Climate justice, gender and activisms

Climate change has historically been viewed as a scientific issue – a matter of physical, biological and technical systems. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s¹ most recent report, for example, is a vast collection of climate science, threats and potential solutions. In this paradigm of negotiating the threats of Climate Change, there is a tendency to offer up the development of green technologies as a type of miracle solution panacea for global climate problems. Yet climate change is also a human problem caused by the collective behaviours of people – mostly the wealthy – around the world. Japanese economist Yoichi Kaya summarises this viewpoint in a neat equation known as the Kaya Identity² which offers an understanding that global greenhouse gas emissions are the product not just of energy use and technology, but also human population size and economic activity (Kaya & Yokobori 1993). As Southern feminists, we understand that population and the economy are deeply gendered spheres of operation that speak to intersections of (amongst other spaces/places that power operates) race, class, sexuality, disability, and geographic location. So, while science (itself not a gender-neutral terrain) is important for understanding climate change, and technology may be crucial for solving some of the problems, climate activists worry that overemphasis on science may not fully offer effective climate solutions – intersectional solutions that put women on the agenda. Thiagarajan Jayaraman (2019, n.p.), working on Indian climate policy, offers:

The realization that it is not just global warming that we are dealing with, but global warming in an unequal and unjust world, has yet to sink in. Without equality and equity – in other words, without peace and security – we cannot effectively fight climate change.

The relationship between climate justice and social justice thus becomes a key negotiating point in confronting contemporary climate change and thus, of necessity, requires input from social and human sciences. In talking about climate change, climate action, advocacy, adaption and even loss and damages, the interrogations of how these are instigated, mitigated, confronted and engaged, become arenas of interrogating social equality – and thus of intersectional gender equality.

Climate activist, Tatiane Eaves (2020, n.p.), for example, writes in relation to her own climate activism in the United States of America (USA),

Climate justice relates to Black liberation because Black communities are disproportionately affected by polluted air from fossil fuel power plants, heat waves, wildfires, and storms. Likewise, climate justice is connected to Indigenous sovereignty because pipeline construction on Indigenous land pollutes the water that Indigenous communities rely on. This is unjust. You cannot have climate justice without social justice or Black liberation or Indigenous sovereignty.

In this special issue of Agenda, as one arena of Southern feminist and African Feminist eco-critical scholarship, activisms, creative practice and intervention into climate change, we offer alternate gender mappings, navigations, interrogations, and analyses. We have asked writers/scholars to look into how gender activists, community engagements, creatives and, gendered socio-economic and political interventions are responding around climate change in ways that help push Climate Justice through advocacy around social justice. Writers share creative practices, activist and educational interventions, as well as critical feminist research that hopefully contribute to informing African Feminist agendas for action for Climate Justice.

The issue has taken on some profound critical tracking, via interrogated case studies of gender focused Climate Justice programmes and projects (with a special interest in the South), interviews with activists and artists, new critical research and praxis methodology strategies, gendered social justice activisms that open up discussions of how 21^st century Southern feminisms locate, engage and provoke gendered and intersectional activist interventions into Climate Justice.

We are heartened by the grassroots Southern-based activist community and education programmes reflected upon in this issue and deeply inspired by the synergy of struggles that emerge in the careful writing and reflections. The linking – in this issue – of Climate Justice issues of land and agriculture, rights of the girl-child, freedom of expression for climate activists and women’s and indigenous voices in climate change, and the meanings of women’s climate change resilience, that span Uganda, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, India and Belize, offers an extraordinary picture of some of what is being done in geopolitical spaces that often bear the worst brunt of an ongoing global climate crisis.

On a personal note, Lliane Loots reflects that her early editorial work on this journal also underwent some conceptual shifts. Coming from an Arts and Humanities background, and as a dance and performance maker, she began this journey hoping to focus this issue to engage the incredible – and often hidden – arena of how arts-based activists and performance makers are engaging Climate Justice in art making – in both personal and political spaces. Loots sits with the idea that art can and sometimes does hold up a mirror to society and as such there are interesting histories and traditions among various artists whose work intersects with political activism and social justice recognising contemporary arts as an accessible dialogical tool for communication, inspiration and raising awareness. Further to this, and very significantly, art – in and of itself – can be a living, breathing embodied manifestation of social justice in action. This special issue of Agenda called for papers that could begin to trace some of these multifaceted and multidisciplinary relationships of art to/as social justice and how it interconnects with the intersectional gendered politics of Climate Justice. For this reason, Loots is particularly excited by the inclusion of essays, poetry, interviews and arts-based critical reflections that begin to open this up as a serious space of gender-based climate activism for Southern feminists. The creative and arts-inspired voices in this issue of Coral Bijoux, Pralini Naidoo, Uhuru Phalafala and Helene Strauss, and Rosa Mário, for example, are at the heart of an issue that has sought a response to Climate Justice that goes beyond simply asking scientists and economists to intervene. When Lou Haysom stepped in, she challenged Loots to broaden the scope of the call for contributions to consider feminist research on social justice and climate action in the South, its intersectionality with race, class and gender and other axis of difference, climate gender policy, and particularly, women-led climate activism. This issue is all the richer for this provocation.

The issue includes articles which open up several critical areas of social justice to interrogation, situating it at the heart of Climate Justice for Africa’s women and girls, sometimes through a powerful lens of subjectivity and creativity and at others feminist research methodologies to reveal and literally excavate some of the meanings of the Southern experience of the North’s long-term under-development and exploitation. Women’s creative activism is legible as resistance that moves demands for Climate Justice out of the margins.

Mapping the issues

Speaking back through image, text and poem

Poet Uhuru Phalafala in conversation with Helen Strauss on her recent book Mine Mine Mine (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) engages with the question how art might offer a “living, breathing embodied manifestation of social justice in action” (p. 13). Phalafala’s poetry is about breath and life as it speaks to the toxic histories of black migration and mining and the burdens carried by her family over generations. The epic narrative of her poem powerfully brings to the collective consciousness the memory of her grandfather, a Black miner, unable to breathe, a casualty of precarious life-threatening underground working conditions, and her grandmother, “widowed […] with a living husband (Phalafala 2023, p. 9)” (p. 12). Phalafala’s search for grammars to address the environmental legacies of colonialism and racism which are at the foundation of climate change offers the term “Black eco” (p. 12). The term speaks back to the climate narratives that gloss over mining’s exhaustion of life and resources at the intersections of race and gender exploitation. Further, in this grammar she seeks to rescue and excavate sacred cultural meanings of the earth and life, “pushing us to enrich our conceptualisation from climate justice towards the ‘Eco’: ecological justice” (p. 12).

The photo essay by Coral Bijoux ‘Land and the feminine: #Silence as a Room, Richmond, Karoo’, engages our attention to a profound search for relationship to land by a Black/Brown woman, artist and poet. Bijoux’s focus is on the feminine nurturing of the earth and a search that will bring home for her a creative relationship to it in #Silence as Room. The feminine rounded, curved structure built by her is dug out and crafted from the red Karoo soil. The Karoo landscape and her shadow “alterego” disrupt the words on the page, thus impelling her thought and reflections on being black and alienation from the land in unexpected ways on the canvas of the page in her reflections on climate change. Bijoux sees Climate Justice as lacking meaning if it does not “restore women to land ownership in previously colonised areas of the world” (p. 19). We thank and acknowledge her for making her evocative images available to run on the cover.

In the interview with Rosa Mário, Mozambican dancer and choreographer, urban decay and the neglect of the African post-colonial city Maputo are not simply the backdrop for a conversation on climate activism and dance in Africa. They form the images and very basis for dance and movement for Mário. The interview by Lliane Loots describes Mário’s practice of dance and movement as a spontaneous but arresting street form that is a response to the deepening environmental abuses she sees and feels.

Learners and educators in climate education

Climate change in the South has the potential to roll back important areas of progress made in addressing gender inequality, particularly education. Among the first casualties of climate change are adolescent girl drop outs from school. This issue brings into focus firstly the relevance of girls in climate adaptation strategies in schools and secondly why the curriculum and educators need to reflect the local context and draw on local Southern-based knowledges.

Ellen Chigwanda, Patience Mutopo and Ngonidzashe Mutanana’s article homes in on the link between climate change and adolescent girls’ education in a study conducted in Ward 25 of Chivi District, an arid and remote rural region in southwest Zimbabwe. Adolescent girls talk about the impacts of climate change in the home, school and community. Drop-out rates are expected to rise dramatically. As one learner in the study reported:

“The gardens dried out, we had no vegetables to eat with our sadza [staple maize meal], there was no maize to take to the grinding mill for our sadza, we had no access to water and had to walk long distances to get it, livestock were dying because they did not have grass to feed on” (p. 53)

The writers emphasise the potential role of teacher support and the continuous learning programme as practical interventions to conduct action research to inform practical adolescent girl-led climate activism. The interventions have led to lowering the drop-out rates and contributed to school and community adaptation planning.

The article ‘Re-centring and recovering knowledge about climate-friendly agriculture: Learning from a woman African indigenous knowledge holder’ by Sebastian Sanjigadu and Ronicka Mudaly gives attention to relevant and appropriate curriculum, teaching methods and epistemic justice in a South African science teaching module. The study adopts a Southern critical feminist perspective on climate science and discourse in establishing the reasons why young educators choose to refocus teaching practices and content. It reports on the science educator participants’ experiences of learning from a woman indigenous knowledge (IK) holder, their conclusions on the learning experience and the question of sustainability in indigenous local approaches in Africa and the South in climate change education.

The active resistance to epistemological exclusion of African knowledge emerged at several points in this project. First, the African IK holder was deemed to be worthy of recognition as a teacher in higher education. The climate justice principle of recognition of diverse knowledges and knowledge holders (IPCC 2022, p. 7) was enacted and this marked a significant learning moment for the teachers (p. 72).

Energy poverty and a just transition

The meanings of a just transition from non-renewable carbon-intensive energy sources to renewable and climate friendly sources are important questions for climate change research, particularly among working-class communities of women who carry the unequal burden of reproductive and productive work in households. A case study exploring the relationship between the development of renewable energy and gendered labour in three Northen Cape towns, South Africa, by Julia Taylor in this issue poses important questions for Climate Justice.

A feminist political economy perspective illustrates how energy access in the household is an important and often unrecognised struggle for the unpaid workers involved in social reproduction, whose needs and conditions of work should be as important as paid labour in the conceptualisation of the just energy transition (p. 77).

Among the findings with ex-workers and community members at the solar power plants, interviewed by Taylor, is that neither their energy access, nor energy poverty has changed as a result of the building of new solar energy plants.

Interrogating the Southern meanings of climate resilience and adaptation

The focus on Africa’s small-scale and subsistence women farmers by contributors to the issue brings two important contingent themes in debates and research on climate change and social justice under scrutiny, the capacity for resilience and adaptation.

Feminist driven gender climate action takes many forms, adopting diverse approaches which position women and vulnerable communities, in different relationship to climate justice. ‘Gender and climate change – ‘through other eyes’ − grassroots women’s responses to changing environments in southern Africa’ by Dorah Marema and Coleen Vogel critically evaluates the gender mainstreaming and gender integration of three climate change projects completed by the organisation GenderCC Southern Africa. The article argues that the tendency to situate women as either saviours or as victims in climate change is problematic, particularly for women in the South. The authors of this article further extend the arguments presented in the issue for contextually informed Southern approaches to transformative adaptation and activism for climate justice.

Florence Kyoheirwe Muhanguzi, Brenda Boonabaana, Losira Nasirumbi Sanya, Susan Namirembe Kavuma, Grace Bantebya Kyomuhendo, Nargiza Ludgate and Laura Meuzen-Dick report on a mixed methods study involving several hundred women in two districts in rural Uganda on women subsistence farmers’ resilience to climate/economic shocks experienced recently. The researchers employed a resilience index as a means of interpreting the data and engage with participants’ capacity to absorb, adapt to and transform in response to climate shocks.

The findings reflect that most women, despite their resourcefulness, relied on short-term crisis responses that are not sustainable due to lack of resources, information and networks of support, among others. Resilience is a highly gendered term and in this context the writers note the low ranking of gender equality by women. The research findings by Muhanguzi et al. that problematise resilience in climate change activism by rural women are corroborated in the profile of a women-led agroecology movement in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.

The article by Ludwig Chanau and Eureta Rosenberg titled ‘Women farmers leading and co-learning in an agroecology movement at the intersections of gender and climate’ centres subsistence women farmers’ social learning spaces and the communities of practice that they establish to meet the challenges of climate change as well as the gender prejudice that they face. Many of the participants are members of the Rural Women’s Assembly, an established movement of subsistence rural women farmers in southern Africa. Fora for sharing information and farming practices are also opportunities for women to organise as women, for example, the RWA’s strategising around land access and the “One Woman, One Hectare with Water Campaign” (p. 133). The writers offer readers evidence of an agroecology movement that speaks cogently to the gendered resilience that can and is being built collectively among women farmers. Sustainable adaptation to climate change is possible through ongoing learning and sharing practices, networks of support and collective strategising and organising. The authors write:

Effective learning and support in the context of evolving social and ecological challenges is important in achieving climate justice and better livelihoods for all. Addressing the ripple effect of climate vulnerability is a collective problem (p. 133).

Policy, law and jurisprudence – fighting back

Kavuri Sadha and Anjana Ramanathan take the locus of concern of Climate Justice to among the most vulnerable global groups to climate change, indigenous women. The focus piece, ‘A case study of three communities – Indigenous Women, jurisprudence and Climate Justice’ draws on national and continental law as well as conventions and resolutions in documenting the fight of indigenous communities of women and men against loss of protected lands, resources and means to life, ways of life and customs as a result of government supported development and/or forced removal. The writers foreground the role of indigenous women in protesting and organising resistance in the three cases that affected the Ogoni Tribe in Nigeria, the Dongria Kondh tribe in India, and the Ogiek of Kenya, respectively. In these cases governments have been implicated in unethical and even illegal action and development. The writers pose questions for climate change jurisprudence, on where women can seek justice and reparations, particularly as indigenous women’s experiences of vulnerability have been all but ignored internationally. The CEDAW Committee General Recommendation No. 39, adopted in 2022, they write, covers the rights of indigenous women, and for the first time provides a recognised women’s rights framework for international intervention, an important step.

At the international level, Climate Justice and climate action require women have more than a token voice and say, and that their representation in decision-making forums at national and international level is agreed nationally. Nidhi Tandon’s focus piece in the issue calls attention to the need for women to find out where their country’s national Gender Action Plan is. Her focus piece outlines three steps for a national climate change Gender Action Plan to be put in place, a process shared in South-South solidarity, bringing a Southern perspective to the process from Belize, a South American country. Tandon relates that the Latin American continental Escazú Agreement protects the freedom of expression of climate and environmental activists, noting that among defenders of human rights the most targeted are reported to be defenders working on the protection of land, environmental and Indigenous peoples’ rights. Ensuring there is awareness of the Agreement is for her the first priority of the Gender Action Plan. She asserts that women need to breathe life into the policy documents, and further popularise it widely among different groups of women – particularly, indigenous and refugee women – if it is to impact on the ecology and catalyse women’s climate action.

The book review in the issue of Wangari Maathai edited by Grace A. Musila (2020) is part of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) Press Liberation Series. The review of this new book on Maathai asserts her vision of a post-colonial Africa freed of eco-racism in which local ways of knowing, indigenous language and farming are freed from repression. Maathai’s life has been much acclaimed. She focussed her attention on women as custodians of the land and as both indigenous knowledge holder and science scholar Maathai led a powerful movement of rural women to reforest and reclaim land to restore eco-systems destroyed by colonial land use practices. Her relevance remains, particularly as we continue to resist forms of development that contribute to climate change, exhaustion of the soil and the water, depletion of resources and growing poverty among people in 2023. We also welcome the two poems by Anjana Ramanathan and Pralini Naidoo which speak poignantly to Southern feminism and climate resistance, and wanton killing of marine life.

Combining the arts-based climate activism with a broader sense of Climate Justice, gender and activism, the issue is richer. The writers in this issue have contributed collectively to the deep need to intersectionally layer the on-going global climate crisis with a Southern gendered lens. The cultural and arts inspired pieces that are included move us, opening up the spirit and memory to new registers for the shared ecology. Organising around and responding to urban and rural climate justice issues, the priorities set need to be informed by women on Southern conditions and specific contexts. Contributors have reflected the many new problems that Climate Justice itself presents, in re-positioning women’s gender as well as strategic interests in disentanglement from unhelpful Northern approaches – in curricula, ‘just’ energy contracts, unsustainable agrarian farming approaches – to mention a few. Sustainable approaches, local means and narratives that emerge from climate activism tend to expand Climate Justice and eco-literacy, as Wangari Maathai showed.

Finally, the Agenda Open Feminist Dialogue ‘Climate and Gender Justice for the South?’ played a part in the framing of this issue and we include a report on it below.

AGENDA OPEN FEMINIST DIALOGUEClimate and Gender Justice for the South?

Agenda held an Open Dialogue on 21^st July 2022 to bring Climate Justice and gender in the South under a feminist and gender activist spotlight. The dialogue aimed to engage a specifically Southern perspective confronting some of the realities of climate injustices and their gender impacts for women in South Africa. Lliane Loots, an Agenda Editorial Collective member, chaired the dialogue that was held on zoom with three invited panellists, Mathsidiso Lencoasa, Olivia Rumble and Xoli Fuyani.

Introducing the Dialogue, Loots said that while science (itself not a gender-neutral terrain) is important for understanding climate change, and while technology may be crucial for solving some of the problems, climate activists worry that over emphasis on science may not fully offer effective climate solutions – intersectional solutions that put women on the agenda. The feminist dialogue engaged three significant South African women climate activists and lobbyists on the relationship between Climate Justice and social justice as a key negotiating point in confronting contemporary climate change. She said without input from social and human sciences, it is difficult if not impossible to talk about climate change, climate action, advocacy, adaption and climate disasters. The panel aimed to question how these are instigated, mitigated, confronted and engaged, through profoundly interrogating social (in)equality – and thus intersectional gender equality for the South.

Loots said that it is important how we think about climate change and justice: “I am not a science-based person”, she said. A provocation from an Indian colleague summed it up for her − it is not that there is no justice, it is rather that there cannot be any form of climate justice without the question of social justice being in the centre. Social justice issues tend to be pushed to the side by most current science frameworks.

The first speaker, Mathsidiso Lencoasa, from the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Section27, introducing herself, said that as a policy analyst her work is to conduct budget research. Growing up in eMalahleni/Witbank, considered one of the most polluted areas in the world,¹ has fostered a perspective that equity and socio-economic rights will never be fully realised if we do not prepare for the climate crisis. Lencoasa said that at Section27 she explores the gendered impact of climate change and the ways the climate crisis currently − and will continue to − exacerbate inequalities in two important areas, education and health attainment in the country. She agreed there is no doubt that the question of social justice needs to be in the foreground. The huge devastation seen from the recent floods in KwaZulu-Natal are an example. Infrastructure was destroyed, particularly precariously placed schools and housing. An imperative of Climate Justice initiatives and consciousness must be that in building the green economy noone is left behind. Loots noted that eMalahleni is indeed one of the most polluted areas in the world as a result of mining, and people living in these conditions, where the air and water can pose risks to community health, need to be heard.

Olivia Rumble, the next speaker, introducing herself said that as a Climate Change lawyer she has seen a lot more focus on social justice issues over the last decade or so. She studied law in 2005 when there was no climate law or jurisprudence or real conception of legal rights in climate change in existence. It is an evolving area and the process of drafting laws in South African and other Southern countries has begun. She said that it is important how we define environmental justice – the vulnerable groups, and the environmental focus. What is meant by Climate Justice, is very laden with legal meanings. It does, however, include agency. As a Director of Climate Legal, Rumble said she has had 10 years legal practice experience specialising in environmental law, energy law policy and governance, climate change (mitigation and adaptation), climate finance, carbon markets, and carbon tax. She has pioneered legal reform initiatives in climate change and water law in South Africa and the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC).

Lencoasa picking up the question of Climate Justice from the perspective of social justice activism, said if no one is to be left behind, it means the vulnerable groups need to be very involved in policy and budget discussions and implementation too. The policy needs to also recognise women‘s greater vulnerability as a result of poverty and allocate resources appropriately. She said that she saw this is a condition for Climate Justice. As we live in a society with extreme levels of inequality, the justice must be seen to be couched in intersectional frameworks, so that everyone benefits.

Loots asked the question, “how do we go about thinking about Climate Justice in terms of law and rights?” Rumble stated that achieving a comprehensive theory of justice is not easy as jurisprudence is too often shown to be a poor tool. Inequity between the so-called developing and the First World has resulted in the creation of carbon credits as a method of compensating for ‘carbon debt’ by the North. She said that the system of carbon credits has in fact tended to create more inequality and worked as a means to ignore the pressure and obligation to reduce emissions of carbon. There is a high level of frustration with political leaders not being accountable or even accounting for their lack of action on climate change. Civil society groups are increasingly using country courts.

Loots posed a critical question: “where women and children are struggling to meet food and water needs, how do they fit into Climate Justice in the South?” “People say that climate change and awareness education is already done. I am worried if this is indeed so. How do we establish broad grassroots learning of the problems of gendered poverty being magnified by climate change?” Lencoasa responded that there is an urgent need for the overhauling of the education system for the transformation to the green world economy that is coming. From policy level to grassroots level, action at several levels – local, provincial, national – is needed. Youth are impacted – but how, in their voices, are they affected? We need to rally and organise to ensure budgets are properly allocated.

Loots observed that there are multiple concerns around load shedding (national energy rationing), flooding, heat, gender-based violence, hunger and thirst. These are at the heart of the discussion of the intersection of our identities. As a Freirian whose understanding of education involves recognition of unequal power relations and consciousness raising as a necessity to support our agency, she questioned what kind of education is taking place if it does not involve the Freirian “pedagogy of the oppressed” where we learn from the people affected most, in building preparedness for climate crisis (Freire 1970).

 Rumble said that in considering rights it should be noted that a Climate Change Bill (B9-2022) is before Parliament.² There is a mandate in the Bill to include Climate Change in the education curriculum. However, that does not automatically mean that the curriculum will also address gender or the issue of women and poverty – although of course it is imperative that it should [given the unequal division of labour in the household carried by women as carers, their central roles in disaster management plans and as custodians of the environment]. There is no question that Climate Justice is simply a science and technology question only. The huge need for the design of climate change mitigation projects is going to be with us for the long term – for example, the planting of forests etc, and demanding and making sure women are included in the design and implementation and budgets. Climate change mitigation and adaptation projects must involve the youth and ensure their participation in decisions.

The third participant in the Open Dialogue, Xoli Fuyani, opened up the discussion around climate activism with youth. She describes herself as an Eco-role Model who guides young people to a safe sustainable green future. Xoli founded Black Girls Rising, an organisation working on developing resilient girls and communities and that is also training and mentoring young climate activists. She was born and raised in Gugulethu in Cape Town. Although she was not able to be physically present the dialogue viewed a video in which she shared her activism and projects in Khayelitsha in Cape Town, where she is the Environment Education child manager at four schools. Fuyani said that her life is about making a living environment for children, demonstrating how, for example, worms are good for the soil and how to grow plants, teaching them how to be better ‘farmers’, and inspire them to work for climate change, and to stop global warming. She said that this means encouraging people to get involved, to be the voice of change so that they ask “how does climate change affect you and your community”. Fuyani said that when she gives learners statistics and facts, they come up with solutions. An example she shared is that they make eco-bricks in exchange for seedlings. Girls have attended a climate change conference in Kenya. Xoli continued that she has put the focus on how climate change affects us in the informal sector. “I have the privilege of knowing, and I want others to know”, she said indicating to the eco-farm in Khayelitsha that she is running. For Xoli there is a lot to be said for finding community youth agency to identify the solutions.

Commenting on Fuyani’s youth climate presentation, Loots said there is so much activism that needs to be shared, because there is a need for expansion of this climate change awareness. We easily miss the middle part – the ideas of small-scale projects and the involvement of the girlchild in leading roles in youth-driven climate change projects in informal settlements, that is happening in Khayelitsha. Rumble also commenting on youth activism in informal settlements and township communities, said she believed that this is a very different ground-up driven approach to climate change, happening at grassroots. Normally, activism relies on the filtering down of ideas or state-driven projects to initiate programmes, unless the curriculum is adapted, as in this example, by a climate change activist educator.

Rumble said that in climate law, community level participation is increasingly becoming more audible and visible. For the first time a meeting held to discuss the issue of carbon credits called by government and industry was attended by community stakeholders, establishing that there are many people and groups working towards the same broad goal of South-based interest in Climate Justice.

Lencoasa, reflecting on Fuyani’s climate activism with youth, said that the NGO Section27 works from the bottom to the top and not with a top-down approach. Acknowledging the need for the involvement of the girlchild in climate change activism, she said, “We need the right voices, that is everyone’s voices. It means the question must be asked: ‘How does climate change affect me?’” She did not believe that the curriculum is working to create an adequate awareness of the need for change. Rather, she said her faith is in policy and budgets as tools that can bridge the gaps. However, there is a problem that the nation has a debt burden so not enough resources are allocated to build climate change resilience – for re-building schools and health facilities following disasters. Unless we have a robust social justice dialogue, it is difficult to call for responsible action. Loots said the problem is that assumes a properly functioning state. She added that there is for her an intersectional grid of budget, policy and law, that must speak to accountability.

Rumble said that she agreed that there is a need for a call for dedicated funding for women in climate change policy supported by budgets, although competing with other vulnerable groups. There is a need to start imagining futures where money is allocated for creation of ‘vehicles’ to support resilience, for example small grants for climate change stokvels run by rural and township community women, who know how to manage rotating funds. The imagined future calls for many more adaptive responses. Lencoasa believed that even though there is a gender quota in procurement processes, more must be done to reverse the past, for a greener economy that is also safer. Steps must be taken towards correcting the past, and the gender, class and race inequalities. It is a problem that many climate change frameworks do not recognise, the crippling poverty and the time hunger that women confront with the search for household water, for energy and that climate disasters ‘exploit’ the scale of this. It seems that when the world is not in a growing crisis, responses can be adequate, so we need to act and be aware of the state expecting women to carry more than their fair share of the burden.

Loots returned to the starting point of the Open Dialogue stating, there can be no Climate Justice without social justice, furthermore we cannot understand gender and poverty and climate change impacts outside of capitalism and patriarchy. It was suggested that beyond the question of working towards a sustainable development agenda by 2030, there is a need to concentrate on the day-to-day reality and the mundane aspects of policy implementation. Can we begin to shift “lived realities”, “What work is needed for this critical shift to take place, for implementation?” Lencoasa believed this surely means that responsible budgeting must match responsible policy-making decisions. She added that Section27 has made a submission on Climate Change asking the Dept. of Education to show how the curriculum addressed the need to move beyond coal, in an energy transition. For her, the other question that must be confronted for Climate Justice was how do affected people in climate disasters like floods access human rights? How can we respond with compassion and to mental health issues? In conclusion, Rumble said she believed that that there is continual advocacy work to be done for South Africa to head towards zero carbon count. Renewable energy sources and solutions need to be found and women need to be involved in this in all communities. We need urban roof top garden projects. It means implementing the projects we have policy and resources for. Women-led projects. For example, the rehabilitation of Karoo soil and carbon sequestration projects that are creating livelihoods, for example, spekboom (Portulacaria afra) propagation and planting.³ We need to see finance trickle down for women-led, designed and implemented community projects.

At this point the Open Dialogue took questions and discussion from participants. Commenting, a participant Danai Mapotsa, said she felt that there is little hope for social justice or climate change because people intentionally endanger so much on the planet – that we may not survive. Further there is little or no pro-poor policy. She saw people as the problem, and questioned whether there is social consciousness of the need for climate change.

Lencoasa replying, said she agreed with the comment. “Capitalism and patriarchy are the problem, and for the planet to survive, given the damage that is being done we may ‘go’”, she said. She believed we need to think more about the sides of our nature /worlds that capitalism does not value and do what we can do. Also responding, Rumble offered that it has a lot to do with the way we end up feeling day-to-day when the system is fundamentally flawed and resistance seems pointless. If we ask what we can do in our own space, it might change something, lead to a report and a change in policy or law or research that involves collective vision and action? Intersectionality is complicated as well, and we can run the risk of losing the conversation unless priorities are recognised as the focus. Loots agreed that it is difficult to ignore the structural violence we face in different socio-economic spaces. How do meta-narratives shape our work on social-justice and Climate Justice There is a theory of the earth surviving humanity, there are multiple meta-narratives that call for responses.

Grace Musila, a participant in the Open Dialogue, suggested that we should not forget the Xolobeni community struggles against environmental destruction on the South African Wild Coast.⁴ Lencoasa, picking up this concern, thanked Musila for raising this decade-long struggle. Mining interests have been dividing the community for years, she said. Resistance by the community to destruction of the land has led to strife and deaths of community members. The mining narrative has been influential in selling the idea of ‘prosperity being forfeited vs the community’s concern about degradation and loss of heritage’. “It is taxing of the environment and it is not clear how the benefits trickle down. Mine owners don’t live there and leave toxic polluted water”, she said.

Lencoasa added that her experience of growing up in Witbank is of mining exploitation’s devastation to the environment and people. In conclusion, Loots added that extraction as a way of life was raised by this issue. By placing ourselves in the discussion of social justice and Climate Justice, we have opened up discussion on the issues we are struggling with and concerned with, she said, and the social justice dialogue needs to continue!

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lliane Loots

LLIANE LOOTS is a South African choreographer. She holds the position of Lecturer in the Drama and Performance Studies Programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. As an artist/scholar her recent PhD research is framed within an ethnographic paradigm with a focus on decolonial narrative as methodology. Loots founded FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY as a professional dance company in 2003 when it grew out of a dance training programme that originally began in 1994. As the artistic director for FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY, she has won numerous choreographic awards and commissions and has travelled extensively in Europe, America and within the African continent with her dance work. Email: [email protected]

Lou Haysom

LOU HAYSOM has worked for Agenda for several years in the capacity of editor and more recently consulting editor. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 https://www.ipcc.ch/(accessed 12 February 2022).

2 See: The "Kaya Identity", https://www.e-education.psu.edu/meteo469/node/213 (accessed 14 August 2023).

1 See: Bega S, ‘It’s time to clean up South Africa’s polluted air’, Mail & Guardian, 2021, https://mg.co.za/environment/2021-10-03-its-time-to-clean-up-sas-polluted-air/ (accessed 14 May 2023).

2 The Climate Change Bill (B9-2022) can be found at: https://www.parliament.gov.za/bill/2300773 (accessed 14 May 2023).

3 See, for example, a local carbon-offset motivated project that is generating jobs/rewilding the Karoo with spekboom, https://www.respeknature.org/ (accessed 14 May 2023).

4 See Mitchley A, ‘High Court rules in favour of Xolobeni community in historic mining rights case’, Mail & Guardian, 2018, https://mg.co.za/article/2018-11-22-high-court-rules-in-favour-of-xolobeni-community-in-historic-mining-rights-case/ (accessed 14 May 2023).