ISSN: 1996-2126
Affiliations: University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), School of Built Environment and Development Studies
Source: South African Journal on Human Rights, Volume 29 Issue 1, 2013, p. 180 – 191
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ISSN: 1996-2126
Affiliations: Doctoral candidate, Department of Geography; Graduate Fellow, Comparative Law and Society Studies Center, University of Washington, Seattle
Source: South African Journal on Human Rights, Volume 29 Issue 1, 2013, p. 170 – 179
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ISSN: 1996-2126
Affiliations: Post-graduate law student, investigative journalist, Africa Fellow at the World Policy Institute, and commissioning editor at the Forum for African Investigative Reporters (FAIR); coordinator of the South African branch of the Environmental Justice Organisations, Trade and Liabilities (EJOLT) initiative, University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society (CCS); School of Built Environment and Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society (CCS)
Source: South African Journal on Human Rights, Volume 29 Issue 1, 2013, p. 144 – 169
Since the December 2011 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties 17 in Durban and the Rio+20 Summit on Sustainable Development, attention has turned to whether the ‘Green Economy’, the concept of ‘natural capital’ and ‘Payment for Ecosystem Services’ together facilitate the management of new environmentally-financialised markets whose aim is to price nature and its pollution, so as to achieve maximally efficient exploitation of resources (an example of which is carbon trading). Alternatively, if there are flaws in such markets, should society instead move towards retributive payments for ‘ecological debt’ based on both ‘loss and damage’ accounting (introduced at the UNFCCC COP18 in Doha) and environmental justice, in order that the valuing of nature is limited to fines for damages and then prohibitions on further pollution. These two countervailing philosophies play out in high-profile projects and pilot social-policy schemes in southern Africa, in ways that will teach the world foundational concepts surrounding ecological reparations.
ISSN: 1996-2126
Affiliations: School of Built Environment and Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) Centre for Civil Society (CCS)
Source: South African Journal on Human Rights, Volume 29 Issue 1, 2013, p. 125 – 143
Can a rights-based agenda potentially challenge the dominant market narrative with respect to water access, and in the process, also address climate change reparations, adaptation and mitigation? Learning from the case of water in the most advanced court challenge to neo-liberal state power that has yet been adjudicated, in Johannesburg in 2009, it is just as likely that rights-talk will be co-opted by neo-liberalism. If that happens more systematically within the climate justice struggle, at a time activism intensifies and court cases emerge more frequently, momentum towards a genuine breakthrough against corporate control of global environmental governance (amplified now under the rubric of the ‘Green Economy’) could well be distracted, halted or even reversed. The classical problems associated with rights-based narratives — their basis in liberal individualism and disconnection from broader socio-economic and ecological processes — may continue to be crippling, as witnessed in the example of South African water policy, law and activism. The specific case involves a Paris-based water privatisation company (Suez) whose policies in Johannesburg led five Sowetans to sue the city to increase water supply and cease imposing pre-payment meters. The same ideological debates — how to fuse neo-liberal imperatives with rights rhetoric — took centre stage during the June 2012 Rio+20 Earth Summit. There, the dominant trend towards market determinations of nature required a stronger countervailing ‘decommodification’ narrative than ‘rights talk’ can offer. The question posed here, is whether using human rights considerations will make contestation of ‘neo-liberalised nature’ any easier, and the answer arrived at is negative, based on the evidence from Johannesburg. Instead, ‘commoning’ is the alternative narrative, ie arriving at the commons through and beyond rights.
ISSN: 1996-2126
Affiliations: Institute of Social Studies (The Hague), Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands; Universidad Centroamericana (UCA), Nicaragua; Center for International Climate and Environmental Research-Oslo and Christian Michelsens Insitute (CMI)
Source: South African Journal on Human Rights, Volume 29 Issue 1, 2013, p. 91 – 124
The Human Development Report 2007/2008 about climate change and development made bold arguments concerning human rights and justice for the poor and for disadvantaged populations. However, its policy proposals were not as bold, looking very similar to those of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2010. In this article we investigate in which direction the thinking on environment and sustainability by UNDP’s Human Development Report Office has evolved since the HDR 2007/2008. A detailed frame- and lexical analysis of the HDR 2011 on Sustainability and Equity shows a markedly technocratic direction, largely apolitical and insensitive to human rights issues and justice, giving a diluted successor to the HDR 2007/2008 and now close in perspective to the World Bank. This direction, as well as the little attention to the socio-economic and political barriers to sustainability and to climate change impacts we find in the HDR 2011, has consequences for the poorest sectors of South Africa’s society.
ISSN: 1996-2126
Affiliations: Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages, University of Bergen; PhD, Adviser, Department of Research Management, University of Bergen
Source: South African Journal on Human Rights, Volume 29 Issue 1, 2013, p. 61 – 90
In late 2011 the South African government published a White Paper outlining climate change response policies for the coming decades. Among the main topics of the text were the socio-economic and climatic vulnerabilities of the country, including the situation of the poor. With the aim of analysing the argumentation regarding climate change and social justice we develop a combined linguistic and discursive approach, starting with occurrences of keywords pertaining to rights, equity and poverty. The White Paper’s conceptualisation of climate change is explored as a narrative, at the level of the text as a whole. This combined analysis shows that the legal rights of the poor are hardly given any place in the argumentation, whereas less constricting political intentions are far more present. Furthermore, the text attributes a passive role to the poor, dependent on the benevolence of a government that attributes the role of hero to itself.