Sustainability Transitions in South Africa

Najma Mohamed

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138727991
• eBook ISBN: 9781351749626
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

South Africa's transition to a greener economy features prominently in the long-term development vision of the country, and is an integral part of the country's national climate change response strategy. Despite significant gains in socio-economic development since its transition to democracy, the country continues to face the triple challenges of rising unemployment, income inequality and poverty – amid a slowdown in economic growth. Sustainability transitions offer new ways of shifting the trajectory of South Africa's resource-intensive economy towards low-carbon pathways linked to the country's transformative development agenda.

Calls for inclusive approaches to greening the South African economy, which addresses the most vulnerable in society and ensures that the benefits of sustainability innovations reach all South Africans, are becoming more pronounced as sustainable development policy reforms are being implemented. The question that should be placed centre stage in South Africa's sustainability discourse is whether notions of justice and inclusivity are being sufficiently addressed in the design and implementation of policy and programme interventions.

This book explores South Africa's sustainability transition through reflections on critical policy, economic, technological, social and environmental drivers. It provides a synthesis of theoretical insights, including new models and concepts, and praxis through illustrations from South Africa's growing landscape of sustainable development policies and programmes. Finally, it assesses whether these transition pathways are beginning to reconfigure the system-level structures hindering the country's goal of 'ensuring environmental sustainability and an equitable transition to a low-carbon economy'.

1 South Africa’s transition to sustainability

An overview

Najma Mohamed

Introduction

The global ascendance of sustainability narratives, through the Paris Agreement on climate change and the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, has reinvigorated sustainable development discourses. This revival can be attributed primarily to the escalation of global social and environmental crises such as climate change, unemployment, inequality and environmental degradation, coupled with the financial crisis of 2008, which exposed the limitations and contradictions of existing development models (Cook et al., 2012). These multiple crises also opened up new pathways for policy reforms that promote sustainable development.

Sustainable development is widely accepted globally as a policy framework in planning and development, and has featured prominently in environmental policy formulation in South Africa. Post-apartheid environmental discourse highlighted the importance of centralising social and environmental outcomes in addressing the country’s development challenges and the inequities of the past. In September 2015, South Africa signed up to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Three years before, in 2012, the country finalised its development agenda and vision for 2030, the National Development Plan (NDP), which expressed a commitment towards embarking on a just transition to a low-carbon development pathway.

South Africa’s transition to a greener development pathway is reflected in the mainstreaming of environmental sustainability, and more recently climate change, in a suite of macro-economic and sector-specific policies, and a marked increase in environmental investments by the public and private sector. This is vividly illustrated in the renewable energy procurement programme, which saw the country emerge as one of the fastest growing renewable energy markets in the world. Sector- and technology-specific strategies have been instituted at the national level, supporting the development of biofuels, biogas and electric vehicle industries, for instance, while sub-national green economy strategies and plans have been developed. To date, seven of the nine provinces in South Africa have developed provincial strategies that identify the driving sectors and focus areas for green economic development at the sub-national level. Climate and environmental drivers have been central in making a case for transitioning to an employment-rich, low-carbon economy, and for developing policies, mechanisms and technologies which can build the resilience of the South African economy and society. A vision for an effective climate change response and transition to a climate resilient, efficient and equitable low-carbon economy and society thus exists.

This book explores South Africa’s sustainability transition through reflections of the context and critical systems which are enabling and driving this transition – with an explicit focus on whether this transition is addressing the environment and development challenges of the country. Increasingly, questions and critiques are being raised whether current sustainability transition pathways are delivering social outcomes and whether they could catalyse the transformative structural and system reform needed to address the deep-rooted causes of rising inequalities and environmental degradation.

The environment and development challenges facing South Africa are largely structural in nature, based in part on the enduring legacy of apartheid, but also rooted in the development trajectory which the country has pursued post-apartheid. Coal-intensive electricity production is largely the reason why South Africa is amongst the top 20 CO₂ emitters in the world, with greenhouse gas emissions commensurate with those of some industrialised countries (DEA and NBI, 2017). Yet climate projections for the country paint a grim picture. In the last decades, the country has already experienced temperature increases higher than the global average, and climate change impact projections predict further warming, as well as an increase in extreme weather events like droughts, floods and heatwaves (CSIR, 2018).

The transformative vision which sought to redress the legacy of apartheid on the South African society has not resulted in the ‘radical economic transformation’ which the country desperately needs. Teetering on the brink of an economic downgrade, unemployment figures stand at close to 30 per cent, marginal betterments in poverty reduction are at risk of being lost and inequality remains amongst the highest in the world (see Chapter 2). South Africa’s environmental performance has also not kept pace. Loss of valuable natural resources (YCELP, 2016), weak environmental governance (OECD, 2013) and resource scarcity – writ large in the recent drought and current water crisis – has highlighted not only the vulnerability of South Africa to the impact of climate change, but has unearthed the growing discontent with the governance of public resources. Ongoing service delivery protests in South Africa – centred on the provision of essential services such as water and sanitation, housing, education and energy – could be regarded as a barometer of growing civil unrest. It illustrates the need to deepen the focus of policy on the poor and vulnerable, giving life to the constitutional mandate of developing ‘responsive, inclusive and accountable’ governance systems befitting of a developmental state (Chigwata et al., 2017: 5).

South Africa’s policy commitment to a just, low-carbon, resource-efficient and pro-employment development trajectory places it amongst an increasing number of countries exploring pathways to transition to more environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive economies. In 2012, the country was ranked first in global leadership in the Global Green Economy Index due to the strength of its policy and political commitment towards greening its economy (Dual Citizen, 2012). This followed the hosting of the 17th Conference of Parties (COP 17) in 2011, the governing body that acts as the fulcrum for deliberations on global climate change commitments. By 2016, South Africa’s performance had declined notably, losing the impetus created by hosting this prestigious global environmental event. The country placed 59th amongst the 80 countries covered in the Index (Dual Citizen, 2016). Further, Yale’s Environmental Performance Index in 2016, which ranks countries in relation to their performance on high-priority environmental issues in two areas: protection of human health and protection of ecosystems, placed the country 81st out of the 90 countries measured (YCELP, 2016).

The marginal adjustments which have characterised much post-apartheid economic policy (Turok, 2011) has barely dented the ‘powerful system of extractive industries, exploiting workers and nature to achieve economic growth’ (Fioramonti, 2017: 5). A just transition towards sustainability, in which the equity and well-being of all South Africans and the environmental sustainability of the country’s valuable natural systems is prioritised (Swilling et al., 2015), promise to move beyond incremental shifts and tweaking of the current economic system. Could it deliver not merely an incremental shift but a ‘substantive and transformative change towards the goal of sustainable development’ (Borel-Saladin and Turok, 2013: 209)? This book explores whether ‘a genuine turn to green economic activity has been made’ (Sharife and Bond, 2011) through reflections on the existing environment and development context of South Africa and sustainability transitions in key systems.

From a variety of disciplinary and conceptual angles, this book brings together the reflections of researcher-practitioners in government, civil society and the private sector to explore the dynamics of South Africa’s sustainability transition pathways ‘empirically [and] in contextually specific ways rather than depict them in generic terms’ (Swilling and Annecke, 2012: xvii). Chapters synthesise theoretical insights, including new models and frameworks, concepts and praxis, contextualised against South Africa’s growing landscape of sustainability policies and programmes, to assess whether policy commitments and visions are being translated into action.

Illustrations of a broad spectrum of transition arenas – across sectors and systems, are presented as transformative niches where shifts towards more sustainability pathways can be discerned. And key challenges and recommendations for new mechanisms, concepts and frameworks to support the achievement of just sustainability pathways are outlined throughout the book, which seeks to answer the essential question: Can South Africa’s current transition pathway lead towards outcomes which are both socially and environmentally just?

Just transitions: a framework for sustainable transitions in South Africa

A wide range of concepts, discourses and disciplines embody the central messages of new pathways towards sustainability, such as green economy, green growth, low-carbon development, resilience, sustainable investment, green skills and jobs, just transitions, circular economy, natural capital and climate-compatible development. These approaches offer diverging views around achieving sustainability though it is possible, as discussed in Section 1.4, to identify distinguishing features of the various discourses around greening the economy, such as a focus on economic growth, ecosystem resilience and equity and social justice.

While diverse and divergent concepts on sustainability abound, it remains one of the critical challenges facing the world in the 21st century – and one that continues to occupy a central role in development discourse, policy and practice. Transitions research is also increasingly being applied to understand socio-technical innovations towards sustainability, particularly the promotion, characterisation and governance of sustainability transitions (Markard et al., 2012). Transitions research has been drawn upon by various contributors to this edited volume, though this work – in its totality – essentially seeks to present contextualised reflections on South Africa’s sustainability transition, and is much closer aligned to the need to present ‘a more nuanced and complex [transition] process’ which is rooted in and determined by the ‘political and economic system of path dependence’ (Fakir, 2017: 29).

Pro-poor and socially inclusive pathways, which respond to the developmental challenges of poverty, inequality and unemployment, are central in crafting the notion of inclusive sustainability transitions. Drawing on existing work and empirical research on the social dimensions of sustainability transitions, this book reinforces the case for adopting a just transition framework in South Africa. A transition can be broadly defined as

a gradual, continuous process of change where the structural character of a society (or a complex sub-system of society) transforms. Transitions are not uniform, and nor is the transition process deterministic: there are large differences in the scale of change and the period over which it occurs.

(Rotmans et al., 2001:16)

Transitions involve a range of possible pathways, and are often designed with long-term (30- to 50-year) end goals in mind. While the term ‘just transition’ has its antecedents in the organised labour movement, it has been employed in recent years by the proponents of inclusive sustainability transitions to foreground the importance of the social dimensions of sustainability transitions. Critical voices have long pointed to the neglect of the social dimensions of prevailing sustainability discourses, highlighting the need to link ‘environmental sustainability with poverty reduction and social justice’ (Lélé, 1991; Adams, 1995; Leach et al., 2010). Heterodox economists are developing new, post-GDP economics required to delineate a ‘safe and just space’ for the well-being of humanity within the means of the planet (see Fioramonti, 2017; Raworth, 2017), while contemporary work is challenging the lack of social justice considerations in the mainstream orientations of prevailing green growth discourses (Centre for Inclusive Growth, 2011; UNRISD, 2012; IIED and CAFOD, 2014; Schmitz and Scoones, 2015; Fatheuer et al., 2016). Environmental justice activists have identified solid ground for establishing stronger synergies between labour and community in creating a more powerful counterforce to neo-liberal sustainability discourses (Ehresman and Okereke, 2015; Evans and Phelan, 2016). From its origins in organised labour, just transitions now represents diverse views unified in their commitment towards ‘going green with equity’.

The case for applying a just transitions lens to understand the dynamics of South Africa’s sustainability transition pathways goes to the central aim of the book – to harness the opportunities presented by this transition for achieving transformative change. Transformative change, drawing on the definition of UNRISD ‘requires changes in economic structures to promote [environmentally sustainable] employment-intensive growth patterns that ensure macro-economic stability’ and which, above all, ‘requires changes in social structures and relations, including addressing the growing economic and political power of elites and patterns of stratification related to class, gender, ethnicity, religion or location that can lock people (including future generations) into disadvantage and constrain their choices and agency’ (2016: 5). A growing multi-stakeholder movement is agitating for transformative change, with the hope of getting the country back in line with the vision of developing a just and sustainable country in which all South Africans prosper.

Environmental policy in post-apartheid South Africa, discussed in the next section, is underscored by an equity- and rights-based discourse in which sustainable development visions include a strong emphasis on social justice. Early scholarship on sustainable development in South Africa reflected this orientation, while recent formulations of sustainability transition pathways note the systemic and structural challenges associated with transitioning from the carbon- and resource-intensive (and inefficient) economy to a low-carbon pathway. The long-term development vision, the NDP, emphasises the need for an equitable and just transition to a low-carbon economy, highlighting key principles central to this goal. Civil society voices reflect this orientation more strongly. One of the leading voices of organised labour, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) denotes a just transition as one which ‘provides the opportunity for deeper transformation that includes the redistribution of power and resources towards a more just and equitable social order’ (COSATU, 2012: 52). The World Wide Fund for nature, WWF, regarded the country’s transition as an ‘opportunity for combining developmental and environmental goals in a new developmental approach – a just transition to a low carbon economy’ (Scholtz, 2011: 1), which should highlight the structural dysfunctions of the prevailing economic model. Swilling et al., reflecting on the South African transition, posits that in South Africa ‘a just transition can be understood as a structural transformation that results in the achievement of two linked goals: developmental welfarism and a sustainability transition’ (2015: 2). A just transition vision can thus be discerned in South Africa’s development discourse.

The driving factor which led to the adoption of just transitions as an overarching analytical framework of this book was thus first the need to centralise equity and inclusivity, poverty reduction and employment generation in the formulation of sustainability t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and acronyms
• 1 South Africa’s transition to sustainability: an overview
• 2 Reaping the socio-economic benefits of an inclusive transition to sustainability
• 3 Climate change and vulnerability in South Africa: sustainability transitions in a changing climate?
• 4 Sustainability transitions and employment in South Africa: a multi-dimensional approach
• 5 Policies for sustainability transformations in South Africa: a critical review
• 6 Transitioning South Africa’s finance system towards sustainability
• 7 The role of national systems of innovation in South Africa’s sustainability transition
• 8 Green skills: transformative niches for greening work
• 9 Creating partnerships to sustain value
• 10 Inclusive sustainability transitions
• Index