Celebrating our 2024 Environmental Law Association of South Africa Student Conference!
The programme is available here.
This year, we asked students to respond to the prompt: My research is at the cutting edge because….
When?
5 September 2024 (all day) followed by a screening of Capturing Water, an inspired Rehad Desai film about the state of South Africa’s water (RSVP for the film screening here).
Where?
The Student Conference was hybrid, recognising that not all students would be able to travel to attend in-person.
Zoom (online).
Chalsty Centre, Wits University, Johannesburg (in-person).
Why?
Presenting research at conferences is a key way to:
- Disseminate your findings to a wide audience;
- Test ideas;
- Receive feedback on your research from experts in the field;
- Build your CV;
- Network with scholars, practitioners, civil servants and others in the field of environmental law and governance to learn about career paths and opportunities.
The Environmental Law Association of South Africa is uniquely placed (through its network of environmental law scholars, practitioners, civil servants, and others) to offer meaningful feedback to students conducting research in the environmental law and governance space.
Prizes for best presenters
The best presenters, Krisdan Bezuidenhout (PhD category) and Wilmien van Biljon (LLM category), judged by a panel of experts, won cash prizes.
Krisdan Bezuidenhout, best presenter, PhD category
Krisdan is a PhD candidate and researcher at the NRF South African Research Chair in Cities, Law and Environmental Sustainability, Faculty of Law, North-West University and holds an LLB from the University of South Africa and an LLM from North-West University in Environmental Law and Governance. He is also an admitted Legal Practitioner of the High Court of South Africa.
Krisdan’s presentation drew from his PhD thesis on collaborative governance, mapping the involvement of local communities in municipal service delivery. Despite operating within a robust constitutional and legislative framework, municipalities often fall short of their obligations, adversely affecting the environment. For instance, malfunctioning WWTW throughout South Africa contaminates our freshwater courses, impacting our drinking water, aquatic wildlife, and ecosystems. He pointed out that we are witnessing a phenomenon where the lines between public and private are increasingly blurred, where the private sector is being drawn into service delivery out of necessity due to the shortcomings of municipalities. In essence, local government cannot achieve its mandate on its own, and he used collaborative governance as the theoretical foundation upon which he shaped his conceptualisation of this phenomenon. He highlighted three modes of collaborative governance, co-design, co-production, and co-creation, within the service delivery cycle and provide a conceptual framework of how this would manifest with communities as the initiators of addressing service constraints. Delving into the South African legal framework for community-led service delivery, he described a spectrum moving from flexibility on the lower end, such as community clean-up campaigns, to highly regulated multi-million rand projects on the higher end of this spectrum. Focusing on the higher end, he discussed two mechanisms found in local government legislation: Internal Municipal Service Districts and Special Rating Areas. Both allow a community to deliver specific services within a designated area within a municipality. He referred to a case study in Saint Francis Bay that illustrates the practical application of these concepts, demonstrating how collaboration with local government can yield positive outcomes for communities, enhance environmental sustainability, and help municipalities achieve their mandate.
Wilmien van Biljon (best presenter, LLM category)
Willemien graduated with an LLB degree from Stellenbosch University in 2023 and is pursuing an LLM degree from the same institution. She is a member of the Stellenbosch University Chair in Urban Law and Sustainability Governance and is currently participating in an exchange programme where she is taking Masters-level law courses at KU Leuven, Belgium. Wilmien spoke about climate change insurance, an internationally recognised mechanism to address climate change, noting that research on South African law’s regulation thereof is not readily available. Climate change is a reality that affects governments, cities, businesses, and individuals, and it has been connected to the increase of natural disasters. The insurance industry, apart from acting as insurers, can contribute as risk managers and investors to assist in the creation of communities that are resilient and sustainable in the face of changing natural conditions. However, insurance is a tool that is predominantly known for use in the private sector by individuals with the financial means to pay premiums for insuring their assets. My research is aimed at determining the extent to which South African law regulates climate risk and whether it is done in an inclusive manner aimed at creating a sustainable environment for all. South African insurance law, disaster management law and the Climate Change Act 22/2024 are the main South African authoritative texts considered. A brief look at the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction aids in establishing what the international law norms and obligations are in terms of regulating climate risk. The research engages with the extent to which South African law regulates climate risk and to make recommendations on possible reform where legislative gaps are identified. The research will be particularly significant considering that it is a relatively novel and under-researched, yet very relevant, area of law in South Africa.
Prizes for best essays
Additionally, we announced the winners of the ELA Student Essay Competition 2023/2024.
Johané Berry (PG Essay Competition Winner)
Johané’s essay was titled ‘The spectre of harm caused by factory farms and its regulation under South African pollution laws‘.
Aleya Dugmore (UG Essay Competition Winner)
Aleya’s essay was titled ‘Evaluating South Africa’s Climate Change Bill: Strengths, Omissions, and the Path Forward‘.
For more information on our best essays in 2023/2024, look here.
Best blog submissions
There was no Student Conference fee. This because our goal was to make the conference accessible and inclusive for a wide-range of students. Instead, 2024 student presenters were asked to submit a blog post or other work for dissemination on the ELA’s website in lieu of a conference fee. Check out the best blog submissions by Michaela O’Donoghue and Thato Mphahlele here.
Michaela O’Donoghue
Michaela holds an LLB degree from the University of Stellenbosch and is currently pursuing an LLM by research from the same institution in urban and environmental law. She is also an LLM researcher in Stellenbosch University’s Chair in Urban Law and Sustainability Governance, under the supervision of Prof Anél du Plessis. She is passionate about spatial justice and urban inequality and aims to use her skills in research to develop these areas of law, and further her understanding of the field. Areas of interest include environmental justice, spatial justice, urbanisation, and urban development.
Michaela presented on the increasing seriousness of environmental justice in South Africa, and the availability of “the right to the city” as being a potential tool of mitigation. Her presentation began by laying out the many complexities which South African cities face today, and which are largely as a result of apartheid-era spatial planning policies. She linked this ongoing spatial injustice to environmental injustice, which is evident in many cities across the country, and across the Global South on a larger scale. She then identified environmental justice as a movement to mitigate environmental risks, promote environmental protection, and address environmental disparities plaguing poor and marginalised communities. She then presented Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city” as being a potential solution to South African cities’ persistent environmental and spatial injustice. This is as “the right to the city” has the core idea that those who use the city should be able to control it for themselves, regardless of social characteristics such as race, colour, age, nationality, or income. She then linked this to the environmental justice movement in that it too aims to address unfair and unequal treatment, and seeks to promote meaningful engagement with all people, regardless of any other identifying factors. From this, she argued that the novelty of this link between “the right to the city” and environmental justice is at the cutting edge of environmental law because it is based on the premise that “the right to the city” frame is not static and could prove to be a useful conceptual tool in mitigating and reversing the ongoing prevalence of environmental injustice in South African cities.
Thato Mphahlele
Thato is an LLM Researcher at SARChI CLES, Faculty of Law North-West University). She hold an LLB from the University of Limpopo and currently pursuing an LLM in Perspectives on Law at the North-West University. Her LLM is in three areas of law: local government law, private law (law of delict), and constitutional law.
She spoke about how, in South Africa’s new constitutional dispensation, local government is constitutionally mandated to realise the environmental right in section 24 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996. Municipalities must fulfil these obligations within their financial and administrative capacities while ensuring accountability towards the local communities. However, many municipalities fail in fulfilling these duties and this leads to local members being harmed as a result. The law of delict is an area of law in which municipalities may be held accountable through competent courts for their failures that resulted in harm when executing their environmental obligations. It governs the relationship between those legally protected environmental interests, aims to balance them, and to restore a disturbed harmonious balance of those interests. A disturbed harmonious balance of the interests occurs when a delict has been committed for which delictual damages can be claimed. To claim compensation, the prejudiced party must prove that the municipality committed a delict which occurs when five elements are present: conduct, wrongfulness, fault, causation, and damage. Only when all elements are met can municipalities be held liable. However, compensation depends on the type of harm, either patrimonial loss or non-patrimonial loss (such as injury to personality). Courts must balance the interests of both parties, of the prejudiced party and the municipality as the wrongdoer. A municipality’s capacity, financial or otherwise as well as the need to avoid limitless liability are some of the factors that will be considered before awarding damages.
Thank you to our sponsors!
