Liberation, Ecology, and Industrialization in the Thought of Ismail-Sabri Abdallah

This article examines the work of Ismail-Sabri Abdallah in relation to two arenas of thought marginalized in the current Marxist debate: socially and ecologically “appropriate” planning and technologies, and national liberation and postcolonial planning more broadly. Abdallah was a senior official in the Egypt National Planning Institute under Gamal Abdel Nasser and then Anwar Sadat. He was also a central figure in arenas like the Third World Forum. As a theorist and practitioner, he faced the multi-scalar problems of planning in a postcolonial state. His work wove together the problematics of the appropriate technologies to use for supplying basic needs for a primarily rural or slum-dwelling population; the pressing problem of unemployment; the nascent problem of ecological degradation; the incipient problem of rapid depletion of exhaustible natural resources; and the existential problem of national defense as a component of Third World development. This article therefore reads his oeuvre as one articulation of peripheral ecological thought within the national liberation tradition, while placing it in associated debates concerning basic needs, the right to development, delinking, and the particularities of the Third World encounter with the ecological crisis.