Rethinking the green state beyond the Global North: a South African climate change case study

Abstract

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.

The Green State in Transition: Reply to Bailey, Barry and Craig

“…Their respective contributions revisit some of the core questions and assumptions of earlier work on the green state with a view to deepening and widening its critical focus. Their contributions are part of a more general 'widening' wave of research that includes work that has revisited and/or re-envisaged the relationship between the environmental state and the welfare state (Gough 2010;Gough and Meadowcroft 2011;Bailey 2015;Christoff 2017); deepened the critical political economy agenda (Newell and Paterson 2010;Paterson 2016); extended the comparative research agendas (Christoff and Eckersley 2011;Bäckstrand and Kronsell 2015;Duit 2014;Duit, Fiendt and Meadowcroft 2016); refocused attention on the politics of transition (Bäckstrand and Kronsell 2015) and widened the geographic scope of inquiry to including the greening of states in developing regions of the world (Death 2016;Chandrashekeran et al 2017).…”

The Environmental State: Nature and the Politics of Environmental Protection

“…At the level of cross-national comparison, any serious account of environmental states must be able to accommodate the vast empirical differences in geopolitical history, territorial size and ecology, political-institutional organization, and economic, military, and cultural specificity that characterize modern nation-states and their efforts, however variable, to provide environmental welfare. Accounts with roots in the Global South are particularly important for improving the theoretical sketch we outline here, where a range of distinctive patterns, from the legacies of Northern imperialism to distinctive ecologies and environmental threats, play important roles in shaping environmental politics and, no doubt, the development of distinctive environmental states (see Brockington 2002;Chandrashekeran et al 2017;Death 2016;Holleman 2018;Martinez-Alier 2002). At the level of intranational comparison, any serious account must also be able to differentiate and specify relations between the environmental state and other elements of the nation-state, such as those providing military defense or social welfare-tensions and conflicts we gestured toward but did not substantially elaborate.…”

Institutionalising decarbonisation in South Africa: navigating climate mitigation and socio-economic transformation

“…For the first decade, the Department had only 1.75 staff working on climate change, but a specialist international negotiating unit was added in 2004 with three times more staff than the domestic policy unit (Department of Environment, Forestry, and Fisheries, 2019). In 2005, a Chief Directorate for Air Quality Management and Climate Change was added, becoming increasingly technocratic and expertiseoriented (Chandrashekeran et al 2017).…”