Social mobilisation for climate change: the Belt and Road Initiative and the case of the Lamu coal plant in Kenya

This chapter examines the case of the Lamu coal plant in Kenya, one of the Belt and Road Initiative projects that was supposed to have a major environmental impact and that social mobilization was able to stop. After having framed the context in which such projects were to be conceived, it considers how the Lamu coal plant project was developed, the opposition it received and the struggle of the various NGOs to stop its construction. It finally gives an account of the trial before the National Environmental Tribunal in the framework of the new constitutional rules enacted in 2010.