Chapter 26: Water security and environmental justice in Nigeria and South Africa: achievable concord or discordant alliance?

Abstract

As the world seeks responses to converging risks from inequality and environmental change, attention is placed on the role of improved governance for sustainable development. The way in which ecosystems and natural resources are currently governed often results in deprivation, marginalisation and structural inequality.1 In many contexts, “environmental degradation generates further poverty by the exhaustion of natural resources and creates prejudice to the exercise of basic rights”.2 Poor and vulnerable communities suffer from various forms of environmental injustice, often unable to fight back and reverse trends, which keep them mired in a state of exclusion.3 Without a paradigm shift in how natural resources and the environment are valued and governed, inequality will deepen and post-2015 developmental goals will be threatened, if not reversed.4 The concept of environmental justice has arisen, in this context, as a mechanism of accountability and legal transformations aimed at curbing abuses of power that result in the poor and vulnerable suffering disproportionate impacts of pollution and lacking equal opportunity to access and benefit from natural resources.5 Environmental justice emerged as a self-conscious movement in the 1980s,6 originally focused on the inequity of the distribution of toxics and hazardous waste in the United States of America, but has now moved far beyond this.7 A major focus of the environmental justice scholarship has always been a move beyond the simple description and documentation of inequity into a thorough analysis of the underlying reasons for that injustice.8 It also involved participatory justice, namely speaking for ourselves or a seat at the table; a