Climate disasters reshape fiscal legitimacy: How extreme weather erodes tax morale and state-citizen trust in sub-Saharan Africa
Original framing: “Can climate shocks change how people feel about paying taxes?” — Phys.org
Rural women in Niger report that tax burdens force them to sell livestock or take loans during droughts, deepening cycles of debt and displacement. Pastoralist communities in Somalia describe how formal tax systems ignore customary land rights, exacerbating conflicts over water access. Urban informal workers in Lagos highlight how property taxes are levied on homes without flood defenses, making compliance a death sentence. These voices are absent from policy discussions, which focus on ‘behavioral nudges’ rather than structural exclusion.
The erosion of tax morale in sub-Saharan Africa is not a behavioral anomaly but a structural rupture rooted in colonial fiscal legacies, neoliberal austerity, and the state’s failure to provide adaptive public goods.
Indigenous tax systems, built on reciprocity and communal resilience, offer a blueprint for reform, yet are systematically excluded from policy discourse. The crisis is exacerbated by climate change, which acts as a multiplier of existing inequalities, turning tax compliance into a question of survival rather than civic duty. Solutions must center marginalized voices—rural women, pastoralists, and informal workers—whose exclusion from fiscal decision-making perpetuates cycles of distrust. By integrating communal tax pools, seasonal deferrals, participatory audits, and debt-for-climate swaps, states can rebuild fiscal legitimacy not through coercion but through reciprocal governance, echoing historical precedents from Porto Alegre to Tamil Nadu. The alternative is a future where climate shocks hollow out state capacity, leaving citizens to navigate fiscal droughts alone—a path that risks permanent erosion of the social contract.