Glocal Governance, Local Reckoning

Rethinking South Africa’s Environmental Crossroads

Lukundo Siwila is a first-class law with business graduate from Birmingham City University, originally from Zambia, and an aspiring legal professional with a strong interest in advocacy, environmental justice and social change. He is passionate about using the law to bridge gaps in society, challenge inequality, and recognize the role legal systems play in shaping peoples lived experiences and stories. His interest in glocal governance reflects his belief that environmental and social challenges require both local understanding and global responsibility. Lukundo writes this opinion piece in his role as Intern of the Environmental Law Association of South Africa.

What do we owe each other?

I have always believed that advocacy begins in the body before it reaches the podium; that before a campaign becomes policy, it is first a feeling someone refuses to let go of. That conviction sits behind this contribution to the “glocal governance” conversation: an attempt to hold South Africa’s environmental crossroads up to the light, not as three unrelated problems of pollution, biodiversity loss and climate change, but as one question asked three times: what do we owe the systems we depend on, and the system that depend on us? This question is explored with reference to South Africa’s energy supply and the plight of elephants in the Johannesburg Zoo.

Eskom and the Cost of Cheap Power

Eskom’s coal dependency is not a new crisis; it is an old one that South Africa has learned to live inside, albeit dysfunctionally. For years, the utility has cycled through governance failures, ageing infrastructure, and a debt burden the State continues to service even as the plants it underwrites struggle to function reliably. The Medupi and Kusile power plants, intended as the next generation of coal-fired capacity, have instead become emblematic of the problem they were meant to solve.

To make the scale legible, Blignaught explains that the two plants were anticipated to emit about 60 millions tons of CO2 annually: 30 million tonnes per plant each. Put differently, that single annual output is roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of 6.5 million cars . Stacked end to end, the cars would equate to the rough mass-equivalent of building around 3,000 Eiffel Towers, or 85 Great Pyramids of Giza, every twelve months. These comparisons are illustrative, rather than audited figures; their purpose is not precision but proportion to make an abstraction register as something closer to its true scale.

The human cost is not abstract either. A class action now before the Gauteng High Court, brought against South32, BHP Billiton, and Seriti Power, seeks redress for tens of thousands of former coal miners and community members whose lives have been affected by exposure to coal dust and polluted environments in Mpumalanga’s coal belt. The National Union of Mineworkers frames it bluntly: this is not only about compensation, but about ending the idea that workers must suffer so others may profit. Read alongside the emissions data, the class action reframes Eskom’s coal dependency: it is not just a technical bottleneck, but a layered injustice: workers’ lungs, communities’ water, and the planet’s atmosphere, all absorbing the cost of energy supply that has long outlived its justification.

What gives me some hope is that the language of transition is maturing. The Carbon Trust’s work on phasing out coal does not treat power plant closure as an event but as a process requiring inclusive and transparent social dialogue, robust governance, and support for impacted workers and communities. Notably, South Africa is one of the countries for which these frameworks are being adapted. That matters, because it means the architecture for a just transition is emerging; what needs strengthening is the political will and the forums and institutions to use it. This is where the glocal governance instinct is correct: change of this scale cannot be legislated from above without layered conversation running alongside it. Government, labour, mining capital, and affected communities need a shared table, not three separate monologues.

Ubuntu and the Edges of Personhood: Lessons from Three Elephants

If the Eskom question tackles what we owe each other, a deeper question engages how far “each other” extends. South Africa’s courts are currently considering a case that, on its face, concerns three elephants: Lammie, Mopane, and Ramadiba who live in a small enclosure at the Johannesburg Zoo. But the legal argument underneath it is considerably larger. Advocacy groups argue that constitutional obligations linked to dignity, environmental protection, and ethical governance extend to the treatment of animals under State custodianship, a claim that, if accepted, could have implications far beyond zoo enclosures.

A parallel case before the Constitutional Court turns on something seemingly smaller still: a single word, “wellbeing”, inserted into biodiversity legislation and now challenged on procedural grounds. But as commentators have noted, the outcome could influence how animals are governed.

I find myself returning here to Ubuntu, “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu”, a person is a person through other persons. A narrow reading keeps the philosophy inside the human family. But African environmental scholars have challenged that confinement. Chibvongodze argues that Ubuntu is “not only about the human” but expresses an intimate relationship between human beings, the natural environment and wildlife; similarly, scholarship on Ubuntu and just conservation in Southern Africa describes Ubuntu as a relational ethic in which human flourishing depends on interactions with “other entities, humans and nature”. Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s account of eco-Ubuntu also supports this wider reading, presenting Ubuntu as an ecological ethic rooted in mutual care, interdependence, and the recognition that the human community is inseparable from land, climate and other living systems.

The wider readings also find support in constitutional thought. Retired Constitutional Court Justice Edwin Cameron has gone as far as suggesting that South African constitutional dignity may be interpreted to extend beyond human beings, with Martha Nussbaum’s capability approach offered as a persuasive legal bridge to legal personhood that embraces nonhuman animals. If Ubuntu is genuinely a philosophy of relation rather than a philosophy of species, then elephants pacing an enclosure smaller than a football pitch, and the wellbeing of animal populations more broadly, are not adjacent to our personhood, they are implicated in it.

Our Role, Reconsidered

What connects a coal-fired power plant in Mpumalanga to an elephant enclosure in Johannesburg? I argue that they are connected by the generally unexamined assumption that the environment is primarily a “resource” to be managed, rather than a relationship to be honoured. The conversation changes the moment we stop asking “what can we extract?” and start asking “what do we owe?” and “to whom?”. That shift does not arrive through law reform alone. It arrives through lekgotla, moot courts, classrooms, picket lines, courtrooms, and conferences like the Environmental Association of South Africa’s Annual Conference on “glocal governance”, where people are willing to sit respectfully at the same table, even in the face of disagreement.

I do not think the work ahead is glamorous. It looks like strategic alliances between unions and environmental lawyers who have historically operated in separate rooms. It looks like policy that treats a just transition as infrastructure and inclusion, not rhetoric. It looks like extending the courtesy of personhood to beings who cannot litigate for themselves and trusting that doing so does not diminish us but completes an idea we already claim to believe.

Glocal governance, at its best, is the recognition that the crisis we face is planetary, but the repair is local, built one dialogue, one court case, and one campaign at a time. South Africa is, right now, having several of those conversations at once. The task is to make sure we are talking to each other.