Dr. Oludele Solaja’s analysis introduces the concept of “Algorithmic Environmental Populism” to illuminate how digital platforms are reshaping the politics of waste across African cities. Moving beyond conventional policy-centered approaches, Dr. Solaja demonstrates how environmental degradation—from plastic pollution to urban flooding—has become a site of algorithmically mediated political contestation. In this emerging landscape, complex ecological crises are reframed into morally charged narratives of blame, privileging visibility, outrage, and immediacy over systemic understanding. By linking populism theory with digital governance and environmental politics, the article offers a novel framework for understanding how platform logics transform ecological grievances into potent political forces. It is an essential contribution to debates on populism, digital media, and environmental governance in the Global South.
By Dr. Oludele Solaja
Environmental politics is now occurring not only at policy and infrastructure levels, but also through algorithms—from the clogged drains of Lagos to flood-prone Accra to landfills in South Africa. Environmental degradation has become a politically charged phenomenon on social media, and the sensational, outrage-driven, and immediate nature of these platforms has created an environment where narratives of blame outpace formal, institutional action. I refer to this new phenomenon as Algorithmic Environmental Populism, and I argue that digital infrastructure has become paramount in the formation, circulation, and contestation of ecological grievances.
The environmental crisis is no longer merely a management problem but a digitally mediated political language across the African continent, in which grievance, blame, and claims to power or moral legitimacy are performed. Plastic pollution, floods, burning dumpsites, and informal recycling have entered platform ecologies within which, according to a range of criteria, the most intense, visible, and confrontational content receives algorithmic attention. From this combination emerges a condition in which the environmental crisis is abstracted from complex systemic causes and reframed as a direct moral confrontation between “the people” and villains: polluters, corrupt elites, those who ship waste to Africa, and absent governments. In this process, platform algorithms prioritize the most engaging framing rather than the most policy-relevant one (Zeng & Schfer, 2023; Heidenreich et al., 2022).
The concept offers a way of extending understandings of populism and digital media, by foregrounding the environmental as a key site of algorithmically mediated political struggle. Classical theory on populism deals with the ideological construction of ‘the people‘ and ‘the elite,’ while the infrastructures through which populist rhetoric is dispersed have been historically overlooked. Algorithmic Environmental Populism instead draws focus to platform logics, showing how they shape the contours and narratives of ecological complaint. By this it builds on research on algorithmic governance, the increasing role of algorithms in policy perception and the legitimacy of state power (Parthasarathy & Rajala, 2023).
In African cities the role of algorithms in producing a political context for waste is further amplified by its material presence on everyday life. Clogged drains, plastic-choked lagoons, burning dump sites and litter, produces and feeds readily available data streams, which produce, or a "condition of constant possibility" for data to be recorded and transmitted, resulting in environmental breakdown becoming rapidly politicisable. Take, for example, Nigeria. When the Lagos State government implemented restrictions on single-use plastics in 2025, environmental considerations took a back seat to narratives of bias, and selective policy enforcement. Viral image of floodwater pouring through plastic-clogged drains fed accusatory commentary that blamed the state, turning environmental degradation into a performance of political betrayal.
Although it is true that a massive volume of plastic waste is annually dumped in Lagos State, these digital conversations tend to flatten the systems behind environmental degradation into morally legible pronouncements of blame and victimhood, which are amplified in the digital domain for emotional impact, rather than for systemic nuance (Couldry & Mejias, 2023).
The significance of such arguments for politics in Africa is that these stories become diagnostically central. In such cases, a multiple-layered system of production, consumption, municipal service provision and global trade are collapsed into stark oppositional narratives because it is the only way in which environmental problems can be successfully broadcast within an algorithmic environment, where visibility takes priority over complexity. As digital media research shows, what gets amplified is content that triggers reactions: outrage, pity, and the assignment of blame.
Similarly, we can observe this in Kenya where political activism is closely tied to moral pronouncements. Though debates exist surrounding extended producer responsibility, green economy initiatives, and refill systems; their manifestation in the digital space, in an effort to capture attention and elicit reaction, tends to focus on "blame-allocation" rather than the mechanics of institutional responsibility between citizens, corporations, and the state. Floods in Kenya’s urban centers of Nairobi and Mombasa provided highly visual and charged contexts to exacerbate these dynamics, producing further blame-oriented discourse regarding governmental incompetence and the inadequacy of infrastructure. In essence, the digitally mediated form of this political problem is not merely transmitting it; it is actively transforming it.
Another significant dimension of the digital landscape is how it also creates new forms of political subjectivity. Waste pickers and scavengers, once entirely invisible components of the informal city, are now visible. They challenge their invisibility through interventions in the digital domain, attempting to recover material flows and claim their political agency. They are now recognized as integral parts of urban recycling systems, while remaining ignored in the policy sphere (Njeru & Ochieng, 2025). Their visibility can be attributed to algorithms that amplify their stories, portraying them as overlooked labor fighting back against systemic neglect. Locally based actions, such as coastal clean-ups by youth groups in Kenya, become symbolical performances. The clean-up has the effect of politicizing the environment, either as an assertion of the citizen’s responsibility, as an attack on state incompetence or as a demonstration of collaborative effort. Environmental activism is transformed into a moral battlefield on the digital platform.
In South Africa we see a similar phenomenon of politically charged, algorithmically amplified resistance to landfill expansion and waste siting decisions. In 2026 protests against landfill development in urban periphery settlements, turned into a national narrative of social and environmental injustice through media mobilization; landfill as a continuance of structural violence through spatial inequalities. The discourse produced and amplified across the networks links contemporary exposure to historical environmental inequities through these landfill developments. Here Algorithmic Environmental Populism and environmental justice are closely interwoven, as the narratives attributed to technology and its governance are interpreted through morally loaded systems of victimhood and violence. The broader implications of Algorithmic Environmental Populism in Africa are that the histories of unequally mediated ecological flows, including plastics, second-hand goods and e-waste that flow into African cities and homes as waste from global consumption and production patterns. Such stories tend to produce a framing where the external imposition of blame arises from deeper historical conditions known as waste colonialism – an unequal world where states and their inhabitants bear uneven burdens of waste (Mah, 2024; Dauvergne, 2022).
This links directly into concepts of waste sovereignty – a state of ownership and control over material waste flows, their meanings and governance. In the digital space, sovereignty can now be enacted through the control of narrative. Those able to frame environmental crises in terms of simple, easily accessible, morally legible oppositions, are gaining political ground regardless of their technical knowledge. Environmental politics of waste is no longer a question of physical waste, or of policy-makers’ actions, but increasingly a matter of the visibility of what it is that matters and to whom it matters, a battle of recognition, and control, within platform governed space.
Therefore, I suggest a three-stage process of digitally mediated waste politics: first, visible urban environmental decay; second, morally legible frames of attribution; and third, algorithmically favored amplification. It is in these stages that complexity is simplified and environmental disaster turns into visible, and therefore governable, political matter.
A certain democratizing aspect is that it allows for participation on new grounds, where citizens, informal waste workers and activist groups can join in debates around the environment on the internet. The downside is that these systems allow for a contraction of discourse: immediate visibility takes the form of sensation and outrage over deliberative engagement, bringing together political mobilization and propaganda (Heidenreich et al., 2022). Consequently, the environment has begun to be spoken of in conflicting terms: critical discourse clashes with simplified frameworks of accusation. A street in Accra that floods, or a dirty drainage canal in Kenya, or a burning landfill in South Africa, are instantly turned into evidence against the state, corporations, or the global system, obscuring underlying complexities.
This new discourse dynamic has major implications for environmental governance. Effectiveness is no longer solely about design and capacity but also about how environmental policies are understood, accepted, and engaged with on line. Municipalities and governments, as well as non-profit organizations need to operate in the digital space to manage the material and political aspects of waste. Scholars of environmental data governance agree that algorithms are key in framing environmental information (Gabrys, 2023). This is also significant for populist politics; waste cannot continue to be seen as an auxiliary or an afterthought. Instead, it has to be seen as a key component of the negotiations around citizenship, inequality, sovereignty and state power; the material traces of society that make social tensions visible and open to struggle. Algorithmic Environmental Populism provides an explanatory frame that connects environmental governance, digital media, and populist politics together, and helps to make sense of the way ecological grievance can be translated into potent political force by means of technologically managed visibility.
In short, the environmental politics of waste in Africa is no longer solely regulated by state and international institutions; its regulation is also about what becomes visible and how, within the spaces that platform logics control. What is now at stake is how we see waste, what we make of it in the discourse we construct, and the meaning that it is given within our digitally mediated attention economies. This transformation is an emblem of a broader shift: authority is no longer held by those who convene political discussions in spaces that are free from the influence of amplification. The management of waste, therefore, involves managing its meaning, a task that in the digital age depends greatly on the very politics of platforms.
References
Couldry, N. & Mejias, U. A. (2023). “Data colonialism and the future of social order.” New Media & Society, 25(4), 945–962.
Dauvergne, P. (2022). “Waste, pollution, and the global plastic crisis.” Global Environmental Politics, 22(1), 1–10.
Gabrys, J. (2023). “Digital waste and environmental data politics.” Information, Communication & Society, 26(9), 1785–1801.
Heidenreich, T., et al. (2022). “Populism and digital media: A comparative perspective.” Political Communication, 39(3), 345–362.
Mah, A. (2024). “Waste colonialism and global inequality.” Nature Sustainability, 7(1), 12–15.
Njeru, J. & Ochieng, C. (2025). “Plastic waste governance and informal economies in Africa.” Environmental Politics, 34(2), 256–275.
Parthasarathy, S. & Rajala, R. (2023). “Algorithmic governance and environmental policy.” Regulation & Governance, 17(4), 987–1003.
Zeng, J. & Schäfer, M. S. (2023). “Conceptualizing algorithmic populism.” New Media & Society, 25(8), 2015–2032.
Algorithmic Environmental Populism and the Digital Politics of Waste in Africa
Dr. Oludele Solaja’s analysis introduces the concept of “Algorithmic Environmental Populism” to illuminate how digital platforms are reshaping the politics of waste across African cities. Moving beyond conventional policy-centered approaches, Dr. Solaja demonstrates how environmental degradation—from plastic pollution to urban flooding—has become a site of algorithmically mediated political contestation. In this emerging landscape, complex ecological crises are reframed into morally charged narratives of blame, privileging visibility, outrage, and immediacy over systemic understanding. By linking populism theory with digital governance and environmental politics, the article offers a novel framework for understanding how platform logics transform ecological grievances into potent political forces. It is an essential contribution to debates on populism, digital media, and environmental governance in the Global South.
By Dr. Oludele Solaja
Environmental politics is now occurring not only at policy and infrastructure levels, but also through algorithms—from the clogged drains of Lagos to flood-prone Accra to landfills in South Africa. Environmental degradation has become a politically charged phenomenon on social media, and the sensational, outrage-driven, and immediate nature of these platforms has created an environment where narratives of blame outpace formal, institutional action. I refer to this new phenomenon as Algorithmic Environmental Populism, and I argue that digital infrastructure has become paramount in the formation, circulation, and contestation of ecological grievances.
The environmental crisis is no longer merely a management problem but a digitally mediated political language across the African continent, in which grievance, blame, and claims to power or moral legitimacy are performed. Plastic pollution, floods, burning dumpsites, and informal recycling have entered platform ecologies within which, according to a range of criteria, the most intense, visible, and confrontational content receives algorithmic attention. From this combination emerges a condition in which the environmental crisis is abstracted from complex systemic causes and reframed as a direct moral confrontation between “the people” and villains: polluters, corrupt elites, those who ship waste to Africa, and absent governments. In this process, platform algorithms prioritize the most engaging framing rather than the most policy-relevant one (Zeng & Schfer, 2023; Heidenreich et al., 2022).
The concept offers a way of extending understandings of populism and digital media, by foregrounding the environmental as a key site of algorithmically mediated political struggle. Classical theory on populism deals with the ideological construction of ‘the people‘ and ‘the elite,’ while the infrastructures through which populist rhetoric is dispersed have been historically overlooked. Algorithmic Environmental Populism instead draws focus to platform logics, showing how they shape the contours and narratives of ecological complaint. By this it builds on research on algorithmic governance, the increasing role of algorithms in policy perception and the legitimacy of state power (Parthasarathy & Rajala, 2023).
In African cities the role of algorithms in producing a political context for waste is further amplified by its material presence on everyday life. Clogged drains, plastic-choked lagoons, burning dump sites and litter, produces and feeds readily available data streams, which produce, or a "condition of constant possibility" for data to be recorded and transmitted, resulting in environmental breakdown becoming rapidly politicisable. Take, for example, Nigeria. When the Lagos State government implemented restrictions on single-use plastics in 2025, environmental considerations took a back seat to narratives of bias, and selective policy enforcement. Viral image of floodwater pouring through plastic-clogged drains fed accusatory commentary that blamed the state, turning environmental degradation into a performance of political betrayal.
Although it is true that a massive volume of plastic waste is annually dumped in Lagos State, these digital conversations tend to flatten the systems behind environmental degradation into morally legible pronouncements of blame and victimhood, which are amplified in the digital domain for emotional impact, rather than for systemic nuance (Couldry & Mejias, 2023).
The significance of such arguments for politics in Africa is that these stories become diagnostically central. In such cases, a multiple-layered system of production, consumption, municipal service provision and global trade are collapsed into stark oppositional narratives because it is the only way in which environmental problems can be successfully broadcast within an algorithmic environment, where visibility takes priority over complexity. As digital media research shows, what gets amplified is content that triggers reactions: outrage, pity, and the assignment of blame.
Similarly, we can observe this in Kenya where political activism is closely tied to moral pronouncements. Though debates exist surrounding extended producer responsibility, green economy initiatives, and refill systems; their manifestation in the digital space, in an effort to capture attention and elicit reaction, tends to focus on "blame-allocation" rather than the mechanics of institutional responsibility between citizens, corporations, and the state. Floods in Kenya’s urban centers of Nairobi and Mombasa provided highly visual and charged contexts to exacerbate these dynamics, producing further blame-oriented discourse regarding governmental incompetence and the inadequacy of infrastructure. In essence, the digitally mediated form of this political problem is not merely transmitting it; it is actively transforming it.
Another significant dimension of the digital landscape is how it also creates new forms of political subjectivity. Waste pickers and scavengers, once entirely invisible components of the informal city, are now visible. They challenge their invisibility through interventions in the digital domain, attempting to recover material flows and claim their political agency. They are now recognized as integral parts of urban recycling systems, while remaining ignored in the policy sphere (Njeru & Ochieng, 2025). Their visibility can be attributed to algorithms that amplify their stories, portraying them as overlooked labor fighting back against systemic neglect. Locally based actions, such as coastal clean-ups by youth groups in Kenya, become symbolical performances. The clean-up has the effect of politicizing the environment, either as an assertion of the citizen’s responsibility, as an attack on state incompetence or as a demonstration of collaborative effort. Environmental activism is transformed into a moral battlefield on the digital platform.
In South Africa we see a similar phenomenon of politically charged, algorithmically amplified resistance to landfill expansion and waste siting decisions. In 2026 protests against landfill development in urban periphery settlements, turned into a national narrative of social and environmental injustice through media mobilization; landfill as a continuance of structural violence through spatial inequalities. The discourse produced and amplified across the networks links contemporary exposure to historical environmental inequities through these landfill developments. Here Algorithmic Environmental Populism and environmental justice are closely interwoven, as the narratives attributed to technology and its governance are interpreted through morally loaded systems of victimhood and violence. The broader implications of Algorithmic Environmental Populism in Africa are that the histories of unequally mediated ecological flows, including plastics, second-hand goods and e-waste that flow into African cities and homes as waste from global consumption and production patterns. Such stories tend to produce a framing where the external imposition of blame arises from deeper historical conditions known as waste colonialism – an unequal world where states and their inhabitants bear uneven burdens of waste (Mah, 2024; Dauvergne, 2022).
This links directly into concepts of waste sovereignty – a state of ownership and control over material waste flows, their meanings and governance. In the digital space, sovereignty can now be enacted through the control of narrative. Those able to frame environmental crises in terms of simple, easily accessible, morally legible oppositions, are gaining political ground regardless of their technical knowledge. Environmental politics of waste is no longer a question of physical waste, or of policy-makers’ actions, but increasingly a matter of the visibility of what it is that matters and to whom it matters, a battle of recognition, and control, within platform governed space.
Therefore, I suggest a three-stage process of digitally mediated waste politics: first, visible urban environmental decay; second, morally legible frames of attribution; and third, algorithmically favored amplification. It is in these stages that complexity is simplified and environmental disaster turns into visible, and therefore governable, political matter.
A certain democratizing aspect is that it allows for participation on new grounds, where citizens, informal waste workers and activist groups can join in debates around the environment on the internet. The downside is that these systems allow for a contraction of discourse: immediate visibility takes the form of sensation and outrage over deliberative engagement, bringing together political mobilization and propaganda (Heidenreich et al., 2022). Consequently, the environment has begun to be spoken of in conflicting terms: critical discourse clashes with simplified frameworks of accusation. A street in Accra that floods, or a dirty drainage canal in Kenya, or a burning landfill in South Africa, are instantly turned into evidence against the state, corporations, or the global system, obscuring underlying complexities.
This new discourse dynamic has major implications for environmental governance. Effectiveness is no longer solely about design and capacity but also about how environmental policies are understood, accepted, and engaged with on line. Municipalities and governments, as well as non-profit organizations need to operate in the digital space to manage the material and political aspects of waste. Scholars of environmental data governance agree that algorithms are key in framing environmental information (Gabrys, 2023). This is also significant for populist politics; waste cannot continue to be seen as an auxiliary or an afterthought. Instead, it has to be seen as a key component of the negotiations around citizenship, inequality, sovereignty and state power; the material traces of society that make social tensions visible and open to struggle. Algorithmic Environmental Populism provides an explanatory frame that connects environmental governance, digital media, and populist politics together, and helps to make sense of the way ecological grievance can be translated into potent political force by means of technologically managed visibility.
In short, the environmental politics of waste in Africa is no longer solely regulated by state and international institutions; its regulation is also about what becomes visible and how, within the spaces that platform logics control. What is now at stake is how we see waste, what we make of it in the discourse we construct, and the meaning that it is given within our digitally mediated attention economies. This transformation is an emblem of a broader shift: authority is no longer held by those who convene political discussions in spaces that are free from the influence of amplification. The management of waste, therefore, involves managing its meaning, a task that in the digital age depends greatly on the very politics of platforms.
References
Couldry, N. & Mejias, U. A. (2023). “Data colonialism and the future of social order.” New Media & Society, 25(4), 945–962.
Dauvergne, P. (2022). “Waste, pollution, and the global plastic crisis.” Global Environmental Politics, 22(1), 1–10.
Gabrys, J. (2023). “Digital waste and environmental data politics.” Information, Communication & Society, 26(9), 1785–1801.
Heidenreich, T., et al. (2022). “Populism and digital media: A comparative perspective.” Political Communication, 39(3), 345–362.
Mah, A. (2024). “Waste colonialism and global inequality.” Nature Sustainability, 7(1), 12–15.
Njeru, J. & Ochieng, C. (2025). “Plastic waste governance and informal economies in Africa.” Environmental Politics, 34(2), 256–275.
Parthasarathy, S. & Rajala, R. (2023). “Algorithmic governance and environmental policy.” Regulation & Governance, 17(4), 987–1003.
Zeng, J. & Schäfer, M. S. (2023). “Conceptualizing algorithmic populism.” New Media & Society, 25(8), 2015–2032.
Latest News
Prof. Wind: Mainstream Parties in Denmark Have Absorbed, Not Neutralized, the Radical Right
Algorithmic Environmental Populism and the Digital Politics of Waste in Africa
Dr. Humagain: Institutionalized Populism Poses Enduring Challenge to Nepal’s Democracy
Prof. Wind: Mainstream Parties in Denmark Have Absorbed, Not Neutralized, the Radical Right
I Have a Dream
Prof. Wind: Mainstream Parties in Denmark Have Absorbed, Not Neutralized, the Radical Right
Algorithmic Environmental Populism and the Digital Politics of Waste in Africa
Dr. Humagain: Institutionalized Populism Poses Enduring Challenge to Nepal’s Democracy
Category
Prof. Wind: Mainstream Parties in Denmark Have Absorbed, Not Neutralized, the Radical Right
Algorithmic Environmental Populism and the Digital Politics of Waste in Africa
Dr. Humagain: Institutionalized Populism Poses Enduring Challenge to Nepal’s Democracy
Prof. Wind: Mainstream Parties in Denmark Have Absorbed, Not Neutralized, the Radical Right
I Have a Dream
Algorithmic Populism and the Politics of Waste: How AI Reproduces Plastic Colonialism in the Global South