Discursive power and environmental justice in the new South Africa: the Steel Valley struggle against pollution (1996-2006)

[摘要] The study explores the thesis that discursive power played a major role in the pollutionand subsequent destruction of Steel Valley to explain why, despite strenuous efforts bylocal citizens, the right to live in a healthy environment, guaranteed in the new SouthAfrican constitution, was not upheld. It analyses the struggle in Steel Valley around thedefinition of pollution, and decision making about its consequences, in terms ofdiscursive resources and their deployment in discursive arenas, focusing on discursivestrategies of the polluted, the polluter and the regulator. This exploration is set within thepolitics of hegemony in a new South Africa after 1994, as well as the 120 year oldMinerals Energy Complex at the centre of the South African political economy. Itexplains the legitimation of pollution in Steel Valley within the global discourses ofenvironmental management, ecological modernisation and sustainable developmentprominent since the 1990s.Discursive power played a major role in the Steel Valley case. Discursive power led tothe material outcomes in Steel Valley: the removal of the community, the physicaldestruction 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 amedical trust. Discursive power was used by the polluter to escape liability, bymaintaining scientific and legal uncertainty about the nature, extent and consequences ofthe pollution. Discursive power enabled the polluter to frame the problem as one ofecological modernisation from which social justice concerns, like compensation, could beexcluded. ISCOR’s discursive power also overwhelmed the regulator, as the regulatorremained too cautious to use to the full the instruments available to it in law, and allowednumerous exemptions. The state and the polluter both pushed issues of EnvironmentalJustice – compensation and rehabilitation – outside the dominant frame of decisionmaking.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 the4Steel Valley community. This superiority derived from a constellation of discursiveconditions in scientific, legal and administrative arenas. To describe these conditions, thestudy constructs a description of a pollution dispositive at work in Steel Valley, whichlegitimises past and future pollution. It explains the choices of the new government aspollution regulator, by understanding the tax-dependent state as responsive to bothlegitimacy and accumulation pressures within a hegemonic growth discourse.A grounded theory approach is followed to study discursive power, synthesizing elementsof the social and narrative construction of reality, Critical Discourse Analysis, dispositiveanalysis and the Environmental Justice approach. It develops a variant of CriticalDiscourse Analysis that can work across a big case study, by treating discursive powerplays 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 anemerging situation. The pollution dispositive was composed of pre-existing resourcesavailable in its environment: local discourses producing disposable others, throughracism or a view of dispensable fenceline communities; the legitimations and limitationsof the politics of hegemony, and the discourses of growth, limited corporate liability, aswell as of environmental management, sustainable development and ecologicalmodernisation.The study explores the implications of this analysis for Environmental Justice tactics inthe areas of environmental management, citizen science, the politics of ecologicalmodernisation, and the politics of hegemony in the new South Africa. It shows that theconditions of fenceline communities and the nature of discursive struggles around themcreate 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-pollutionstruggles within the Environmental Justice movement, engaging with a triad of conceptsthat explain the imposition of environmental injustice: externalisation of the costs ofpollution, exclusion from decision making and enclosure of resources. This approach canbe applied to the environmental struggles of other communities on the fencelines of theMinerals Energy Complex in South Africa.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand