Building on sand: state capacity, livelihoods, and the limits of environmental governance in Cabo Verde

Cabo Verde has built an extensive environmental policy framework, ratifying major multilateral agreements and enacting decree-laws that formally regulate the exploitation of natural resources. Yet on Santiago Island, small-scale illegal extraction of development minerals by low-income households continues to cause severe degradation of beaches, watersheds and hillsides. Drawing on fieldwork in two northern municipalities (São Miguel and Tarrafal) and 25 semi-structured interviews with community leaders and sand and gravel extractors, this article investigates why extraction persists despite a dense regulatory architecture. We find that extraction is a survivalist strategy primarily undertaken by women heads of household, for whom environmental regulation represents a direct threat to precarious livelihoods. Mobilising the "environmental state" framework and feminist political ecology (Nightingale, 2006). We argue that state intervention has tightened coastal enforcement but displaced extraction into riverbeds and hillsides, intensifying rather than reducing aggregate environmental pressure. We characterise this as "governing through precarity", an environmental state present in law and on highly visible beaches, though absent in inland sites where the poorest extractors work. By centring the politics of enforcement and social reproduction, the article contributes to global debates on artisanal extraction, gender, and informality in African Small Island Developing States (SIDS).