How climate change has Reshaped Competition Arenas in the Lake Chad Basin
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2026-07-01
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Résumé
This study examines how climate change has reshaped the arenas of competition over resources, power and legitimacy in the Lake Chad Basin. Moving beyond reductionist environmental narratives, it argues that the retreat of Lake Chad has not produced conflict directly but through the collapse of institutional mediation. Drawing on the original analytical concept of "Drought Economies" the study demonstrates that environmental scarcity, in contexts of institutional fragility, becomes a mechanism for redistributing power and producing alternative legitimacy. Through an analytical, historical and critical methodology complemented by a structural foresight analysis (MICMAC) and a scenario matrix for the 2035 horizon, the research reaches four principal findings: governance quality, not the severity of the lake's retreat, is the decisive variable in the crisis; ISWAP has risen as an alternative governing actor by filling the functional vacuum left by fragile states; the four riparian states violate binding international legal obligations toward their populations; and climate change functions as a fragility multiplier rather than a direct cause of conflict. The study concludes with the LCE Platform, a sovereign digital monitoring tool that translates this analytical framework into a practical instrument serving national and regional decision-making.
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Lake Chad Basin, climate change, resource competition, governance vacuumI,
ISWAP, contested sovereignty,