists purposefully attempt to pick issues that will not put them “in direct and violent confrontation,” aiming to focus instead on “confrontation around policies and the ideas they are built on.”⁸ Not only is there “room for practices to improve,” but also, CSOs imagine that government officials or bureaucrats “know they need help to address climate change.” The characteristics of an issue that is not “owned by anyone” also endow climate change activism with more “flexibility”—or, at least, “there is no hostility . . . [or] lurking sense of violence” that many may have themselves experienced working in other advocacy spheres.⁹ This flexibility is in part shaped by a perception that officials do not have an “opposition to others. On the contrary, they think of climate change as a crisis coming our way.” There is thus a window of action and a possibility for NGO leaders to leverage this need.

Climate change politics, environmental leaders propose, “are not honest” as they offer “an indirect point of entry into conversations on power, but the links are not always obvious.”¹⁰ In the political, economic, and security environment in Egypt—with inflation reaching an unprecedented 40 percent, an escalating debt crisis, and domestic security volatility—environmental issues may seem like “irrelevant,” “trivial,” and secondary issues dismissed as mere “privileges” that do not require imminent and immediate attention against critical livelihood matters.¹¹ But environmental NGOs and activists are not oblivious of the political nature of their work. Instead, they exploit the lack of political clarity as an “advantage that offers the space to work on the issue”—to build alliances, discourses, and make connections.¹² Some argue that being off the political radar is “beneficial because you have more time. You have a buffer.”¹³ This buffer allows for the technical nature of climate management, and the advocates campaigning on behalf of solutions to be listened to and even “congratulated” by high-ranking officials for “positive engagement” that “gives suggestions based on data.”¹⁴ By focusing on the policy issues, rather than the political system at large, CSO activists show that “if you understand the society you are working with, [officials] will listen and won’t leave the conversation deciding they never want to see you again.”¹⁵

These tactics are not exceptional to Egypt. In a wide variety of political contexts, numerous works have documented the use of “circumspect” approaches to influence environmental policy or to forge functional cooperation around “depoliticized” activities that may nonetheless “be intensely political despite not being contentious.” Examples from Myanmar around supposedly “nonpolitical arenas” allowed groups to affect policies in other spheres, describing activism against dam-building projects that may appear simply about environmental concerns but also provided spaces for contesting ethnic redistribution patterns. In a connected thread, research from Vietnam highlights how a campaign against tree-cutting enabled a platform for rights-driven civic discourses around state-society accountability. In China, environmental NGOs have used environmental issues as a “way in” to much more contested claims around democratic rights and citizenship. In the case of the charity group in Alexandria, the critique of the government’s management of flooding in the city was squarely political and fundamentally about poverty, land use rights, and informality in a growing urban metropolis. However, group leaders never articulated these concerns as political agendas directly to municipal officials. Instead, they hid advice on flood management behind the veneer of depoliticized technical analysis. But in gaining an audience with officials, they managed to convey vital information on land use rights in informal areas in the city.

In conclusion, the political malleability of climate change offers a possibility for CSO groups in Egypt, as it does in a host of similar political settings. The perception that climate change and climate governance are “scientific” matters and technical domains can enable some forms of advocacy. These approaches, however, come with obvious limitations, and there are associated risks: the pretense of depoliticizing environmental work may effectively make it apolitical and unable to successfully advance climate action in the country.

Conclusion

Although Egypt operates in a context of deep climate vulnerability, Egyptian civil society groups appear limited in bandwidth and are working with stretched resources. Few organizations have a clear climate change strategy and focus, and the systematic differentiations between different kinds of associations, across urban and rural divides or around various issue areas, are less than clear. The civil society landscape around climate change in Egypt in all cases appears fragmented and small. Few organizations have the funding and connections needed to make a dent on climate action to support local mobilizations and engage national CSOs on the international front.

Yet the possibilities for policy engagement are available to some and are unevenly cultivated. Disparate and fragmented environmental advocates have carved out space to work on a climate change agenda. Many groups have adopted a calculated and rhetorical negation of combative politics and have exploited a perception that climate change and climate governance are merely “technical” and “scientific” matters. In the climate change policy context, the fact that environmental issues do not have an overtly contentious history is likely advantageous and tactically conducive for some civil society actors to adopt alternative organizational formats to remain below the radar. Inversely, they may be pulled into closer relationships with officials, often allowing nonstate actors to critically influence the policy design process and theoretically enable wider participation in what may otherwise be opaque political spaces.

Of course, evading political contestation may mean that self-censorship limits the scope for radical change. But contrary to abstracted global narratives that expect civil society to serve as a democratizing and pluralizing force for climate governance, there are practical and fundamental constraints shape the feasibility of those efforts. In an environment in which the civil society community at large must navigate immediate concerns like losing funding streams and reacting to arbitrary repression, the lived realities of an under-resourced civil society community should be at the center of deeper analysis.

This piece has argued that activists make the most of the fact that climate change and environmental issues remain below the radar to connect with one another and often with the state establishment. Exclusive attention to large-scale NGOs and visible initiatives, however, may mean losing sight of numerous small-scale initiatives and locally led efforts that carry out important work on the ground and often are not labelled as climate focused. Researchers need to systematically improve the capacity to track and document these efforts. Many groups working around the climate agenda do not always describe their activities in that language, or they may not even appear to be traditional NGOs, with some opting to register as social enterprises. Yet these organizations are part of the mosaic of nonstate voices shaping the climate conversation and the nature of work at the grassroots level.

For those pulled into closer ties with national and municipal government officials, there are real opportunities to influence the framing of climate change in policy circles. In entering key policy conversations, civil society groups can co-construct at least nominally more deliberative spaces and contribute to policy evolution. It is not particularly unusual for strides on climate and sustainability advocacy to be made by highly networked organizations and individuals. Indeed, existing research reveals a “democracy-influence paradox” on an international level, in which actors with the highest capacity to engage repeatedly, and often informally, around key governance processes often are more effective and more likely to influence policy, even while they are rarely representative of global civil society. This may appear to be the case in the Egyptian context. Further research is necessary to understand these trade-offs and to examine whether a simple resourcing of and democratization of civil society spaces is sufficient to increase the efficacy and the inclusiveness of civil society groups in policy processes.

Finally, CSOs have adopted tactics to find supposedly apolitical ways to play politics. Through organizational formats like social enterprises, makerspaces, and community hubs, activists work under a label that is sanctioned under current political configurations, allowing themselves to be seen as “partners in development” by officials instead of being labelled as provocateurs. Such intentional depoliticization of the work risks and limits CSO abilities to recruit and retain support and, more fundamentally, to critically track government performance and commitment information. Moreover, by working in nonthreatening ways, local civil society groups also often effectively are unable to build international coalitions or even cross-regional networks, especially with more radical grassroots networks.

Initiatives and research that map and connect civil society actors thus will be vital. As Egypt’s vulnerability to climate change increases, the need for deeper civil society engagement will only grow. Those interested in supporting locally led climate action must expand their lens of analysis to incorporate the diverse and complex ways in which civil society actors are already connecting with one another and with government officials. A more nuanced understanding also is needed of the tactical ways in which civil society advocates operate in diverse institutional settings, without layering unrealistic expectations on local groups—especially in the absence of fundamental transformations to their ability to access resources and material support. Egypt’s 2011 National Adaptation Strategy stressed the role for civil society and community participation in climate change risk reduction and management, arguing that to adapt to climate change, “the state cannot certainly assume this role on its own without full support of these groups.” It appears overdue to turn these words into reality.

Notes

¹ Interviews have been anonymized throughout to protect the identity of individuals and organizations—attributing characteristics and descriptors will be kept general and high level.

² Ragia El Gerzawy, Khareetat al-Nashat al-Beye’ay fe Masr (Cairo: Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, 2016).

³ Author’s estimation.

⁴ Interview with social enterprise climate change program manager.

⁵ Interview with makerspace founder, based and operating in Alexandria, Egypt.

⁶ Interview with rights-based environmental educator.

⁷ Interview with pioneering environmental NGO founder.

⁸ Interview with rights-based environmental advocate.

⁹ Interview with program manager in rights-based organization.

¹⁰ Interview with program manager in rights-based organization.

¹¹ Interview with rights-focused environmental researcher.

¹² Interviews with a project manager and a second climate-focused researcher.

¹³ Interview with project manager.

¹⁴ Interview with long-term activist and environmental adviser.

¹⁵ Interview with long-term activist and environmental adviser.