Environmental Justice Publications A Death in Durban: Capitalist patriarchy, global warming gimmickry and our responsibility for rubbish By Patrick Bond and Rehana Dada This article reflects upon the struggle of Sajida Khan, an environmental activist based in Durban, South Africa, who dedicated her life to fight international corporations and local municipalities on the pollution and environmental degradation of her community. Khan’s battle is then linked to ecofeminist theory and international feminist, anti-capitalist struggles. The paper ends with an interview of Khan about her views on environmental justice and possible ways forward to create healthier livelihoods. Sajida Khan Bisasar Road Landfill More Privatisation of the Air turns Lethal: Carbon Trading as a Non-Solution to Climate Change By Patrick Bond The passing of Durban environmentalist Sajida Khan in July 2007 reminds us of the life-and-death consequences of the climate justice struggle, even when conflict rises over a seemingly arcane topic, emissions trading. The trade is irrational and fundamentally unjust, and points to the way environmental reformers committed to the Kyoto Protocol process can do more harm than good, by installing a system of emissions reductions prone to structural corruption, which at the same time blocks genuine climate protection strategies. But the new market’s failure is so obvious that a post-Kyoto coalition of global forces can and should now be built, with the alternative strategic orientation - following the Ecuadoran government’s lead - of non-renewable resource preservation for the sake of the climate as well as victims of the resource curse: ‘keep the oil in the soil’, leave the fossil fuels in the ground. More Decentralization, Privatization and Countervailing Popular Pressure: South African Water Commodification and Decommodification By Patrick Bond This chapter considers the underlying pressures to decentralize and privatize state water services, rooted in capital’s drive to commodify. The 1990s and early 2000s witnessed the formal establishment of “water as an economic good” in multilateral programs and multinational corporate expansion of service provision. But, in addition to various forms of economic logic that have driven water commodification, countervailing pressure emerged, both implicitly in the form of poverty, and more explicitly from trade unions, community and consumer groups, environmentalists and other citizens’ movements. The case of South African water during the first decade of post-apartheid democracy is illustrative, not only for the way decentralization of financing initially limited access, but also for the revealing ways resistance shifted state policy to a “free basic water” tariff in 2001, which still left consumers disempowered because it retained crucial micro-neoliberal pricing principles. More Water, Human Rights and Social Conflict: South African Experiences By Patrick Bond and Jackie Dugard This article reviews some of the debates regarding the right to water, applying these to the experiences of water delivery in post-apartheid South Africa. Of central importance, we find, are international trends towards cost-recovery and the commercialisation of water, whether through privatisation or corporatisation. Against such trends, which result in water being priced beyond the reach of poor households, popular resistance to water injustice has taken forms ranging from direct protests, to autonomist-style reconnections and destruction of prepayment meters, to a constitutional challenge over water services in Soweto. Do such water wars have the potential to shift the focus from marketbased and ‘sustainable development’ conceptions to policies more conducive to ‘social justice’, even in the face of powerful commercial interests and imperatives? And can rights mobilisation be part of this struggle for a more socially-just model of water delivery, which views water primarily as a social rather than a commercial good? More Affidavits in the High Court of South Africa (Witwatersrand Local Division) In the matter between: Case Number: 06/13865 LINDIWE MAZIBUKO First applicant GRACE MUNYAI Second applicant JENNIFER MAKOATSANE Third applicant SOPHIA MALEKUTU Fourth applicant GEORGE MLAMBO Fifth applicant PINKIE MOHLABI Sixth applicant VUSIMUZI PAKI Seventh applicant and THE CITY OF JOHANNESBURG First respondent JOHANNESBURG WATER PTY (LTD) Second respondent THE MINISTER OF WATER AFFAIRS AND FORESTRY Third respondent I, the undersigned, PATRICK BOND do hereby make oath and say: 1. I am a Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies, Durban and concurrently a Director at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society, Durban. First Affidavit Second Affidavit Dirty Politics: South African Energy Policies By Patrick Bond There is perhaps no better way to interpret power relations in contemporary South Africa than by examining who has had access to energy in the past, who is getting it now and at what cost, and who will have it in the future. The argument below is that the larger players in the energy ‘market’ – i. e. , transnational capital, accommodating neoliberal multilateral agencies and national governments, and the rich – are having a disproportionate effect on public policy, even in South Africa. More Crony Capitalism, Climate Crisis and Coega: The Minerals-Energy Complex Queues for Corporate Welfare By Patrick Bond Desperate to prove critics wrong, the South African government has been shoveling Africa’s largest-ever industrial subsidies into the Coega industrial zone complex and port, located in the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality (NMBM) about 30 kilometers north of Port Elizabeth. Government proponents say Coega represents sound industrial and development policy, but many others consider the project a ‘corporate welfare’ giveaway replete with eco-destructive and socially insensitive features, especially during a period of renewed attention to climate change. More Access to Decent Sanitation in South Africa: The Challenges of Eradicating the Bucket System By Baruti Amisi and Simphiwe Nojiyeza This paper explores the challenges in providing access to decent sanitation - as a human right guaranteed by the 1996 South African Constitution and a United Nations Millennium Development Goal - to all. The paper contends that the elimination of the bucket system needs to be understood in a broader context of sanitation coverage to both rural and urban areas as well as public spaces - such as schools and clinics - and individual residential areas. Secondly, effective approach to the elimination of the bucket system needs to include the participation of the beneficiaries in technology choice, capacity building of the beneficiaries and municipal officials, technology transfer to the communities, and community ownership. Otherwise, access to sanitation as a human right and one of stepping stones to better life for all will remain an empty shell at the level of political propagandas around the elections. The study used primary and secondary data. Primary data consists of participant observation, empirical research, and the day-to-day protests highlighting social and economic discontents. Secondary data include the South African government’s policy documents at both national and municipal levels, key state officials’ speeches, the National Policy on Sanitation, White Paper on Water and Sanitation, National Sanitation Strategy, Water Services Development plans of municipalities and the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Whereas progress have been made since the democratic breakthrough in 1994, there are challenges in effectively eliminating the bucket system in schools and clinics in both urban and rural areas due to social , economic, institutional and technological problems that ordinary citizens face in the existing informal settlements and mushrooming of the new ones and in rural areas. More  Back