Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 3: The politics of wasteIn short, the NWMS had no purchase on the production system presided over bythe ‘senior’ departments. For government as a whole, the environment in general andwaste in particular were scarcely a priority. The inter-governmental Committee forEnvironmental Co-ordination, established in law by NEMA, was all but ignored bysenior departments, environmental budgets were squeezed and waste managementwas in reality abandoned without adequate resources in the flood of waste.Closing downFor six years, EJNF coordinated the emergence of a remarkably vibrant environmentaljustice movement linking disparate struggles over a very wide range of issues includingland and labour, municipal services and waste, and air pollution and climatechange. It also challenged the central premises of development, notably through itscoordination of the environmental sector inputs to the ‘poverty hearings’ organisedby the South African NGO Coalition (Sangoco). In 1998, however, internal tensionsopened into painful divisions and the organisation suffered a collapse of capacity. Itsurvived another eight years but never regained the momentum of the earlier period.groundWork emerged from the fall-out, taking the form of a conventional NGO, tofocus on working with fenceline activists mobilising against industrial pollution andchallenging the power of large corporations.On the fencelines, people still faced the issues thrown up by toxic production systemsand the overbearing power of corporations. Gear reinforced corporate power. Its neoliberallogic came to define development and was entrenched in policy across therange of government functions. It represented the will to subordinate environmentalconcerns to economic growth at whatever cost. The relative openness evident inConnepp was thus closed down as environmental policy making began to brush upagainst the imperative of growth directed by corporate interests and the minerals andenergy complex in particular. Effectively, government had abandoned environmentalregulation to the ‘market’ – that is, to the decisions of individual firms and the presumedincorporation of environmental management in the ‘triple bottom line’.The effects were highly uneven. 33 Some firms adopted the discourse of ‘sustainabledevelopment’. Some even made real improvements either because of sustained pressurefrom local activism or because their access to Northern markets required at least the33 See The groundWork Report 2003 for the uneven effects of market regulation.Wasting the Nation - groundWork - 51 -