This dissertation is an ethnographic investigation into how democratic municipalities in Dakar, Senegal are formed and reformed. The municipal scale of government has long been both a modern norm and a central object of governmental reform throughout the Francophone world. Established in the late 19th century as a colony of France, Dakar is one of the oldest local democracies in Africa and remains today a model of democratic reform for municipal governments across the continent. In 2013, the Senegalese legislature passed what is known colloquially as Act III of decentralization. This national reform legally delegated political and fiscal authority to Senegal’s lowest level of territorial administration—the commune—inaugurating what the law itself referred to as the “complete communalization of the national territory”. Yet far from resolving the problem of communal form, the Act III incited a novel set of experiments in communal authority.

This dissertation reveals a broader terrain of democratic politics and reform that is beyond the more familiar domains of law and public debate. I examine the novel set of experimental techniques that have emerged out of critical reflections on the problem of communal form in Dakar. Posing the communal form as contested problem-space, I follow a range of experiments through which diverse actors make sense of how public authority should be distributed across Dakar’s urban terrain. To analyze the politics of this distribution, I develop the concept of municipal state formation: the set of techniques through which sub-national governments take on functions of the sovereign nation and exercise legitimate authority over citizens, populations, publics, and territory.

Yet this dissertation does not demonstrate how communes have arrived, once and for all, fully formed—or, as the Senegalese laws describe it, “fully empowered”. Municipal state formation is never complete; it is an ongoing process of experimentation, disagreement, and piecemeal reform. In the wake of Act III, most communal officials articulated a commonly held critique: the laws had devolved new responsibilities, but without the necessary revenues to match. There was, in other words, a persistent mismatch between political and fiscal decentralization. For this reason, I examine fiscal administration as a particularly consequential political terrain in which the problem of communal form took shape in Dakar.

This dissertation is organized into five substantive chapters and a conclusion. After introducing the concept of municipal state formation, the second chapter reveals how a French colonial policy of assimilation provided the political conditions for the legal constitution communes in Senegal. But these laws were also formed in relation to a longstanding dispute over the fiscal administration of the communes. The third chapter turns to one such dispute over Dakar’s municipal bond program. Although the program was ultimately sabotaged by the central state, it introduced a novel political terrain into this long-standing dispute over fiscal administration: public financial evaluation. I argue that such evaluations made an appeal to an audience beyond the courts—what I term, a financial public—to assert the City’s claim to municipal authority.

The fourth chapter examines a similarly unsuccessful experiment to re-distribute public authority in Dakar. In partnership with a private firm, municipal authorities constructed a commercial center in which to relocate thousands of Dakar’s walking street vendors. The program introduced a familiar form of a neoliberal fiscal contract: the user-fee. However, vendors disagreed with the poor location and high cost of the building, and unequivocally refused to relocate. In this chapter, I argue that this failed neoliberal program provided the conditions under which vendors’ refusal became a possible and effective political act, successfully delimiting when and where municipal authority was legitimately exercised in Dakar.

The final chapter returns to a more traditional aspect of public authority: the right to tax. Although Act III supposedly delegated several new local taxes, bureaucrats and officials nevertheless had to experiment with novel techniques of rule to exercise communal authority on the ground. One local commune pushed the limits of communal rights to enforce tax collection by drawing on the mayor’s public reputation for violence. The Mayor’s reputation as an armed murderer with a “flare for the aggressive” shaped how and where street-level bureaucrats collected taxes. Tax collection thus became more than an accounting of the physical landscape: it was a technique of territorial control grounded in a reputation for unlawful violence.

This dissertation concludes with a reflection on how the concept of municipal state formation may be extended to cities far from Dakar. To make this comparative case, I briefly analyze the problem of metropolitan fragmentation in St. Louis, Missouri.

This dissertation documents the processes and outcomes of Chinese government efforts to address national environmental problems through master planned "green development" projects. These large-scale spatial planning projects include eco-city and eco-industrial parks, and integrate goals for industrial, urban and rural development. Such efforts explicitly attempt to simultaneously "green" the economy, society and space; that is, to reduce the negative environmental impact of economic growth, to produce the social norms to support optimized use of resources, and to construct the human-ecological places where an "ecological civilization" can flourish. I find that the ideology of green development, taken from international and national sources, is projected onto local processes of place making. This process works to construct environmental resources at trans-local scales, and to justify rural dispossession as environmentally rational. I then document how national environmental governance agendas target rural society and space as backward and as the necessary site for intervention. I argue that green development in China extends practices of rural dispossession and deepens patterns of urban-rural inequality. Furthermore, I demonstrate that these patterns present significant negative environmental externalities as local governments transform rural landscapes to provide cheap land and financing for projects of China's "Green Leap Forward."

To explore the policies, institutions and practices that make up these processes, this dissertation focuses on Yixing, a third-tier city in Jiangsu province, where the construction of eco-city, solar and other `green' industry projects have been yoked as the engines for rural transformation. To begin, I describe the national and regional contexts of environmental industry construction and eco-city planning. I document the growth of solar manufacturing, eco-city construction and linked projects for agricultural modernization and ecological conservation that have required the enclosure of over 330 square-kilometers of rural land and the displacement of over 55,000 residents since 2006. The local government expects to displace another 50,000 residents in master planned rural-urban transformation by 2020.

I further document how these primarily state-led processes of dispossession and development planning refigure rural state-society and social-environmental relationships in the rapid construction of "new" ecologically rational city-regions. I argue that these processes are fundamentally linked to a revaluation of rural environmental resources and forms of agrarian transition that entail dispossession and the elimination of the land ownership system, which is bifurcated between state-urban and collective-rural structures. I analyze three processes through which this strategy unfolds. First, I examine the construction of a model of green development based on master-planned eco-urbanization and rural environmental governance at regional and national scales. I document and analyze the institutionalization of green development in the national policies of the Chinese government, the practices of municipal agencies, and in the approaches of transnational experts and businesses operating in China. I demonstrate that this model envisions a reallocation of rural land resources for master planned urban expansion. As its primary rationale, the model seeks to address the historical environmental failures of China's present model of industrial modernization and is predicated on restructuring municipal authority over rural land use.

Second, I document how these changes shape agrarian transition by revaluing rural land as an environmental resource. I examine the environmental justification of rural dispossession and the dissolution of collective land tenure rights as economically and environmentally untenable. I argue that as rural livelihoods come to be designated as environmentally irrational and rural land is made into an object of planning, environmental value is paradoxically abstracted and divided from actual landscapes. I demonstrate that rural cash assets as well as land are enclosed into green development and contribute to circuits of accumulation based on "exporting sustainability." I show how the processes of eviction and resettlement re-inscribe historical urban-rural inequalities into a new geography of peri-urban segregation and class differentiation.

Third, I argue that environmentalization in China is fundamentally tied to structural changes in territorial-administrative authority. Through an examination of local governmental practices in planning and land management, I document the construction of spatial uniformity and land resources at the national scale. I argue that in deploying a national land-use quota system, local governments fundamentally reshape the land management regime so that instead of managing the land itself, abstracted quanta of land are the objects that are being governed. This leads to negative social-environmental consequences that manifest in specific localities, and that undermine goals of sustainability at all scales. As a case study, I examine the rapid state-facilitated construction of the solar photovoltaics industry in Yixing through subsidies in land, infrastructure and finance capital. Such practices link rural dispossession in China to the global green economy. Additionally, large-scale and rapid construction on greenfield sites produces direct and indirect land-use change impacts on the carbon efficiency of solar photovoltaics manufactured in Yixing and elsewhere.