The politics of ecology in South Africa: Urban governance and environmental policy in Cape Town

The primary focus of this thesis is the relationship between urban poverty (particularly the lack of basic services like sewerage and sanitation) and environmental degradation in cities in South Africa. What are increasingly referred to as "brown" environmental problems are arguably the most serious environmental concerns in South Africa today, directly affecting the living environments of millions of urban poor while at the same time threatening to undermine the environmental integrity of South African cities as a whole.;The new South African government has begun to take these urban environmental concerns very seriously, but has yet to develop official environmental policies on the subject. What is emerging, however, is an unofficial policy framework very similar to one that now dominates the international literature on brown environmental degradation, and is identified in this thesis as an "urban environmental governance" policy model.;The thesis is a critical analysis of this policy framework in the South African context. With the city of Cape Town serving as a case study, it is argued that the institutional model of change outlined in the urban environmental governance literature is an important step forward in the environmental policy debates in South Africa, but that there are enormous barriers to change. Most important perhaps are the impediments thrown up by post-apartheid local government restructuring and the heavy decentralization of powers that will make it very difficult for future local governments to develop more equitable and more participatory forms of urban environmental governance.;But there are deeper, structural barriers to the kinds of changes that are required in the governance model, and the last part of the thesis examines the broader, class dynamics of brown environmental degradation in South Africa in an attempt to highlight additional tensions associated with institutional change. We focus, in particular, on the impact that privatization and fiscal restraints have had on the delivery of basic services to the urban poor, and question the ability of governance policies to deal adequately with the longer-term environmental implications of rapid economic growth in a market-oriented economy.