A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Johannesburg, December 2012 / The study explores the thesis that discursive power played a major role in the pollution
and subsequent destruction of Steel Valley to explain why, despite strenuous efforts by
local citizens, the right to live in a healthy environment, guaranteed in the new South
African constitution, was not upheld. It analyses the struggle in Steel Valley around the
definition of pollution, and decision making about its consequences, in terms of
discursive resources and their deployment in discursive arenas, focusing on discursive
strategies of the polluted, the polluter and the regulator. This exploration is set within the
politics of hegemony in a new South Africa after 1994, as well as the 120 year old
Minerals Energy Complex at the centre of the South African political economy. It
explains the legitimation of pollution in Steel Valley within the global discourses of
environmental management, ecological modernisation and sustainable development
prominent since the 1990s.
Discursive power played a major role in the Steel Valley case. Discursive power led to
the material outcomes in Steel Valley: the removal of the community, the physical
destruction of their buildings and the transformation of the area into a “conservation”
buffer zone, along with decisions not to pay residents compensation and not to establish a
medical trust. Discursive power was used by the polluter to escape liability, by
maintaining scientific and legal uncertainty about the nature, extent and consequences of
the pollution. Discursive power enabled the polluter to frame the problem as one of
ecological modernisation from which social justice concerns, like compensation, could be
excluded. ISCOR’s discursive power also overwhelmed the regulator, as the regulator
remained too cautious to use to the full the instruments available to it in law, and allowed
numerous exemptions. The state and the polluter both pushed issues of Environmental
Justice – compensation and rehabilitation – outside the dominant frame of decision
making.
The study shows how a superiority of discursive resources on the side of the polluter,
derived from a financial and political superiority, translated into decisive defeats for the
4
Steel Valley community. This superiority derived from a constellation of discursive
conditions in scientific, legal and administrative arenas. To describe these conditions, the
study constructs a description of a pollution dispositive at work in Steel Valley, which
legitimises past and future pollution. It explains the choices of the new government as
pollution regulator, by understanding the tax-dependent state as responsive to both
legitimacy and accumulation pressures within a hegemonic growth discourse.
A grounded theory approach is followed to study discursive power, synthesizing elements
of the social and narrative construction of reality, Critical Discourse Analysis, dispositive
analysis and the Environmental Justice approach. It develops a variant of Critical
Discourse Analysis that can work across a big case study, by treating discursive power
plays as part of a pollution dispositive, which is an assembly of heterogeneous elements
(practices and knowledges) that can be understood together as a strategic response to an
emerging situation. The pollution dispositive was composed of pre-existing resources
available in its environment: local discourses producing disposable others, through
racism or a view of dispensable fenceline communities; the legitimations and limitations
of the politics of hegemony, and the discourses of growth, limited corporate liability, as
well as of environmental management, sustainable development and ecological
modernisation.
The study explores the implications of this analysis for Environmental Justice tactics in
the areas of environmental management, citizen science, the politics of ecological
modernisation, and the politics of hegemony in the new South Africa. It shows that the
conditions of fenceline communities and the nature of discursive struggles around them
create a tactical terrain which can be used to advance the cause of Environmental Justice.
In the tradition of critical theory, it contributes to the understanding of anti-pollution
struggles within the Environmental Justice movement, engaging with a triad of concepts
that explain the imposition of environmental injustice: externalisation of the costs of
pollution, exclusion from decision making and enclosure of resources. This approach can
be applied to the environmental struggles of other communities on the fencelines of the
Minerals Energy Complex in South Africa.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/13005 |
| Date | 06 August 2013 |
| Creators | Munnik, Albert Victor |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
Page generated in 0.002 seconds