Aligning Climate Policy with National Interest: Disengagements with Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions in South Africa

Abstract

Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) were proposed as a policy framework that could provide middle ground for meeting both the development and mitigation objectives in developing countries. While South Africa engaged actively with the NAMA terminology in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations, its engagement at the domestic level has been rather lacklustre. This presents an interesting paradox. The paper studies the interplay of international norms embodied in NAMAs with South Africa's domestic policy process. Disengagement and contestation around NAMAs in South Africa is played out at three stages: decision-making stage where the symptoms surrounding this contestation first emerge; policy formulation stage where NAMAs have to not only align with the National Development Plan but also compete with a predilection for domestically familiar terminology of flagships under the national climate policy; and finally the broader agenda-setting stage of policy process, where NAMAs have to prove useful in not only pursuing the developmental state agenda but also in tackling the underlying material factors that represent country's economic dependency on fossil fuels. NAMAs faced combined resistance from ideas and interests in various degrees at all these stages resulting in their disengagement.

Key Words:

• Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions
• South Africa
• domestic politics
• climate policy
• policy process

Acknowledgements

This paper is dedicated to the memory of my cousin brother Shireesh Bhatt and my grandparents. I would like to thank the ERC, UCT for hosting me between April and June 2014. I also express my heartfelt gratitude to Eva Lövbrand, Björn-Ola Linnér and Mathias Fridahl for their guidance, encouragement and feedback during the research and writing of this paper. Thanks are also due to all the interviewees and South African colleagues for sharing their views and perspectives during my stay in South Africa; to Thomas Sommerer and Anna Bohman for their probing questions; to Naghmeh Nasiritousi and Rizwan-Ul Huq for feedback on various drafts and finally to the Commerford family and Prasad family for hosting me in Cape Town.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Prabhat Upadhyaya http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9576-9936

Notes

1. South Africa has submitted one NAMA to the NAMA Facility, which will be discussed in the sixth section.

2. South Africa is amongst one of the few states that ex-ante commits themselves to constructing a developmental state. The concept of developmental state was first formally used by Chalmers Johnson (1982) to describe the rise of the Japanese economy. It invokes a strategic role for a state in dealing with market failures and achieving long-term, society-wide development goals.

In 2007, the ANC defined four key attributes of the South African developmental state: its strategic orientation is ‘ … premised on people-centred and people-driven change, and sustainable development based on high growth rates’; its capacity to lead in the definition of a common national agenda; state's organizational capacity and its technical capacity (ANC, 2007, para. 188–191).

3. Norms are referred to while discussing developments at the international level, whereas ideas are employed to refer to domestic policy process in this paper.

4. Many of the interviewees pointed to combinations of these three issues as the key challenges facing South Africa.

5. Email conversation: Emily Tyler, August 3, 2015.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Energy Agency (Energimyndigheten) [grant number P35462–2].