The Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel Initiative (GGWI), launched in 2007 by the African Union, is one of Africa’s most important green transformation projects. From a pan-African environmental movement to a mosaic of locally managed projects to its considerable funding from the international community, the GGWI is now seen as a ‘megaproject’. While this megaproject has been primarily studied along the lines of political ecology and critical development studies, both showing the material limits and effectiveness of the initiative, its impact on the ground remains important in that the Sahelian landscape is shaped by donor and development actors’ discourses and imaginaries. The conceptual debates around the notion of ‘future’ thus make it possible to capture and facilitate the emergence of endogenous practices and environmental knowledge which involve the population, their history, and their culture using specific methods. By implementing the relationship formulated by Jacques Lacan between symbolic, reality and imaginary, this project will make it possible to approach the GGWI project as a social-technical imaginary while considering the complex social-ecological processes that this project involves.