David A. McDonald

Environmental justice in South Africa

Environmental Justice in South Africa provides a systematic overview of the first ten years of postapartheid environmental politics. Written by leading activists and academics in the field, this edited collection offers the first critical perspective of environmental justice theory and practice in South Africa. Accessible and wide-ranging in its coverage, the book offers a benchmark analysis of the environmental justice movement today as well as an assessment of where it may be headed in the future. Beginning with a history of the environmental justice movement in the country, the book explores a range of conceptual and practical questions: How does environmental justice relate to issues of marginalization and poverty in South Africa? What are the links between environmental justice and other schools of environmental thought? Is the legal system an appropriate tool for addressing environmental equity? How do race, class, and gender intersect in the South African environmental context? The second half of the book is a more concrete exploration of environmental (in)justice in the country. These chapters are interspersed with real-life stories of struggles by workers and communities for environmental change. The book is an invaluable resource for South African and international audiences interested in the growing, and increasingly global, environmental justice movement.Environmental Justice in South Africa provides a systematic overview of the first ten years of postapartheid environmental politics. Written by leading activists and academics in the field, this edited collection offers the first critical perspective of environmental justice theory and practice in South Africa. Accessible and wide-ranging in its coverage, the book offers a benchmark analysis of the environmental justice movement today as well as an assessment of where it may be headed in the future. Beginning with a history of the environmental justice movement in the country, the book explores a range of conceptual and practical questions: How does environmental justice relate to issues of marginalization and poverty in South Africa? What are the links between environmental justice and other schools of environmental thought? Is the legal system an appropriate tool for addressing environmental equity? How do race, class, and gender intersect in the South African environmental context? The second half of the book is a more concrete exploration of environmental (in)justice in the country. These chapters are interspersed with real-life stories of struggles by workers and communities for environmental change. The book is an invaluable resource for South African and international audiences interested in the growing, and increasingly global, environmental justice movement.

Of liquid dreams: a political ecology of water privatization in Buenos Aires

The privatization of water and sanitation in Buenos Aires has been hailed by its neo-liberal proponents as an unprecedented success. This paper takes a deeper and more critical look than many of these accounts. It looks at political and economic changes within Argentina in order to explain the troubling findings regarding the performance of Aguas Argentinas, the private company that won the concession for most of Buenos Aires. The paper begins with a brief overview of the political and economic context in Argentina before describing the process involved in the water privatization in Buenos Aires. It then discusses the outcomes, including changes in coverage and charges to end users as well as impacts on labour and the environment. The paper describes how the promised reduction in water tariffs did not materialize (in fact the opposite occurred) and how agreed-upon targets for expanding sewerage connections and sewage treatment were not met. It also describes how the national government intervened to support the water company in conflicts with the regulatory agency and even by-passed the regulatory agency when the water company wanted to renegotiate the contract. Finally, the role of international financial institutions in this process is discussed.

Writing Xenophobia: Immigration and the Print Media in Post-apartheid South Africa

This paper discusses the print medias coverage of cross-border migration in South Africa and how it may affect both public opinion and policymaking on the topic. The paper argues that coverage of international migration by the South African press has been largely anti-immigrant and unanalytical. Not all reportage is negative, and newspaper coverage would appear to be improving over time, but the overwhelming majority of the comprehensive collection of newspaper articles, editorials and letters to the editor surveyed for this research are negative about immigrants and immigration and are extremely unanalytical in nature, uncritically reproducing problematic statistics and assumptions about crossborder migration in the region. Although it is impossible to draw direct causal links between this kind of anti-immigrant media coverage and anti-immigrant policymaking and xenophobia in South Africa, the paper does argue that the two are at least mutually reinforcing and that the print media has a responsibility to be more balanced and factual in its reporting on the issue.

The relative deprivation-gratification continuum and the attitudes of South Africans toward immigrants : A test of the V-curve hypothesis

It has long been established that there is a linear and positive relationship between relative deprivation and prejudice. However, a recent experiment suggests that the converse of relative deprivation, relative gratification, may also be associated with prejudice (S. Guimond & M. Dambrun, 2002). Specifically, the evidence suggests that the usual test for a linear relationship between relative deprivation-gratification and prejudice might conceal the existence of a bilinear relationship. This function, labeled the V-curve hypothesis, predicts that both relative deprivation and relative gratification are associated with higher levels of prejudice. This hypothesis was tested with a representative sample of South Africans (N=1,600). Results provide strong support for the V-curve hypothesis. Furthermore, strength of ethnic identification emerged as a partial mediator for the effect of relative gratification on prejudice.

Introduction to Special Issue: Evaluating South African Immigration Policy after Apartheid

Apartheid-era immigration laws remain in force in South Africa. The will to change is considerable but the whole transformation process has been constantly bedeviled by the complexity of the issues and political tensions between the ruling ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party.

(Re)writing xenophobia: Understanding press coverage of cross-border migration in Southern Africa

Xenophobia – although difficult at times to disentangle from other psychological and structural influences such as racism, nationalism and ethnocentrism – refers specifically to “a deep dislike of foreigners” (Oxford Concise Dictionary).This definition describes a discrete set of attitudes that manifest themselves in the behaviours of governments, the general public and the media.This is certainly true in South and southern Africa where xenophobia is distinctive and widespread (albeit uneven across the region) and where the print media in particular has been accused of exacerbating the phenomenon. In a previous article, Danso and McDonald (2001) reviewed English-language press coverage in South Africa from 1994 to 1998 and argued that reportage and editorial comment on cross-border migration was largely anti-immigrant and unanalytical.Not all such treatment of the issue by the media was negative and superficial, and there did appear to be gradual improvement over time, but the overwhelming majority of newspaper articles, editorials and letters to the editor employed sensationalist, anti-immigrant language and uncritically reproduced problematic statistics and assumptions about cross-border migration in the region. The purpose of the current paper is threefold.First, it updates the previous study to determine what, if any, changes have occurred in South Africa with respect to xenophobia in the press by looking at English-language newspapers from 2000 to early 2005 and comparing the results to the former survey.Second, and more im portantly, the paper poses a series of hypotheses as to why press coverage in South Africa is xenophobic (or not) and where we might expect to see trends developing in the future. The paper also expands the analysis to other countries of the region – namely, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia and Zambia (with the emphasis on the first two due to the relatively small sample sizes of news material available for the latter). An analysis of these additional countries helps to expand our understanding of the regional aspects of xenophobia in the press and places our study of South Africa in empirical and theoretical perspective.The variations across the region serve to highlight important theoretical differences, which show that there is no

Transnationalism, African immigration, and new migrant spaces in South Africa: an introduction.

ResumeLa fin officielle de l’apartheid a creede nouvelles opportunites de migration vers l’Afrique du sud, opportunites encore assez mal comprises. La (re)insertion de l’Afrique du sud dans l’economie globale a vu de nouvelles vagues de travailleurs itinerants, certains legaux, d’autres sans papiers, venus de la region du Southern African Development Community (SADC) et de nouvelles constellations a l’interieur. Les lois d’entree legale ou non autorisee ayant ete relaxees, l’Afrique du sud est devenue une nouvelle destination pour les Africains en quete d’un asile, ceux pratiquant le commerce avec les pays voisins, les etudiants et les hommes de metier.Les nouveaux immigrants africains d’Afrique du sud sont le sujet de ce numero special. La collection fait partie d’un corpus de recherche plus important, sponsorise par le Projet de Migration en Afrique du sud, qui a pour but d’explorer le phenomene de la migration a partir de diverses perspectives disciplinaires et methodologiques et d’un certain nombre d’...

Experience of mental disorder in the context of basic service reforms: The impact on caregiving environments in South Africa

Abstract The integration of mental health services into primary health care and the shift towards community- and family-based care for chronic mental disorders has been associated with increased burden on households. At the same time, research investigating the impact of policies of cost recovery for basic services such as water and electricity has also indicated an increased burden on households. This study aimed to investigate the impact of these basic service reforms on households caring for a family member with a chronic mental disorder in Cape Town, South Africa. The findings indicate that factors associated with service reforms may increase the stress and burden experienced by households and in turn impact on the primary environment in which care is received.

Ubuntu bashing: the marketisation of ‘African values’ in South Africa

Broadly defined as an ‘African worldview’ that places communal interests above those of the individual, and where human existence is dependent upon interaction with others, ubuntu has a long tradition on the continent. This paper explores the ways in which the philosophy and language of ubuntu have been taken up and appropriated by market ideologies in post-apartheid South Africa. The literature on ‘ubuntu capitalism’ offers the most obvious illustration of this, but there are more subtle ways in which ubuntu theory and language have been (re)introduced to post-apartheid South Africa to support and reinforce neoliberal policymaking. But rather than reject ubuntu thinking outright as too compromised by this discursive shift, as much of the Left in South Africa has done, the paper asks if there is something potentially transformative about ubuntu beliefs and practices that can be meaningfully revived for more progressive change.

Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back: Ideology & Urban Ecology in 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. The first half of this article examines this shift in envi...