Chapter 9 Quadrant 3: Integrated natural resource management and sustainable human settlements
2 The sustainable development imperative
2.1 Finding the balance
Discourse on sustainable development and environmental management has tended to sit uneasily in the land sector. This is partly due to a long history of interventions by the State prior to 1994; ostensibly with a focus on land use and natural resource management, but often associated with dispossession and loss or diminution of land and natural resource rights.

The concepts of conservation and environmental management became inextricably interlinked with authoritarian control and infused with ‘received wisdom' and associated ‘disaster narratives' concerning overgrazing, desertification, deforestation, soil erosion and the depletion of natural resources by spiralling populations. They were closely shadowed by the perception that group tenure systems based on common property and subsistence farming systems that combined household provisioning and some production for the market were backward, unproductive and resulted in environmental degradation.

Post-1994, government has tried to reframe environmental management in many different ways. This started with the inclusion of environmental rights in the Constitution and moves to adopt new approaches such as participative forest management, community-based natural resource management and co-management of protected areas by parks officials and members of surrounding communities. These values and approaches are reflected in a suite of new legislation that we review below which marks government attempts to move away from older resource management paradigms with their emphasis on exclusion and harsh enforcement, but which nevertheless provide a strict regulatory environment.

Although DLA has taken note of these new directions and formally complied with its obligations under the National Environmental Management Act,1 the evidence from the field indicates that in practice environmental and natural resource management planning have largely been dismissed as an impediment to land reform in a programme that has been focused on speeding up the transfer of land. Alternatively, it has been assumed that such matters are the prerogative of the departments of agriculture.

The fact that DLA's environmental planning policy and guidelines (DLA 2001), which were approved by the Minister in 2003, remain unimplemented, may well reflect a continuing ambivalence to matters ‘environmental' by senior management in DLA. However, in this regard they are not alone. The tension between two conflicting sets of needs has been growing over the last few years:

  • the need to move rapidly to meet social delivery targets for land and housing and to drive economic growth from new developments; and
  • the need for measures to identify and mitigate impacts on ecosystem goods and services and protect biodiversity.

More widely in South Africa there appears to be a growing impatience with what are perceived to be time-consuming and over-elaborate environmental planning and approval procedures. Clearly the challenge is to find a viable balance between meeting immediate needs and protecting the integrity of the natural resource base which provides the foundation on which social and economic development rests.

This has been recognised in a draft policy document by the National Treasury (2006) which acknowledges that:

As the South African economy continues to develop, it is increasingly important to ensure that it does so in a sustainable way and that, at the same time, issues of poverty and inequality are effectively addressed. It is, therefore, important to appreciate that it's not just the quantity of growth that matters, but also its quality (DEAT 2006:9).



Clearly the challenge for land reform is to be able to combine accelerated delivery while ensuring that quality and sustainability are key features of project design and overall impact.