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Environmental Movements, Climate Change, and Consumption in South Africa
Abstract
The environmental movement in South Africa is plural and diverse, but lacks a strong centre or unified framing. How can we explain and understand this, and what consequences does it have for ecological politics in South Africa? There are many environmental grievances, extensive resources available to potential social movements, and a broadly favourable political opportunity structure. On the other hand, prominent environmental organisations have faced a number of limits, obstacles and challenges that have prevented the formation of a strong, unified and popular ‘green’ movement. Movements on land, housing, and service delivery, however, have thrived in comparison, and, while they tend not to self-identify as environmental movements, they should be regarded as important elements of broader progressive environmental struggles in South Africa. Consumption may also become a powerful framing issue for environmental justice movements, and its relevance to contemporary South Africa is illustrated through a controversial township youth phenomenon known as ‘pexing’. While it is important to ensure that South African environmentalism does not become inward-looking and nationalistic, a strong environmental movement is essential for driving a political transformation on to a more environmentally sustainable development path.
... has argued that South Africa's environmental movement is "fractured, disparate and diverse." This is despite a 'vibrant' environmental sector comprised of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and community movements who participate in broader networks and alliances "to exert and influence beyond their size through skilful advocacy in the courts, channels of political access, media campaigns and…mass demonstrations" (Death, 2014(Death, : 1223. One of the reasons cited for this weakness is because environmental movements have struggled to connect with popular movements. ...
... One of the reasons cited for this weakness is because environmental movements have struggled to connect with popular movements. In this sense daily struggles for housing, water and electricity, dubbed 'service delivery' protests, are intrinsically linked with environmental struggles but connecting the environmental justice 'message' with the service delivery protest 'message' has not been fully realized (Death, 2014(Death, : 1227. This article considers the Life After Coal campaign's work in eMalahleni, Mpumalanga to examine the challenges faced by environmental campaigns. ...
... Llewellyn Leonard (2021) notes that South Africa's neoliberal framework promotes industrial development, giving mining a prominent place. This promotes "inhospitable environments" characterized by poor housing, roads, sanitation, unsafe water and electricity "under clouds of smog, dust and particulates" described aptly by Death as derived from South Africa's "national development path dominated…by heavy industry the minerals-energy complex, dirty and dangerous transport systems and a political economy in which economic growth has produced widening inequality, and continued high levels of poverty" (Death 2014(Death : 1219. ...
South Africa's environmental movement has been described as "fractured, disparate and diverse" (Death, 2014: 1232). This article considers the Life After Coal campaign's work in eMalahleni, Mpumalanga to examine the challenges faced by environmental campaigns. The article examines the relationship between the campaign and community members and activists through the lens of Jacklyn Cock's ideas of "building counter power" and Marlies Glasius and Armine Ishkanian's ideas of "surreptitious symbiosis'" The article draws on a series of interviews and discussions with Life After Coal leaders and community members and activists affected by coal mining in eMalahleni. It finds that the Life After Coal campaign's work in eMalahleni reflects the challenges of building a unified popular environmental movement. Despite its critical work in 'building counter power' through community mobilisations and the campaign's catalysing effects it has yet to fully integrate the substantive aspects of an unrealised democracy in the form of genuine socioeconomic rights into its environmental frames. Further to this, there are various levels of discord which hinder solidarity between formal civil society organisations and the organic community movement.
... However, this 'political honeymoon' was shortlived, as opposition formed around the African National Congress's (ANC) adoption of neoliberalism (ibid., 616). South Africa has both a range of resources available and a broadly receptive political opportunity structure (Ballard et al. 2005;Death 2014). Despite being one of the world's most unequal societies, it is rich in cultural and social resources for activists. ...
... This history of struggle has also bequeathed a public view of protest as broadly legitimate and interwoven into the fabric of democracy. Although the post-apartheid state has taken some repressive actions in response to more radically critical movements, the context remains relatively conducive for activism (Ballard et al. 2005;Death 2014). ...
... Environmentalism in South Africa has tended to be split between broadly conservationist greens, a red labour movement advocating just transition, and an emerging yet disunified red-green coalition. Historically, green movements have been associated with racial injustice, with conservative conservationism 'dominated by white liberals and conservatives who obviously put the interests of charismatic mega-fauna, hunting and white agriculture ahead of black populations' (Death 2014(Death , 1226. Under the apartheid regime, large-scale conservation projects often entailed the expulsion of black populations from their land for the purpose of protecting nature (Cock 2021). ...
... There is no single or unified environmental movement in South Africa (Cock 2004:1;Death 2014Death :1217. Environmental issues are generally perceived to be the concern of the well-off white people (Cock 2004:19;Death 2014Death :1217Neville 2010:5). ...
... There is no single or unified environmental movement in South Africa (Cock 2004:1;Death 2014Death :1217. Environmental issues are generally perceived to be the concern of the well-off white people (Cock 2004:19;Death 2014Death :1217Neville 2010:5). It therefore becomes imperative that the environmental justice movement continues to take into consideration the threefold approach to justice 1 as well as attempt to create some form of unified action. ...
... It therefore becomes imperative that the environmental justice movement continues to take into consideration the threefold approach to justice 1 as well as attempt to create some form of unified action. Death (2014Death ( :1216, while not convinced that the vulnerable are unable to respond to environmental justice, mentions that there are arguments that tend to state that where underlying poverty exists and basic needs are left unmet, there is a lack of agency to focus on environmental matters. Cock (2004:1-2, 17-18) argues that the movement is a bottom-up approach, one that is decentralised and is driven by the poor and marginalised. ...
There has been visible evidence of youth activism regarding environmental consciousness on the global scene with some prominent voices amongst them. An increase in research on eco-theology has also been seen. Yet, it is easy to become fixated on environmentalism with regards to ozone depletion and greenhouse effects, and miss the various nuances of the movement. One such area relates to consumption and environmental justice, and that means not only for the global movement of environmentalism but more specifically in the local South African context.Contribution: This article, therefore, will look at environmental justice as an act of love through the agency of the youth within the coloured community on the Cape Flats.
... Faced with state pressure, UDF leaders became more open to alternative forms of democratic outcome, such as representative democracy, which resulted in the non-cross pollination of issues in contemporary South Africa (Seekings 2000). South Africa has not advanced in linking social and environmental concerns into a coherent ideology for an environmental justice framework (EJF) (Cock 2004b;McDonald 2002;Death 2014). Wider social changes against neoliberal risks can be achieved by avoiding a narrow focus on purely 'environmental' or 'social' concerns, by linking environmental justice to the broader political, social and economic issues. ...
... In some countries a coalition between environmental and social justice activists against neoliberalism has had mutual benefits (Death 2014;Agyeman, Bullard, and Evans 2002). For example, new European social movements were formed to defend the difference surrounding the environment, peace and human rightssharing an anti-hegemonist agenda (Dagkas and Tsoukala 2011). ...
... According to Cock (2004a), mobilisation around urban pollution is increasing. However, there is a lack of a coherent ideological framework to bring together diverse struggles (Cock 2004a;McDonald 2002;Death 2014). The mobilising issues are health and rights, and not environmental justice or sustainability. ...
Whereas anti-apartheid social movements engaged collectively against a repressive regime, especially in actions against social injustices, post-apartheid civil society has witnessed fragmentation when it comes to engaging jointly against neoliberal risks such as poor/no service delivery, privatisation, and environmental pollution. Civil society has not linked struggles into a coherent ideology to comprehensively challenge neoliberalism and associated risks. Research has not explored the underlying elements that contribute to reinforcing fragmentation. This article reviews the literature on key social and environmental struggles in order to draw out common elements and differences that reinforce fragmentation. The paper highlights the need for social and environmental activists to engage collectively both within their respective arenas, as well as across the social and environmental divide, if an environmental justice framework is to emerge. Social movements advocating social justice could serve as a platform to incorporate environmental discourses into their struggle to assist in formulating an environmental justice framework.
... 50 This was consistent with other post-Apartheid participatory and 'actively-inclusive' processes that served environmental issues such as the Consultative National Environmental Process that featured until the early 2000s. 53,59 The NCCC was a forum for participation, legitimacy building, and technical knowledge generation by nonstate actors (both grassroots and policy-focused NGOs), but was contested by certain business interests. 60 In 2002, South Africa took the opportunity to host the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) to maximize environmental diplomacy efforts and publically associate itself with environmental stewardship and the international regime for environmental governance. ...
... Whilst a strong coordinated state-led industrial restructuring process has not occurred, the state has promoted 'green growth' and the benefits of decarbonization for international competitiveness. 59,73 This state-led project focuses on growth via the creation of new markets, services, and modes of consumption. In the wake of the global financial crisis, the government allocated 11% of a $7.5 billion stimulus package to environment-related projects; hosted a Green Economy Summit in May 2010; set up a R1.2 billion Green Fund to facilitate green investment; and established a Green Economy Accord to create 300,000 jobs over 10 years. ...
... In the wake of the global financial crisis, the government allocated 11% of a $7.5 billion stimulus package to environment-related projects; hosted a Green Economy Summit in May 2010; set up a R1.2 billion Green Fund to facilitate green investment; and established a Green Economy Accord to create 300,000 jobs over 10 years. 59,74 Since then there have been two particularly significant 'green growth' style mitigation initiatives that have emerged in an uncoordinated fashion: the carbon tax and the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producers Procurement Programme (REIPPPP). ...
This study focuses on the role of the South African state in environmental governance, with particular reference to transformations in political authority and processes of capital accumulation. Our approach underscores the importance of analyzing state environmental efforts both empirically and normatively, in order to understand the underlying drivers of state policies that perpetuate or ameliorate environmental degradation. The tension between economic and ecological values lies at the heart of South Africa's approach to mitigation. We evaluate South Africa's performance on climate change mitigation policies and programs and show that while, empirically, South Africa may appear to be a partial or emerging green state, its performance is weak when assessed against normative frameworks. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e473. doi: 10.1002/wcc.473
This article is categorized under:
• Policy and Governance > National Climate Change Policy
... In recent years there has been an emergence of green economy discourse in international movements for sustainability, many of these narrowly conceived within a growth discourse and associated green skills research being associated with technicist HCT theories and assumptions. There is, however, a critique of this green skills discourse with more nuanced analysis emerging (Death 2014(Death , 2016. These debates are discussed in more depth in the accompanying background paper on skills for sustainable livelihoods (McGrath 2020). ...
... In recent years there has been an emergence of green economy discourse in international movements for sustainability, many of these narrowly conceived within a growth discourse and associated green skills research being associated with technicist HCT theories and assumptions. There is, however, a critique of this green skills discourse with more nuanced analysis emerging (Death 2014(Death , 2016. These debates are discussed in more depth in the accompanying background paper on skills for sustainable livelihoods (McGrath 2020). ...
The first aim of this foundations paper is to develop initial
understanding based on a critical engagement with the existing
literature of how key terms that are used to frame the work of
the Transforming Education for Sustainable Futures (TESF)
Network Plus are understood.
In particular, the paper will seek to develop working definitions of the
ideas of ‘sustainable development’ (SD), ‘sustainable futures’,
‘education for sustainable development’ (ESD), ‘education systems’
and of ‘transformation’ that are fundamental for our work. Rather
than seeking to provide a comprehensive review of the literature,
however, a task that has been undertaken elsewhere (e.g. Wals and
Kieft 2010), the focus of the discussion will be on how these key
terms are understood in the context of the Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs) and the implications of these understandings for the
work of TESF.
... Manifestations of social tension get stronger as the disparity of economic conditions between the social classes get wider (Death, 2014;Hilton, 2007) 7 ...
... Leonard (2013) noted that historically, the exclusion of black people from land for conservation has shaped the relationship between people and the environment. Death (2014) suggested that concern for environmental issues relates to privileged white people who do not have to deal with extreme poverty. The activists felt that these voices were largely missing from the participation process and therefore conducted participatory action research to contest the power narratives. ...
A tsunami of development projects is sweeping across the planet. This includes another 25 million kilometres of new paved roads by 2050 - enough to encircle the globe more than 600 times. Approximately 90% of these new roads will be built in low- and middle-income countries that are likely to have high biodiversity. This paper focuses on the environmental impact of 1.2 km of road planned to be built through endangered western leopard toad habitat and breeding ponds and extending into a greater wetland system in Cape Town. This paper reports a case study of the experiences of two female community environmental activists (the authors) throughout the public participation process and environmental impact assessment for this road. The results show the contesting of power in public participatory spaces as a form of trans-species accompaniment, and the generation of emotive knowledge (including distress and a sense of betrayal). The paper contributes to the existing knowledge of the execution of trans-species accompaniment in the context of public participation processes to seek ecojustice.
... Leonard (2013) noted that historically, the exclusion of black people from land for conservation has shaped the relationship between people and the environment. Death (2014) suggested that concern for environmental issues relates to privileged white people who do not have to deal with extreme poverty. The activists felt that these voices were largely missing from the participation process and therefore conducted participatory action research to contest the power narratives. ...
P I N S [ P s y c h o l o g y i n S o c i e t y ] 6 3 • 2 0 2 2 | 1 1 0 Abstract A tsunami of development projects is sweeping across the planet. This includes another 25 million kilometres of new paved roads by 2050-enough to encircle the globe more than 600 times. Approximately 90% of these new roads will be built in low-and middle-income countries that are likely to have high biodiversity. This paper focuses on the environmental impact of 1.2 km of road planned to be built through endangered western leopard toad habitat and breeding ponds and extending into a greater wetland system in Cape Town. This paper reports a case study of the experiences of two female community environmental activists (the authors) throughout the public participation process and environmental impact assessment for this road. The results show the contesting of power in public participatory spaces as a form of trans-species accompaniment, and the generation of emotive knowledge (including distress and a sense of betrayal). The paper contributes to the existing knowledge of the execution of trans-species accompaniment in the context of public participation processes to seek ecojustice.
... The Intergovernmental Plan on Climate Change (IPPC) projections for sub-Saharan Africa are expected to be warmer than for the rest of the world; in the Global South issues such as climate change is often less prioritized in comparison to imperatives such as poverty, crime and unemployment. In turn, this often contributes to limited public awareness on the topic (Death, 2014;Moser & Dilling, 2004). The latest IPCC report highlights ecosystem structure changes and species range shifts in Africa with very high levels of confidence in attribution to climate change. ...
Many studies around the world have shown differences between generational cohorts in levels of concern about global environmental change. Global environmental change caused by the anthropogenic practices poses a threat to human life as well as biodiversity, and it is perpetuated by the lack of awareness of environmental sustainability. To spread awareness where it is lacking, it is important to determine which generation is more concerned about global environmental change. This study analysed the Knowledges, Attitudes and Practices of Gen X and Gen Z to determine which one is more concerned about global environmental change. There were no significant differences seen between the two generations in their respective levels of green knowledgeand their level of concern for climate change and environmental problems. There was, however, a significant difference in the peer discussions on global warming of the two cohorts; the results revealed that discussions are more common in the Gen X cohort. Investigating environmental perceptions in light of generational cohorts is of importance to environmental groups seeking to communicate with different generational cohorts to push the climate change movement forward, strategise better for climate adaptation plans and for policy makers to better advocate for climate action.
... 80 The legacy of 'other country' tropes is also discussed by Carl Death in his consideration of perceptions of contemporary environmental issues and green movements in South Africa. 81 Such careful considerations of both historical developments and contemporary politics are crucial for understanding how dynamics of race, class and state play out in terms of the technicalities of land use and reform, as well as the cultural and political framings of climate change. ...
Climate change is a vast global relationship made manifest by experiences of variability in local weather conditions. In the South African context, this reality is inextricably tied to historical land dispossession and politics around land reform. Art offers new conceptual vocabularies for understanding and responding to entanglements between land issues and climate change in the country. This article discusses the works of Ledelle Moe, Simphiwe Ndzube and Dineo Seshee Bopape, three contemporary South African artists who explore land politics either explicitly as material or indirectly through metaphor. Three concepts – entanglement, hyperobjects and fabulation – are speculatively submerged into the land to analyse selected works by the three artists, additionally drawing from qualitative interviews, visual material and online news media. The article situates the artists’ work in the nexus between land politics and climate change, exploring three mediums to offer new metaphors for meaning-making in South Africa’s climate knowledge infrastructure, increasingly critical for understanding and responding to climate change in the country.
... Qualitative studies suggest that that the importance of environmental protection for climate change belief in Japan could be explained with the pronounced role of environmental institutions in raising climate change awareness in Japan 69 . The correlation between poor environmental protection and limited climate change belief in South Africa may reflect the country's widespread prioritization of fossil-fuel driven economic development over ecological concerns and the limited credibility of traditional environmental NGOs in the country 70,71 . Formal education is very important for identifying climate change beliefs in China, Latin America, and some African countries. ...
Decades after the scientific community agreed on the existence of human-made climate change, substantial parts of the world’s population remain unaware or unconvinced that human activity is responsible for climate change. Belief in human-made climate change continues to vary strongly within and across different countries. Here I analyse data collected by the Gallop World Poll between 2007 and 2010 on individual attitudes across 143 countries, using a random forest model, to show that country-level conditions like environmental protection, civil liberty, and economic development are highly predictive of individual climate change belief. Individual education and internet access, in contrast, are correlated to climate change awareness, but much less to belief in climate change’s anthropogenic causes. I also identify non-linear pattern in which country-level circumstances relate to individual climate change belief. The local importance of most predictors varies strongly across countries, indicating that each country has its relatively unique set of correlates of climate change belief. Country-level conditions such as civil liberty are highly predictive of climate change belief, whereas individual attributes such as education are related more to awareness than belief, suggests a random-forest analysis of individual attitudes in 143 countries.
... With the exception of acid mine drainage (Rafey and Sovacool 2011:1147), water has not figured prominently in the environmental campaigns against the construction of Medupi. This is partly explained by the fact that traditionally environmental justice movements in South Africa have focused on the living conditions of communities close to coal-fired power stations and the mines supplying them, but not necessarily on water-related issues (Death 2014a). 18 Moreover, one of the justifications for MCWAP is that it will transfer more water to Lephalale municipality and in this way secure local water supply in a semi-arid part of the Waterberg, where water shortages are a regular occurrence. ...
Socio-historical context and ideology are often overlooked in analyses of how social welfare policy is used to promote well-being. This paper uses the South African Child Support Grant (CSG) to illuminate how a policy may enhance or hinder well-being, not only for individuals but also for a society. Forged through a combination of the inherited apartheid state's architecture, the redistributive ideology of the ruling African National Congress, social development theory and the constraints of economic globalisation, the CSG has produced paradoxically positive material well-being outcomes for many poor South Africans and possibly reproduced problematic subjective and relational forms of well-being nationally. Analysing how the grant, as a social policy, is historically and ideologically situated illuminates some of the constraints imposed upon a twenty-first century democratic developmental state as it tries to find its way in a global market, redistribute wealth, satisfy different constituencies and promote individual and collective well-being. Grants are a necessary but insufficient strategy for a twenty-first century democratic developmental state like South Africa.
... With the exception of acid mine drainage (Rafey and Sovacool 2011:1147), water has not figured prominently in the environmental campaigns against the construction of Medupi. This is partly explained by the fact that traditionally environmental justice movements in South Africa have focused on the living conditions of communities close to coal-fired power stations and the mines supplying them, but not necessarily on water-related issues (Death 2014a). 18 Moreover, one of the justifications for MCWAP is that it will transfer more water to Lephalale municipality and in this way secure local water supply in a semi-arid part of the Waterberg, where water shortages are a regular occurrence. ...
The issue of climate change has been at the forefront of a number of nongovernmental environmental organisations, such as Greenpeace and its national branches, for instance, Greenpeace Africa (Pandey, 2015). Located in Johannesburg in South Africa, Greenpeace Africa (further-GA) aims "to bring forth the solutions which are essential to a green and peaceful future" (Greenpeace Africa, 2024). One of the major foci of GA's environmental campaigns for a green future involves the issue of climate change. To-date, however, little is known about how GA frames its climate change communication, especially on Social Networking Sites (SNSs), such as Facebook. The present study seeks to fill the current gap in scholarship by collecting and analysing a corpus of GA's Facebook status updates on climate change in order to shed light onto this under-researched issue. In the study, the corpus is analysed qualitatively by means of applying framing methodology (Entman, 1993, 2004, 2007, 2010). The results of the corpus analysis have revealed that GA frames its climate change communication on Facebook by a number of frames that are further discussed in the article.
Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change (CC), warming at ‘double the global average rate’. The southern African region is already a CC hotspot with climate variability exposing stark societal and biophysical ecosystem vulnerabilities. South African and southern African youth are beginning to claim their place at various CC negotiation tables adding to the voices of government and various civil society groups. In this paper, written by a group of youth activists, civil society organisation leaders, educators and climate scientists, we track the journey that a group of young change-makers and local government officials (in the age range 15–24) have taken in securing a seat at the policy table. The challenges, caveats and course corrections that have been taken in the Johannesburg Youth Climate Action Plan (YCAP) process and the wider country, are interrogated. This YCAP Johannesburg experiment provides a useful learning exercise for subsequent CC policy and practice engagements in the country and elsewhere.
In this paper "Environmental Racism in South Africa: Assessing the Impacts of Durban South Industrial Basin" has been discussed. Environmental racism is racial discrimination in environmental policymaking and the unequal enforcement of environmental laws and regulations. It combines with public policies or industry practices to provide benefits for whites while shifting industry costs to people of color. The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes was adopted in 1989. This global agreement shifts from thinking of toxic materials as "wastes" to thinking of them as "resources. However, the convention is co-created with industry actors and aim to accelerate the flow of toxic "resources" to less-developed countries which exacerbate the global environmental injustice. Environmental racism in South Africa is one of the worst in the world. The segregation policies forcefully settled the black communities near the polluting industries. The Durban South Industrial Basin is a typical example. The industries are mainly chemical and petrochemical industries. Local communities have experienced very high levels of air, ground, and water pollution, poor health conditions, and constant exposure to high risks.
Global climate solutions depend on low-carbon energy transitions in developing countries, but little is known about how those will unfold. Examining the transitions of Brazil and South Africa, Hochstetler reveals how choices about wind and solar power respond to four different constellations of interests and institutions, or four simultaneous political economies of energy transition. The political economy of climate change set Brazil and South Africa on different tracks, with South Africa's coal-based electricity system fighting against an existential threat. Since deforestation dominates Brazil's climate emissions, climate concerns were secondary there for electricity planning. Both saw significant mobilization around industrial policy and cost and consumption issues, showing the importance of economic considerations for electricity choices in emerging economies. Host communities resisted Brazilian wind power, but accepted other forms. Hochstetler argues that national energy transition finally depends on the intersection of these political economies, with South Africa illustrating a politicized transition mode and Brazil presenting a bureaucracy-dominant one.
Coal mining and burning are among the most destructive activities on the planet, and a major driver of environmental inequality in South Africa. This article suggests that, despite heavy constraints, initiatives involving resistance to coal are building a ‘counter-power’ which challenges inequality, generates solidarity, and is potentially infused by imaginative visions of another world beyond coal. Following the ‘social power’ approach this vision could, with deeper connections between three sites of resistance to coal – organised labour, mining affected communities and environmental justice organisations – cohere into a vision of a ‘just transition’. This could embed the anti-coal struggle in a social movement for an alternative development path to challenge deepening poverty and inequality.
This essay, a reading of Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist (1974), seeks to reconcile the promise of global environmental aesthetics with postcolonial theories of difference. While the Anthropocene is often framed as universal and unprecedented, Gordimer's ironic presentation of an earlier discourse—centered on resource limits and population bombs—demonstrates that certain themes have existed in the global environmental imagination for decades. Read alongside the history of South African conservation and Judith Butler's theory of precarity, he Conservationist develops an alternative green aesthetic, one that considers environmental problems to be produced by diverse and unequal social relations. Gordimer's dialectical response to apartheid-era conservation (an emphasis on utopianism and haunting) offers insight into South Africa's contemporary environmental politics and into ongoing debates in the environmental humanities about the value of the central analytic strategies of postcolonialism.
The tropics host about 80% of the planet’s terrestrial species and over 95% of its corals. A well-known tropical forest ecosystem to provide significant global regulating services has declined at a rate of 5.5 M ha per year from 1990-2015, while another region noted an increase per year. There is evidence that tropical region ecosystem services and disservices are the least studied in the world. This study quantified peer-review papers in the tropics, then explored the neglected ecosystem type, service category, assessment mode, applied techniques and choice dependence between ecosystem type, service category, assessment mode and applied techniques. The Google Scholar and Web of Science database were used to collect all ES & ED studies available online from 1960 to December 2017. This review covered 102 countries with 578 articles. The study showed dramatic articles increase in the last three years as more than 50% of articles were published after the year of 2014. The top countries in high articles were Mexico (n = 53), India (n = 43), and Brazil (n = 35). The ES & ED assessment tools/techniques are barely applied in tropics as only social based techniques such as interviews and questionnaire take over 45%, while biophysical tools like remote sensing and GIS appeared only in 20%, InVEST only in 3% while the rest tools are less than 1% even none such as ARIES model. Urban and marine ecosystem types, disservices category and trade-off assessment mode were the least studied. The review concluded that policy analysis ES & ED studies do not reflect the trade-offs and synergy analysis between different services which hinder the development of pragmatic policy and decisions toward ES sustainable management in the tropics. The rampant urbanization in the tropics is subjected to destroy existing ES. Thus, this review highly suggested a high concern of urbanization ecosystem. This study also calls for great academic research to give attention to the tropical rainforest region as most African countries to host such forest have not even a single article on ES & ED.
In contemporary South Africa, environmental justice is a critical question for geographers. It is argued in this chapter that whilst new civil society leadership has emerged to address environmental justice concerns in the post-apartheid period, these have not been effective in formulating an emerging ‘environmental justice framework’ by way of a coherent ideology to collectively address social and environmental risks for more effective civil society actions against macroeconomic risks. This chapter explores selected case studies to examine how leadership in social and environmental struggles has unfolded, and for joint actions. Results indicate that leadership for an emerging environmental justice framework is restricted by individualised and self-interested leaderships, undermining engagement for collective actions both within and across the social and environmental arenas. It is observed that leadership will be vital in advancing local struggles, and also ensuring expansion and connection of struggles beyond localities, but will require negotiation between leaderships on convergence.
While South African environmental activism has progressed and blossomed substantially since the 1990s, there still is no popular unified environmental movement. Some critics, such as Carl Death argue the lack of unification makes it difficult to address environmental grievances. Nadine Gordimer's Get a Life responds to this environmental problematic. Weaving in and out of the Bannerman family's thoughts, Get a Life explores what ecology and environmentalism can mean in South Africa when it is visualized from a suburban, middle-class, well-meaning male point of view. This paper examines the way the novel portrays vision, omission, and invisibility. By exploring Get a Life's motif of vision, I show that the three visions portrayed (above, below, and on the ground) all highlight distance—distance that makes it difficult to overcome borders and imagine communities, even as the ecologist voices concerns about problematic land redistribution and the effects of consumer capitalism. Privileging the visual makes black communities, and the environmental violence they suffer, invisible. Get a Life imagines a complicated terrain for South African environmental activists to navigate, in which every environmental impulse is haunted by histories of uneven development and bears global connections without critical reflection.
The 1980s was a time of incredible political ferment in South Africa with student protests, consumer boycotts of white businesses in small town, and consolidation of the union movement. The Faustian moment came when South Africa took an International Monetory Fund (IMF) loan on the eve of its first democratic election. At first, the started with just one loan and the markets were satisfied that the African National Congress (ANC) was not going to renege on paying the odious debt of the previous government. All South Africans need to work together in a concerted effort to improve service delivery, strengthen job creation and expedite economic transformation. In South Africa, joblessness is still unacceptably high even with recent growth in job numbers. Global economic prospects remain fragile. In response, the Government of the Republic of South Africa has taken a bold decision. People have chosen a path of counter-cyclical spending driven by catalytic infrastructure investment. They are striking a fine balance between protecting our sovereign integrity while leveraging the multiplier impact of fixed capital formation.
This article provides a critical examination of relationships between non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and rural movements in post-apartheid South Africa, particularly with regard to the possible subordination of movements to NGOs. In discussing NGOs as a particular organisational form, and in reviewing some arguments pertaining to NGOs and rural movements globally, I explore whether NGOs in South Africa have a progressive role to play in agrarian transformation.
Social protests in South Africa are frequent, contributing to an average of more than 8000 ‘Gatherings Act’ incidents per year recently, according to the South African Police Service. This paper is focused on discontent and social protest in Durban in 2009–2012, considering emerging trends and tactics within current understandings of social protest in South Africa. It relies mainly on mainstream media articles such as those archived in the Centre for Civil Society Social Protest Observatory. The paper examines various protest activities and protest victories in Durban, arguing that in the light of state failure, protest has been an important mechanism through which Durban citizens have made gains in the struggle for improved socio-economic conditions.
This article analyses the media images and public discourses that surrounded the 2011 ‘open toilet scandal’ or what came to be known as the ‘2011 Toilet Elections’ and the ‘Toilet Wars’. Widely circulated media images of unenclosed modern, porcelain toilets struck a raw nerve as the nation was preparing to vote in local government elections, and produced responses of shock from politicians and ordinary citizens, partly because these images seemed to condense and congeal long historical processes of racism and apartheid. Whereas the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was understood to be the key transitional justice mechanism in the mid-1990s, by the late 1990s the TRC was no longer at the centre of political life, and its mythology of national reconciliation and ‘new beginnings’ was being widely contested. What replaced it was a ‘messy’ popular politics that was preoccupied with issues relating to land, housing, sanitation, service delivery, labour conditions and employment equity. The TRC's narrowly conceived conception of transitional justice seemed unable to address these struggles to improve conditions of everyday life. The article concludes that these forms of popular politics reveal the limits and possibilities of engaging with the unfinished business of the 1994 democratic transition by developing a localized politics of transitional social justice.
Colonial dichotomies continue to operate quite freely in the present … Of these dichotomies, that between “modernity” and “tradition” has proved to be the most enduring. The first axis – modernity – is associated with progress, development, “the West”, science and technology, high standards of living, rationality and order; the other axis – tradition – is associated with stasis or even stagnation, underdevelopment, conventional tools and technologies, poverty, superstition and disorder. (Gupta. 1998:48)Knowledge is like light. Weightless and intangible, it can easily travel the world, enlightening the lives of people everywhere. Yet billions of people still live in the darkness of poverty – unnecessarily. (World Bank, 1999:1)
Considerable attempts to create a single economy of credit, in part through regularizing microlenders (especially the much-demonized loansharks or mashonisas), have been made by the South African government, notably through the National Credit Act. This article explores how borrowing and indebtedness are seen from the point of view of consumers and of those who aim to protect them. It suggests that we should speak of moneylending rather than money-lenders; that lending is often done by groups rather than by individuals (in a variant of the well-known stokvel); and that it may represent a response to so-called ‘formalization’ (Guyer 2004) of financial arrangements by those who have considerable experience of this, rather than being a bulwark against it. Based on research in Gauteng and Mpumalanga, the article critically explores prevalent stereotypes of the ‘overindebted consumer’ and the ‘black diamond’, seeking evidence both in support and in refutation of them. It discusses those factors which are conducive to and those which obstruct the achieving of the status of upwardly mobile – and simultaneously overindebted – person; demonstrates that aspiration and upward mobility, and the problems of credit or debt that accompany these, have much longer histories; and that these matters can give us insights into the contradictory character of the South African state. Its ‘neo-liberal’ dimension allows and encourages free engagement with the market and advocates the freedom to spend, even to become excessively acquisitive of material wealth. But it simultaneously attempts to regulate this in the interests of those unable to participate in this dream of conspicuous consumption. Informalization intensifies as all manner of means are devised to tap into state resources. Neo-liberal means are used to ensure the wide spread of redistribution.
This essay identifies the major trends and theoretical underpinnings of South African environmental history, and places them within the context of recent political, social, and economic developments in the post-apartheid era. Skeptical about Western conservation models, attentive both to the concerns of local communities and to transnational themes, and alert to issues of power, space, agency, and identity, this new historiography has reconfigured the colonial past in environmental terms and set an ambitious agenda for future research.
This paper examines the predicament of the postcolonial nation-state through the prism of environmental catastrophe. When are plant 'invaders' likely to become an urgent political issue? And, when they do, what might they reveal of the shifting relations among citizenship, community, and national sovereignty under neo-liberal conditions? Pursuing these questions in the 'new' South Africa, we posit three key features of postcolonial polities in the era of global capitalism: the reconfiguration of the subject-citizen, the crisis of sovereign borders, and the depoliticisation of politics. Under such conditions, we argue, aliens – both plants and people – come to embody core contradictions of boundedness and belonging. And alien-nature provides a language for voicing new forms of discrimination within a culture of 'post-racism' and civil rights.
Since 2004, South Africa has experienced a movement of local protests amounting to a rebellion of the poor. This has been widespread and intense, reaching insurrectionary proportions in some cases. On the surface, the protests have been about service delivery and against uncaring, self-serving, and corrupt leaders of municipalities. A key feature has been mass participation by a new generation of fighters, especially unemployed youth but also school students. Many issues that underpinned the ascendency of Jacob Zuma also fuel the present action, including a sense of injustice arising from the realities of persistent inequality. While the inter-connections between the local protests, and between the local protests and militant action involving other elements of civil society, are limited, it is suggested that this is likely to change. The analysis presented here draws on rapid-response research conducted by the author and his colleagues in five of the so-called ‘hot spots’.
This article deconstructs the problematic way the 'Poor' are represented by the intellectual 'Left' as a fixed, virtuous subject. Even while this fixed identity is actively mobilised by people themselves to gain symbolic and real power, I argue that the philosopher's fixation on the singular subjectivity of the oppressed confines the 'Poor' to their very subjugation. Instead, I propose a more nuanced understanding of how agency and oppression occur within the 'uncomfortable collaborations' that are forged between various actors. My argument is grounded in experiences with the shack dwellers movement in Durban (Abahlali baseMjondolo, ABM), and young AIDS activists in Khayelitsha and Atlantis, South Africa.
Environmental discourse in South Africa has undergone dramatic change in the 1990s. Since the unbanning of the ANC and other anti‐apartheid organizations there has been an important re‐conceptualization of environmental issues and a rapid politicization of environmental debates. Organizations like the Environmental Justice Networking Forum (EJNF) have made the links between poverty and ecology an environmental priority in the country and important gains have been made on a wide range of environmental fronts. Environmental debates in South Africa have shifted from an historically racist and exclusionary discourse to one in which the definition of ‘the environment’ has expanded to include the working and living environments of black South Africans. This has had a profound impact on the way that environmental policy is prioritized and developed in the country and has contributed to a strong, and growing, environmental justice movement in the country.
This introduction considers three themes that recur across the various contributions to this collection. The first is the nature of borders and how these have been affected by the increase in transnational collective action and the growth in the power of transnational institutions. The second is the distinction between environmental movements and the social movement forms of environmentalism: meaning that not all forms of environmental movement are social movements. The third is the evidence of the diversity of environmentalisms, which leads us to identify three principal kinds of environmental movement, the post-material movements strongest in the United States and Australia, the post-industrial movements that are strongest in Europe and the post-colonial movements of the South.
24 Zarina Patel TRANSFORMATION 57 (2005) ISSN 0258-7696 24 Article Understanding environmental change in South African cities: a landscape approach1 Zarina Patel ��the making, remaking and making again of places and environments are an essential part of what human beings do�. (Campbell 2002:273) �have faith in human creativity and change: movement and change are life: and the only enemy, the only heresy, is finality�. (Mellows 1967, in Harrison 2002:1) Introduction Although change is characterised as an inevitable force, with multiple catalysts, having diverse effects, the forces responsible for environmental change are not all inevitable or unavoidable.2 The approach taken in this paper in describing environmental change in South Africa is one that acknowledges the pivotal role of the relationship between society and nature in understanding environmental change. This paper rejects what Macnaghten and Urry (1998) have described as �environmental realism�, a doctrine that separates the environment as a physical entity from social practices and human experience. Instead, environmental change is understood as resulting from of a combination of natural as well as sociocultural and political processes. Decisions about the allocation and consumption of resources are deeply political acts, entrenched in systems of power, with the effects of environmental change being experienced differently by different sectors of society. As such, there is no single interpretation of environmental change, or of nature for that matter. What exists instead are a diversity of natures and interpretations of environmental change, which are constituted through a variety of socio-cultural processes (Macnaghten and Urry 1998). Documenting changes to the environment will vary depending on the eye of the beholder. The effects of these changes will also vary, depending on who 25 Understanding environmental change in South African cities is doing the interpretation (Hajer 1995). Given the complexity of discussing environmental change, any discussion on changes in the environment in South Africa must therefore revolve around developing a conceptual framework for understanding how changes in the environment are interpreted and acted upon. This paper proceeds to describe some of the changes in the environmental landscape of South African cities. In doing so, it argues that a positivist approach to understanding landscape change falls short of providing us with a deeper engagement with the political, social and cultural processes that shape the landscape. Furthermore, descriptions of the environmental landscape do not allow for a discussion of the forces and influences that do not take on a physical manifestation, but have a crucial role to play in understanding transformations in South African society and its relationship with the environment. It is argued that an approach to understanding changes in the environment that will yield a more textured appreciation of environmental change would depend on the development of a framework within which to understand environmental change. This paper makes use of a landscape approach for understanding environmental change, in order to allow for an engagement with the political catalysts for environmental change, and the social and cultural filters through which landscapes can be interpreted. A number of case studies are used to demonstrate the usefulness of a landscape approach for achieving this objective. A more nuanced approach to understanding environmental change and society�s changing relationship to the environment, will serve to contribute towards previous calls for the development of a �clearer, indigenous conceptual framework [for sustainable development] � tailor made for the priorities of South Africa� (Patel 2000:394). The environment and the urban landscape South African cities have all been shaped by common national processes but also have their own distinctive features in terms of the natural environment, economic, social and cultural make-up, and current dynamics (Roberts et al 1998). The stark juxtaposition of first and third world conditions in close proximity within the urban environment presents a range of environment and development challenges. Cities are characterised by well-developed and powerful institutional, financial and technical capabilities, concentrated mainly in the urban core (Hindson and Patel 26 Zarina Patel 1999). Cities are also the focus of much industrial and mining development, controlled largely by multinationals, impacting negatively on marginalised communities living adjacent to and within industrial development zones. At the other end of the spectrum, cities have massive townships3 on their peripheries, and...
Despite constitutional commitments to environmental justice in South Africa, evidence indicates that the poor and the natural environment continue to be marginalised in decision making. This paper examines the role of environmental assessment procedures, specifically Environmental Impact Assessments, in shaping outcomes at the local level to understand how injustices are perpetuated and maintained. Injustices are understood here by examining the relationship between power, knowledge and rationality, and the effects these have on including the public in decision‐making processes. In the revamping of environmental assessment regulations in South Africa, much attention has been paid to streamlining the process of assessment. However, this paper argues that environmentally just decisions cannot be made in a context where debates are centred on process. Instead, debates need to be redirected to qualities of outcomes, foregrounding the need for an approach grounded in questions of value. Recognising that the poor and the natural environment tend to systematically lose out in a context where environment is pitted against development, environmental assessment must be able to take into account the distributional consequences of decisions. Furthermore, the paper makes a case for the need to challenge the broader political context within which environmental assessments are conducted, as environmental assessments cannot replace broader strategic and policy debates. In the absence of this broader institutional challenge, political power will continue to work through decision‐making tools to perpetuate and maintain systems of injustice.
A wide body of scholarly literature on social movements on an international level emphatically, but uncritically, declares that ‘another world is possible’. This paper investigates this trend and its implications for political and academic practice in post-apartheid South Africa, where community-based movements have emerged primarily in order to access basic services. In particular, it highlights the pivotal role that the state and poor people's immediate basic needs play in limiting social movements' contribution towards a transformative development agenda. Paying close attention to poor people's struggles and needs, the paper argues that there is a sharp disjuncture between the ideologies manufactured by academics, and the worldviews that the working class and poor possess. It concludes by providing insight into the possibilities for post-apartheid political struggles – praxis – to lead to the formation of class consciousness and to a formidable challenge to neoliberalism.
Collective action in support of the redistribution of wealth and power in South Africa was initially led by the trade union movement. But, as more labour-market entrants have failed to find work in the formal economy, unions' capacity to speak for the poor has declined. Scholars and activists have, therefore, come to see new social movements as a superior source of effective action for redistribution. Analysis reveals that the movements are not equipped to lead a redistributive coalition but that co-operation between unions and social movements, and a synergy between their approaches, is most likely to produce effective redistributive politics.
[Au-delà des bords? Les mouvements sociaux sud-africains et la politique de redistribution]. L'action collective en faveur de la redistribution des richesses et du pouvoir en Afrique du Sud était initialement dirigée par le mouvement syndical. Mais, compte tenu du fait que des nouveaux arrivants dans le marché d'emploi n'ont pas réussi à trouver du travail dans l'économie formelle, la capacité des syndicats de parler au nom des pauvres a diminué. Les universitaires et les activistes sont, par conséquent, arrivés à voir de nouveaux mouvements sociaux comme une source supérieure d'une action efficace pour la redistribution. L'analyse révèle que les mouvements ne sont pas équipés pour mener une coalition de redistribution, mais la coopération entre les syndicats et les mouvements sociaux, et une synergie entre leurs approches, est plus susceptible de produire des politiques efficaces de redistribution.
Mots-clés : redistribution; politiques; mouvements sociaux; syndicats; Afrique du Sud
This article explores the internal dynamics and external impact of a South African farm workers' movement, Sikhula Sonke. It looks at the extent to which this women-led ‘social movement trade union’ has succeeded in improving the livelihoods of Western Cape farm workers. Drawing from the organisation's own aims, it investigates whether the movement has created a democratic organisational structure, addressed social and economic inequality on Western Cape farms and effectively challenged unfair labour practices. The article argues that the movement, although facing historical conditions of disempowerment, has set up the foundations of an empowering representational structure. It has begun to address the social challenges of paternalism, patriarchy and racism between workers and, through an effective use of strategies that target both employers and government, successfully challenged numerous cases of unfair labour practice. Furthermore, beyond meeting its immediate aims, there are broader lessons that can be learnt from Sikhula Sonke. The movement deepens participatory democracy in the Western Cape through its ability to empower citizens and its use of political institutions. More significantly, Sikhula Sonke opens up spaces for greater participation in the democratic system by its use of ‘radical’ and ‘moderate flanks’ and by exploiting the multidimensional nature of the state.
This article analyses in some detail the scientific developments relating to extensive game ranching for meat production in South Africa from the 1960s onwards. Initially it recalls how game was utilised in South Africa in the nineteenth century and then reflects on the rise of the modern livestock industry and its detrimental effect on the herds of game that survived in the region into the twentieth century. The roles of scientists from different regions—Britain, the United States and South Africa—are identified and their respective scientific contributions to the wildlife industry evaluated. The narrative is situated within the con-text of a rise in environmental consciousness in the mid-twentieth century and the recent challenges that have faced the formal agricultural and pastoral sector in South Africa.
Transfrontier conservation is a global concept which encompasses the protection of biodiversity spanning the borders of two or more countries in ways that support local economic development, international relations and peace. Nowhere is this more relevant but highly debatable than in Africa, which is home to a third of the world's terrestrial biodiversity, while at the same time hosting its poorest nations. This is one of the first books to account for the emergence of transfrontier conservation in Africa against international experiences in bioregional planning. The roles of the state and local populations are analysed, as well as the ecological, socio-economic and political implications.
While no policymaker would claim to be celebrating the centenary of the Natives Land Act, the form and content of the commemoration of this significant event on the website of the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform has some unsettling parallels with the celebratory countdown to the Soccer World Cup of 2010. Rather than using the centenary to acknowledge the significant changes in relations to land of the past century, the state is treating it as an opportunity for political theatre that deflects attention from serious weaknesses in its land reform programme. If the centenary of the 1913 Land Act is to be an opportunity for meaningful reflection, then a more thoughtful engagement is required with major processes of social change and regional differentiation over the past 100 years.
The paper limns modes of consumption and wastefulness in recent South African fiction about the township. It draws upon moves of aspiration and carelessness articulated in the youth practice I’khothane to think through the ways in which conspicuous destruction around car-use maps onto township socialities. Accordingly, it compares Sifiso Mzobe’s Young Blood and David Dinwoodie-Irving’s African Cookboy as texts utilizing scenes of consumption and destruction with a variety of effects. While commodity ownership and disposal enunciate identities that can unsettle the status quo, the article argues that aspiration alone cannot provide resources with which to shift structural inequalities persisting in South African cities.
The centenary of the Natives Land Act of 1913 offers an avenue through which we can rethink and debate post-apartheid land reform. This paper focuses on how this Act epitomised the culmination of ideas about state and society and also laid the foundation for the social geography of the country. The Act set the stage for the configuration of the country through land as a tool for spatial planning. The principal objective of the paper is to highlight aspects of the Act that have cemented the social geography of the country, and to reflect on how and why those aspects continue to impede the redrawing of social and territorial borders in post-apartheid South Africa. The paper calls for a deeper reflection on the philosophical and material meanings that the Natives Land Act embodied, and how these have been disrupted or reinforced in whole or parts by post-apartheid policies and programmes.
How might we understand inclusionary rights to common means of life within landscapes of entrenched exclusion? This essay addresses this question through processes of racialized dispossession, segregation, industrialization, and activism, through the specific contradictory space of industrial-residential South Durban. Beginning with the colonial effects of Victorian expertise, intervention, and subjectivity with respect to vitality, variously construed, the article argues that biopolitical tools have been harnessed to divergent imperatives throughout twentieth-century South Africa. Within these contradictions, South Durban's segregated populations were provided segregated housing, access to industrial work, proximity to the city center, and, by the 1950s, exposure to toxic pollution. Differentiated biopolitics generated specific opportunities and frustrations. As apartheid entered a phase of deepening crisis, Durban's subalterns began to organize in new ways to demand their right to the city. Importantly, while actual commons may have been elusive, the idea of commons has remained politically vital.
In current debates on transformation in South Africa, socio-spatial differentiation and the ways racism may be produced in the built environment are rarely explored. While racial boundaries have become less rigid, new proxies for racism are developing, while racial inequalities deepen. Among the privileged strata, defence of safe neighbourhoods and property values often slides into certain kinds of exclusions, which take on racial hues. This article takes a pessimistic view of socio-spatial change in South Africa and explores how the built environment and racism are linked. It argues for a wide definition of environmental racism and points to the limits of current environmental rights discourse.
The New Growth Path (NGP) is the symbolic policy document of South Africa's newly formed Department of Economic Development. It marks an intended break with the growth path of the first two decades of the post-apartheid era. But does it do so in principle and is it likely to do so in practice? This paper suggests otherwise because of its failure to address, let alone remedy, the key determining features of the post-apartheid economic landscape. These are the (international) financialisation of (domestic) conglomerate capital especially associated with (illegal) capital flight, the complicity of a newly formed black elite, and the continuing reliance upon how these interact with South Africa's longstanding minerals–energy complex (MEC). Without breaking with these features, the NGP in particular, and policy more generally, will seek to temper the gains and organisational opposition of better-off workers for putative benefits to those deprived of employment and basic levels of public provision.
[Évaluer la nouvelle direction de croissance d'Afrique du Sud : cadre pour le changement?] La nouvelle ligne de croissance (NGP) est le document de la politique symbolique du nouveau ministère sud-africain de développement économique. Il marque une pause prévue avec la ligne de la croissance des deux premières décennies survenues après l'ère de l'apartheid. Mais est-ce que cela se confirme dans le principe et dans la pratique? Ce document suggère le contraire, à cause de son incapacité à répondre - sans parler de remède – aux principales caractéristiques qui déterminent le paysage économique de la période après l'apartheid. Il s'agit de la financiarisation (internationale) du capital conglomérat (domestique), en particulier associée à la fuite (illégale) des capitaux, la complicité d'une élite noire nouvellement constituée, et d'un appui persistant sur la façon dont ceux-ci interagissent avec le complexe de longue date des minéraux d'énergie de l'Afrique du Sud. Sans rompre avec ces caractéristiques, la NGP en particulier, et plus généralement la politique, cherchera à tempérer les gains et l'opposition de l'organisation des travailleurs plus aisés pour des avantages supposés aux personnes privées d'emploi et les niveaux de base de la prestation publique.
Mots-clés: La Nouvelle trajectoire de croissance ; financiarisation ; complexe des minéraux d'énergie ; Afrique du Sud
Environmental movements in the Third World are a relatively recent phenomenon. They should be seen, not as concerned purely with environmental issues, but as manifestations of wider, usually, political concerns. Such movements tend to attract the unempowered ‐ those without the means to address their concerns in more conventional ways. Movements in India, Kenya, Indonesia, Tahiti and Nigeria are examined in the search for factors that explain their success or failure. If most were not, in the short term, successful, they have nevertheless helped to place environmental concerns on the political agenda of many countries in the Third World.
This paper analyses the growing discourse on climate change and migration from the perspective of critical race theory. The main contention put forward is that the figure of the climate change migrant is racialised to the extent that it is made to bear racial connotations. The paper traces the racialisation of the figure of the climate-change migrant through three specific racial tropes evident in the discourse on climate-change and migration: naturalisation; the loss of political status; and ambiguity. The paper concludes with the observation that the racialisation of climate-change and migration discourse does not point to any sort of universal theory of racialisation pertinent to the discourse but, instead, reaffirms the notion that racialisation is a contingent phenomenon. The paper also calls for an interpretation of climate change that is sensitive to racialisation as a key social process in the configuration of climate-change and migration discourse.
Global environmental politics is emerging as a key field for South African diplomacy and foreign policy, in which Pretoria is endeavouring to lead by example. Environmental summits and conferences such as Johannesburg (2002) and Copenhagen (2009) have been crucial stages for the performance of this role as an environmental leader, and in December 2011 Durban will host the seventeenth Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. There are also signs from within policy-making circles that ‘the environment’ is seen as a field in which some of the lustre of South Africa’s post-1994 international high moral standing could be recovered. However, tensions remain between South Africa’s performance and rhetoric on the global stage, and domestic development paths which continue to be environmentally unsustainable. The article concludes by suggesting that while the visibility and prominence of South Africa as an actor in global environmental politics is likely to grow, it remains doubtful whether this represents a sustained and committed new direction in South African foreign policy.
Public Culture 16.3 (2004) 373-405
If there is ever an African form of metropolitan modernity, then Johannesburg will have been its classical location. The idea of the metropolis in European thought has always been linked to that of "civilization" (a form of existence as well as a structure of time) and capitalist rationalization. Indeed, the Western imagination defines the metropolis as the general form assumed by the rationalization of relations of production (the increasing prevalence of the commodity system) and the rationalization of the social sphere (human relations) that follows it. A defining moment of metropolitan modernity is realized when the two spheres rely upon purely functional relations among people and things and subjectivity takes the form of calculation and abstraction.
One such moment is epitomized by the instrumentality that labor acquires in the production, circulation, and reproduction of capital. Another moment is to be found in the way that the circulation of goods and commodities, as well as the constant process of buying and selling, results in the liquidation of tradition and its substitution by a culture of indifference and restlessness that nourishes self-stylization. Yet another is to be found in the ways that luxury, pleasure, consumption, and other stimuli are said to affect the sensory foundations of mental life and the central role they play in the process of subject formation in general.
This study is highly speculative. It uses the notion superfluity to revisit the biopolitics of Johannesburg as a "racial city" and its transition to a metropolitan form. In the wake of the collapse of apartheid (an insidious form of state racism), the collage of various fragments of the former city are opening up a space for experiences of displacement, substitution, and condensation, none of which is purely and simply a repetition of a repressed past, but rather a manifestation of traumatic amnesia and, in some cases, nostalgia or even mourning. In the process, an original form, if not of African cosmopolitanism then of the performance of worldliness, emerges. It is structurally shaped by the intertwined realities of bare life (mass poverty), the global logic of commodities, and the formation of a consumer public. Today, the nervous rhythm of the city and its cultural pulse are made up of an unrepentant commercialism that combines technology, capital, and speculation.
As I use the term here, superfluity does not refer only to the aesthetics of surfaces and quantities, and to how such an aesthetics is premised on the capacity of things to hypnotize, overexcite, or paralyze the senses. To my mind, superfluity refers also to the dialectics of indispensability and expendability of both labor and life, people and things. It refers to the obfuscation of any exchange or use value that labor might have, and to the emptying of any meaning that might be attached to the act of measurement or quantification itself, insofar as numerical representation is as much a fact as it is a form of fantasy.
But the abolition of the very meaning of quantification, or the general conversion of number into fiction, is also a way of writing time, of forgetting and remembering. Moreover, I argue that the postapartheid metropolis in general, and Johannesburg in particular, is being rewritten in ways that are not unlike the operations of the unconscious. The topography of the unconscious is paradoxical and elusive because it is bound to several distinct modes of temporality. So is the psychic life of the metropolis. This psychic life is inseparable from the metropolitan form: its design, its architectural topographies, its public graphics and surfaces. Metropolitan built forms are themselves a projective extension of the society's archaic or primal fantasies, the ghost dances and the slave spectacles at its foundation.
Johannesburg began as a mining camp of tents and corrugated iron buildings during the Witwatersrand gold rush of the late nineteenth century. As South Africa was consolidated as a white supremacist state, Johannesburg developed into a colonial town. Like every colonial town, it found it hard to resist the temptation of mimicry, that is, of imagining itself as an English town and...
The land question is fundamental to understanding the possibilities and limits of change in the South African context. It can legitimately be argued that the measurement of transforming South African society from its colonial and apartheid past to a more democratic dispensation directly correlates with the extent of land redistribution to blacks. Measures to deal with land and agrarian transformation in South Africa have been reluctant and ineffectual, to say the least. This article will trace the historical origins of the weaknesses of both government and civil society interventions. The author argues that the dominant theoretical and ideological forces which took centre stage at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle had no thorough-going understanding of what a liberation would entail for the majority, and were trapped by ‘liberal instrumentalist’ conceptions of power. This article will analyse the National Land Committee (NLC), one of South Africa's key land non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and will pose the question, can NGOs be consistent counter-hegemonic forces to capital and racism?
This article seeks to give an outline of the key events in the unfolding struggle in Mandela Park, Cape Town, South Africa, against evictions and disconnections from water and electricity. It also seeks to situate this sketch of the emergence and trajectory of these struggles in a broader narrative about the Post-Apartheid State’s turn to neo-liberalism. We argue that, in certain instances, the increased political legitimacy of the State, consequent to the elite transition from apartheid to neo-liberalism, has enabled it to step-up attacks on the poor. Furthermore, we also argue that some of the new movements that have emerged to oppose neo-liberalism mark a new stage in the South African struggles: against the elitism of the ANC tradition, they believe that, in Fanon’s famous phrase, ‘the only magic hands are the hands of the people’. However we caution that, largely as a result of the strains and difficulties of organizing under growing state repression, there is a danger that new forms of authoritarianism could emerge and pose a serious risk to the growth and development of the rebellion begun by these new movements.
In 2007, Smuts Ngonyama, then leading spokesperson for the South African government and the ANC, triggered a public controversy by proclaiming, ‘I didn't join the struggle to be poor’: a frank conjunction of liberation with wealth and what it can buy. For all the vociferous critique of Ngonyama, there are many whose life trajectories seem to underwrite his position. This article reflects on some of the historical antecedents of this version of freedom, arguing for an historically constitutive relationship between the regulation of race in South Africa and the regulation of consumption.
Within the short space of a few decades, the South African white male's role as a game ranger and conservationist rose to glory and fell from grace. The disgrace roughly coincided with the demise of apartheid as the ideological basis of racial hierarchies became more widely recognised. The illegitimacy of the white conservationist's colonial role as the gamekeeper and custodian who forcibly withheld natural resources from African people became apparent. This knocked the calling and mission of the game ranger off the moral high ground, and forced it down to the grassroots to consider more egalitarian participatory approaches. While the racial and class connotations of colonial conservation have been well recognised, such analyses have rested on the presentation of the game ranger as an insensitive khaki‐clad macho man on a militarised mission, possibly driven by romantic ideals. In such depictions, the losers of this war over resources are rural African people — especially women who are generally seen as closer to the earth in the struggle for livelihood. This essay does not seek to challenge such a reading of history, but maintains that the story is not that simple. White men did not make this history themselves. Both the racial and gendered aspects of nature conservation need to be seen in a multi‐dimensional frame that accommodates the insouciant agency of people, as well as nature. This it does by focusing on South African wilderness politics in the province of KwaZulu‐Natal. It also shows the links with the global situation and situates such an analysis in terms of the debates about changing masculinities where the frontier experience has been fundamental. In another settler society (Australia) the environmental movement which identifies with wilderness in particular, has been shown to be an important home for men seeking to shrug off their hegemonic power and attempting to move against the ingrained habits of their race and class identities. In the maverick lives of Ian Player and Nick Steele, the two white men principally examined here, identification with wild nature and indigenous Africans did involve some quite radical reorientation away from the milieu of the white ruling class. They anticipated and influenced trends that came to the global environmental movement relatively recently. Player and Steele were, however, caught up in circumstances that made for some curious local twists in their adventures on a frontier’ where the laws of nature became confused with social ideals.
When it appeared in 1983, Black Politics in South Africa offered a revised interpretation of developments in black South African politics in the 1950s and early 1960s. In comparison to existing academic and popular writing on this topic, Black Politics proposed that ANC-led resistance had much less organisational coherence than represented conventionally and that through the decade political opposition to apartheid would be shaped mainly by local dynamics and opportunities. This argument led to the exploration of different data sets and allowed new insights, in particular in showing how political organisations recruited among very specific social groups and in indicating the ways in which they were shaped by ‘inherent’ ideas or folk beliefs. A second section of the paper considers ways in which, if Black Politics were to be written afresh, the methodology and emphases might change in the light of fresh evidence and as a consequence of ANC's subsequent development up to the present.
Public Culture 16.3 (2004) 430-452
Global cities, like New York, San Salvador, or Shanghai, have served as critical sites for the remixing and reassembling of racial identities. This has taken specific and concrete form in Johannesburg, where, particularly after 1994, the city has become a site for new media cultures as a wide range of radio stations, television talk shows, and local soap operas went on air and magazines were founded. Postarchitectural spaces, like billboards, came to be used to insert products, like cell phones or AIDS campaigns, into youth culture itself. Darrel Bristow-Bovey writes of the city's skyline:
Much of what Bristow-Bovey writes about Johannesburg is also true of the main roads through Soweto, where one sees vast billboards dwarfing shacks and lower-middle-class dwellings. Such juxtaposition of media cultures and poverty marks the visual and material dimensions of Johannesburg, generally. This essay is about these urban visual forms, which embody concepts of the urban, of race, and of culture that have much to tell us about Johannesburg as it participates in global cultures of circulation. These visual cultures are the loci of a language of aspiration, a language that, as we will see, both speaks to and silences psychic and material "remainders" beyond the text: crime, economic hardship, and bodily frailties, even death itself, in the wake of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
In discussing urban visual cultures, I pay close attention to modes of stylizing the self increasingly common among young people in the city. By stylization of the self, I am referring to how people seek to transform themselves into singular beings, to make their lives into an oeuvre that carries with it certain stylistic criteria. I am also referring to the emergence of explicit forms of selfhood within the public domain and the rise of the first-person singular within the work of liberation. My focus on self-styling avoids easy equations between the young, postapartheid generation in Johannesburg and a global youth culture. Generation Y cannot be reduced to mere surface(s), nor is it simply a subcultural critique of "official culture." We also need to reformulate the way the local and global intersect in South Africa to understand the innovative, often still unchartered borderlands in which youth cultures give voice to imaginative worlds very different from those of the parental generation.
The generation I discuss in this essay includes those who have attended racially mixed (model C) schools in the city as well as many who attended exclusively black township schools. I focus specifically on the emergence of a new city youth culture, called Y, loxion culture, or loxion kulcha, centered in Rosebank, Johannesburg, but stretching well beyond this trendy, affluent, and increasingly racially mixed suburb. I show how young people remake the past in very specific ways in the services of the present and the future and how they develop a mode of cultural accessorization in the making of their contemporary selfhood. I argue that accessorization should be understood neither as a Foucauldian biopolitics nor as an epidermal or nanopolitics, in the sense developed by Paul Gilroy. Rather, it is a practice that represents the new edge of a youth movement that cuts across sonic, sartorial, visual, and textual cultures to produce a dense interconnectivity among them. This accessorization of...
From Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) to Van Niekerk's Agaat (2004), the farm novel has reflected South Africa's experience of colonial conflict, white supremacy, gender struggle and nationalism. Revisited at key historical moments, the farm novel describes a deterministic relationship between genre and ideology, drawing attention to the role a particular fictional mode has played in justifying the disenfranchisement of blacks and the disempowerment of women. The social context in which the Afrikaans farm novel developed was one of emerging Afrikaner nationalism; it lent credibility to a story about Afrikaners' rural origins that provided an illusion of continuity in South African history and a description of an unchanging Afrikaner identity. Since the 1960s, leftist Afrikaans writers, concerned with the role the early farm novel played in promoting white supremacy, have rewritten it in order to deconstruct its themes and tropes. J.M. Coetzee's English-medium challenge to the farm novel genre, in his fiction and elsewhere, can be viewed in this context. Increasingly, since the end of apartheid, feminist versions of the genre have articulated connections between nationalist ideology, the canon and the representation of gender. I view recent rewritings by Marlene van Niekerk, particularly, as a challenge to both literary convention and racist-masculinist ideology. Her work draws attention to the genre's importance in describing the relationship between white supremacy and land ownership; moreover, it proposes new directions for the study of pastoral traditions in South African writing.
This article uses experiences from South Africa to argue that, despite progress made in making biodiversity conservation compatible with social, political and economic changes, progress could still be limited by reluctance of social actors to acknowledge and engage with the issue of race. The article argues that acknowledging the history of conservation in Africa, including close ties to racially charged colonialism, could be a positive impetus in the transformation of conservation to make it more socially, economically and politically justifiable.