Towards sustainability via participation? environmental evaluation and land use planning in the Garden Route, South Africa

Bibliography: p. 222-237.This thesis seeks to relate the concept and practice of public participation (PP) to an evolving theory of sustainability. This relationship is framed within the context of the South African local state, where government institutions interact with civil society to support socio-economic development, as wen as environmental protection. In this respect, key mechanisms are land use planning and environmental evaluation, which interact to influence decision-making processes surrounding at times contentious land development applications. PP plays an important role in this process, and to analyse this role is the aim of this thesis

Distance makes the (committed) heart grow colder: MNEs’ responses to the state logic in African variants of CSR

Abstract: The question of how multinational enterprises (MNEs) respond to local CSR expectations remains salient, also in the context of many African governments’ attempts to define and regulate business responsibilities. What determines whether MNEs respond to such local, state-driven expectations as congruent with their global commitment to CSR? Adopting an institutional logics perspective, we argue that a higher global CSR commitment will lead to higher local responsiveness when regulatory distance is low, but it will lead to lower local responsiveness when regulatory distance is high. We find support for our hypothesis using data on 93 MNEs’ responses to the South African state’s Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment policy. We thus contribute to the global-local CSR literature and show how MNEs’ local CSR responsiveness will not only be shaped by the local context, but also their home country and firm-internal environments

Corporate Social Responsibility and the United Nations Global Compact in South Africa

This publication reflects the major findings of the desk study of South Africa. It shares an elaborate overview of corporate citizenship in South Africa -- a must-read for all people working in the field of corporate citizenship locally

What Makes Cross-Sector Partnerships Successful? A Comparative Case Study Analysis of Diverse Partnership Types in an Emerging Economy Context

This paper seeks to identify leadership success factors of cross-sector partnerships. We start with an overview of relevant scholarly and practice-oriented work, and motivate our research with reference to the need to add nuance to existing constructs, to explicitly consider the implications of different partnership types, and to assess the role of socio-economic and other contextual factors in an emerging economy. Our methodology focuses on ten comparative case studies, premised on two intermediate steps to develop a typology and evaluative criteria for partnerships

Neither colony nor enclave: calling for dialogical contextualism in management and organization studies

We express our unease with one-sided invitations into the Northern mainstream, as well as with Southern critics’ retreat into indigenous enclaves of organizational scholarship. We use this dichotomy to theorize the role of context in organizational theorizing by linking scholarly conversations on context, analogical reasoning, and problematizing assumptions. This creates the opportunity to more carefully consider how not just our theoretical backgrounds but also our contextual life-worlds provide the assumptions and analogies we bring into our theorizing. We use this platform to consider in more detail systematic biases in both the Northern mainstream (erasing and imposing biases) and the Southern critique (scapegoating and valorizing biases). These biases have in common that they essentialize context. To address this risk and to facilitate contextual reflexivity, we propose a form of dialogical scholarly engagement to generate complementary spaces to fruitfully question our contextually embedded assumptions

COVID-19 in Africa:Contextualizing impacts, responses, and prospects

It has become a truism that COVID-19 has impacted all countries and all people around the world, but in different ways. Yet this contextual diversity in the pandemic’s impacts, the responses by governments and other actors, and the prospects for recovery are only beginning to be understood. This is especially so for Africa, where, on the whole, the pandemic had a late start compared to other regions, but where the complex interactions among the disease, local health systems, and preexisting vulnerabilities linked to poverty, inequality, and fragile governance make such understanding particularly important. “Africa could become the next epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic,” though thankfully the rate of infections has slowed in most parts of the continent in August and September. Yet the risk of a second wave of infections remains high, and in any case, the effects of the global recession and of governments’ lockdown regulations are layered upon a context of widespread poverty and constrained states, resulting in severe humanitarian, economic, and social impacts, with long-term implications for sustainable development on the continent. Setbacks to Africa’s sustainable development agenda have global implications, and this is true for the pandemic also. As argued by the United Nations Secretary General, “Only victory in Africa can end the pandemic everywhere

Climate change impacts and adaptation in South Africa

In this paper we review current approaches and recent advances in research on climate impacts and adaptation in South Africa. South Africa has a well-developed earth system science research program that underpins the climate change scenarios developed for the southern African region. Established research on the biophysical impacts of climate change on key sectors (water, agriculture, and biodiversity) integrates the climate change scenarios but further research is needed in a number of areas, such as the climate impacts on cities and the built environment. National government has developed a National Climate Change Response White Paper, but this has yet to translate into policy that mainstreams adaptation in everyday practice and longer-term planning in all spheres and levels of government. A national process to scope long-term adaptation scenarios is underway, focusing on cross-sectoral linkages in adaptation responses at a national level. Adaptation responses are emerging in certain sectors. Some notable city-scale and project-based adaptation responses have been implemented, but institutional challenges persist. In addition, a number of knowledge gaps remain in relation to the biophysical and socio-economic impacts of climate change. A particular need is to develop South Africa's capacity to undertake integrated assessments of climate change that can support climate-resilient development planning

Labrador Sea freshening at 8.5 ka BP caused by Hudson Bay Ice Saddle collapse

A significant reduction in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and rapid northern Hemisphere cooling 8200 years ago have been linked to the final melting of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Although many studies associated this cold event with the drainage of Lake Agassiz-Ojibway, recent model simulations have shown that the Hudson Bay Ice Saddle collapse would have had much larger effects on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation than the lake outburst itself. Based on a combination of Mg/Ca and oxygen isotope ratios of benthic foraminifera, this study presents the first direct evidence of a major Labrador shelfwater freshening at 8.5 ka BP, which we associate with the Hudson Bay Ice Saddle collapse. The freshening is preceded by a subsurface warming of the western Labrador Sea, which we link to the strengthening of the West Greenland Current that could concurrently have accelerated the ice saddle collapse in Hudson Bay