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This book investigates mine closure and local responses in South Africa, linking dependencies and social disruption. Mine closure presents a major challenge to the mining industry and government policymakers globally, but particularly in the Global South. South Africa is experiencing notable numbers of mine closures, and this book explores the notion of social disruption, a concept often applied to describe the effects of mine growth on communities but often neglecting the impact of mine closures. The book begins with three theoretical chapters that discuss theory, closure cost frameworks and policy development in South Africa. It uses evolutionary governance theory to show how mining create...
Hardly a day goes by without South Africans going on a rampage over the provision of basic municipal services such as water, electricity, sanitation and other municipal obligations. This book connects the critical issue of community protests to the equally precarious issue of political trust in local governance in South Africa by using comparative analysis of grassroots activism in predominantly black communities and predominantly white communities.
The chapters in this book reflect on the practice of using narratives to understand individual and social reality. They all reveal dimensions of the same concrete reality: contemporary society of Central South Africa. Except for two, all the chapters originated from research in the program The Narrative Study of Lives, situated in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Each chapter opens a window on an aspect of everyday life in Central South Africa. Each window displays the capacity of the narrative as a methodological tool in qualitative research to open up better understandings of everyday experience. The chapters also reflect on the epistemological journey towards unwrapping and breaking open of meaning. Narratives are one of many tools available to sociologists in their quest to understand and interpret meaning. But, when it comes to deep understanding, narratives are particularly effective in opening up more intricate levels of meaning associated with emotions, feelings, and subjective experiences.
Popular protest has become a regular feature of post-1994 South Africa. As a young democracy born out of resistance, we may understand the contemporary manifestations of protest as extensions of this broader history. However, it is notably in the context of formal democratic institutions that popular protest has become an increasingly normalised mode of influencing policy, demanding service delivery and forcing change. Protest is constitutive of South Africa's democratic politics, but also reflective of it. Protest in South Africa: Rejection, reassertion, reclamation explores the underpinnings of contemporary protest and both its short-term causes and structural drivers. Focusing on the surg...
Since the dawn of colonialism in Southern Africa, the province of the Eastern Cape emerged as the cradle of African resistance against colonial oppression. A closer look at the province reveals opportunities for progress and ultimate resurgence of economic and social development; yet conflated by a myriad of challenges. This book brings together different perspectives and realities of the post-apartheid Eastern Cape to provide an in-depth exploration of the developmental dilemmas that the province faces. This book provides insightful reflections on development and its sustainability some 25 years since democracy, and specifically focuses on sociological and demographic realities in the areas...
Mining and Development in Sierra Leone examines how different actors in Sierra Leone use the effects of large-scale mining to navigate and transform the challenging conditions of life. The book offers an in-depth analysis of the processes of development and change that mark resource extraction environments globally. Across the world, resource extraction is assigned an important role in development agendas. Yet a key question is how development opportunities are given shape and accessed and how extraction’s negative impacts are dealt with in actual politics and practices. Set in the Northern Province of Sierra Leone during a global mining boom, this book shows how mining-cum-development’s...
This comprehensive Handbook tackles the increasingly urgent problem of the impact of climate change on conflict and human security. It analyses the ways in which scarcity of resources leads to food, water and health insecurities, resulting in population migration. Featuring contributions from leading international scholars, chapters cover how these contribute globally to societal insecurity and violent conflict in a growing number of regions.
This book examines how extractivism transforms territories and affects the well-being of rural people, drawing on in-depth fieldwork conducted on tree plantations in Chile. The book argues that pine and eucalyptus monoculture plantations in southern Chile are a form of extractivism representing a mode of nature appropriation that captures large amounts of natural resources to produce wooden-based raw materials with little processing and an export-oriented focus. The book discusses the nexus of extractivism, territorial transformations, well-being, and emerging resistances using a participatory action research methodological approach in the Region of Los Ríos, southern Chile. The findings sh...
This book approaches environmental, climate, and social justice comprehensively and interlinked. The contributors, predominantly from the Global South and have lived experiences, challenge the eurocentrism that dominates knowledge production and discourses on environmental and climate [in] justices. The collection of works balances theoretical, empirical, and practical aspects to address environmental and climate justice challenges through the lens of social justice. This book gives voice to scholars of the Global South and uses an interdisciplinary approach to show the complexity of the problem and the opportunities for solutions, making this book a powerful resource in teaching, research, ...
This book highlights the role of community trusts in social licencing through the lens of mining and mining disputes in South Africa. Employing elements of trust, acceptance and elite interaction as a framework, this book critically investigates the underlying dynamics of community development trusts and also the response of host communities to the inherent dilemma of the SLO concept, namely social legitimation versus corporate profits. Looking at formal versus informal regulatory requirements, popular mobilisation, and the interaction between the local population and mining companies, this book constitutes a thorough look at the issues surrounding mining in South Africa and its effect on society. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of African studies, business in Africa, corporate responsibility, and development studies.