Development Alternatives

MACUA, a partner organisation of the Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBF) in Cape Town, has recently launched a new podcast series.

As African countries embark on net zero transitions, it is critical that Global North actors align their investments to specific and localised understandings of ‘Just Transitions’

As South Africa celebrates heritage month in September the coastal community of Sicambeni on the East Coast of South Africa, together with social justice partners celebrated a victory for indigenous people. On 1st September 2022 the Makhanda High Court ruled that Shell’s exploration right to conduct seismic surveys on the Wild Coast of South Africa was granted unlawfully and therefore set it aside. Community and environmental activist Ntsindiso Nongcavu reflects on what the ruling means for those who lives are spiritually and economically connected to the oceans.

Under Germany’s presidency, the 2022 G7 Leaders’ Summit invited Senegal, which holds the rotating chair of the African Union (AU), Argentina, India, Indonesia and South Africa. South African researcher Mikatekiso Kubay explains how the G7 can be genuine development partners to Africa.

Links between environmental disasters and mental health are increasingly coming into focus as ticking time bombs. It is vital that spatial planning strategies at local government level are adapted with this dual threat to societal welfare in mind.

Heritage Month comes and goes each year, always with much fanfare around celebrating our country’s diverse cultures and history. Yet, many of the government’s proposed energy solutions pose significant risks to human life and the environment, while ignoring customary rights and risking several heritage sites. If not challenged, they will most likely leave communities across the country at a huge disadvantage.

Can community kitchens play a role in moving our approaches to hunger beyond the binary of ‘charity’ and ‘market’?

The first podcast from our friends at the Food Agency Cape Town (FACT), reflecting on the stigma of hunger and the potential of community kitchens to transform a commodity fixated food system.

FACT co-founder Nomonde Buthelezi will speak alongside international experts and other speakers to share perspectives on the UN Food Systems Summit.

From 28-30 April, the Delta Built Environment Consultants (Delta) will host public hearings on the Musina Makhado Special Economic Zone (MMSEZ) – a mega-industrial development proposed to be built in the Vhembe region of Limpopo.

The climate crisis is the result of relations of power and exploitation, between the Global North and the Global South as well as between people and nature. A decolonial approach in climate activism stands for a radical break with colonial principles of economic, political and social systems – including industrial agriculture and landgrabbing. A conversation with Ruth Nyambura, climate activist from Kenya. 

For centuries, resources have been extracted from the African continent without adequate payment or compensation. With colonialism, Khoikhoi and San, the first inhabitants of Southern Africa, lost their land and many lost their lives. During decades of Apartheid they were racially discriminated and still have to fight for political and economic inclusion in the post-Apartheid era. We spoke to the Khoikhoi lawyer Lesle Jansen about her fight for the community and for the legal acknowledgement of the cultural heritage of Indigenous people.

What began as a hyperlocal movement to protect the interests of emerging and commercial farmers, farmworkers and informal settlement residents in Cape Town’s Philippi Horticultural Area has become a much bigger campaign.

The struggle to preserve this resource for residents of the Cape Flats to farm and feed themselves is about protecting it from development and nurturing the richness it offers.

The South African government still needs to drawing up a just transition plan that will support workers who are likely to lose their jobs as the country moves its economy away from dependence on carbon-emitting production, such as mining and downstream industries.

With findings that neither the City of Cape Town nor the provincial government considered the full impact of development on the Cape Flats Aquifer in the Philippi Horticultural Area, the Cape High Court has sent two crucial decisions back for a second look.

Just a few months ago, two cyclones (Kenneth and Idai) destroyed the homes and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people in parts of southern Africa. The cyclones, along with widespread drought, forced desperate people to migrate. But links between migrancy and xenophobia, violence against women and the growing climate crisis across southern Africa and well beyond have been largely neglected.

On Friday 20th September, thousands of South Africans joined the global climate strike to register their objections to the continuing destruction of the planet. Among them was HBF partner the Philippi Horticultural Area Food and Farming Campaign (PHAFFC) who are fighting to reverse a series of land use decisions that will render Cape Town anything but food, climate and water resilient.