Global climate policy requires constant attention due to shifting interests and alliances between national negotiators. Whether represented at global or national scales, three universal features of fused climate policy conjoin the wealthy and emerging G20 economies that are historically responsible for the most greenhouse gas emissions. The former are represented by G7 Western powers—the United States, Europe, United Kingdom, Japan, and Canada—and the latter are centered on the fast-expanding ‘BRICS’ bloc: Brazil–Russia–India–China–South Africa (2010–2023), new members Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates, and potentially also Saudi Arabia (a member invitee), along with ten new ‘partners’ designated in 2024, many of which have carbon-intensive economies. Although conflicts regularly arise—especially over emissions-related trade policy and climate financing—and although Donald Trump’s exit from United Nations climate politics profoundly disrupted the usually coherent G7 bloc, the consensual principles uniting these diverse Western and BRICS governments at multilateral climate summits include the following: (1) not cutting corporate, state, and household emissions to the extent necessary for avoiding unmanageable planetary disasters, in the process denying effective ways of leaving fossil fuels underground (by reimbursing poor countries); (2) not pricing carbon properly or acknowledging their economies’ ‘climate debt’; and (3) instead promoting carbon trading and offset mechanisms. The implications are important for alliance-formation involving climate-victimized, low-income countries and climate justice activists, alike. In sum, there is an increasingly urgent rationale to transcend ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ dichotomies and instead consider climate (like many other aspects of G7-BRICS relations) with a perspective open to critique of the imperial–subimperial fusions, not only oft-assumed frictions.

The South African Communist Party's potential to play a progressive role within post-apartheid state leadership was frequently tested-and found wanting-following liberation in 1994. The failure was in not advancing the National Democratic Revolution's 'second-stage' objectives, that is, ending not just racial injustice in civil and political terms (the first stage), but socioeconomic injustice. Several Communist cabinet members shaped transitional and post-apartheid policies. Their sector-by-sector travails merit attention in part because they openly documented and defended their own work, and also because in housing, water and industrial development, three ministers made crucial, long-lasting neoliberal policy decisions. In the spirit of a structure-agency dialectic, such leaders (Joe Slovo, Ronnie Kasrils and Rob Davies) reflected Marx's conclusion in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon that people 'make their own history ... but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past', not of their own choosing-and thus not fighting effectively for socialism, either.

L’application de la logique néolibérale à la lutte contre le racisme, le sexisme et l’écocide depuis les années 1990 s’est révélée largement inefficace pour éradiquer les relations d’exploitation extrême et faciliter un développement équitable. Les subventions à la reproduction sociale n’ont pas amélioré de manière significative les conditions de vie de la grande majorité des Sud-Africains, qui continuent de vivre en dessous du seuil de pauvreté. L’horizon annonce une période caractérisée par la consolidation néolibérale et l’intensification des pressions sur la reproduction sociale.

Africa stands out as the continent where the legacies of colonialism and the ongoing dynamics of neo- and post-colonialism are felt most profoundly. In its role as the primary global supplier of raw materials, and with the ongoing technological transition towards the so-called “smart” economy and “green” energy systems, the demand for minerals from Africa is anticipated to increase significantly. European imperialism and its historically embedded extractivist logic are indispensable to understand the conditions that gradually prompted many African states to seek new trading partners. But “coloniality” is not limited to historical colonialism. Over the last two decades China has gradually assumed a prominent role in African trade, becoming Africa’s first trading partner, and leading several scholars to ask whether China is developing a new kind of colonialism. The impact of extractive activities by European, American, and Chinese private and public companies on African resources has been profound, resulting in the shifting of socio-ecological costs from industrialised countries to the African extractive peripheries. In this work, we employ a political ecology approach to examine: i) the claims of lingering French imperialism and Chinese neocolonialism; and ii) the impact of projects implemented by actors from France and China in Africa. We mobilise the theory of ecologically unequal exchange and cases of environmental conflicts involving Chinese and French industries to demonstrate how these projects have resulted in damaging impacts over African territories, leading to land pollution and detrimental effects on community health. We find evidence of ecologically unequal exchange both in the Chinese and French cases, though the dynamics characterising the trading relations of these two countries with the ensemble of African countries is markedly different.

South Africa has relied on extremely high levels of coal and other fossil fuels, but the early 2020s was a period of flux in South Africa. Dominant patterns of fossil dependency began to change and the politics of ideas shifted not only to renewable energy, but also to an explicit commitment made by the government to LFFU. This chapter first looks into South Africa’s national context vis-à-vis climate policy and the related key actors. Next it discusses the key arguments and approaches for leaving fossil fuels underground (LFFU) that would also rectify the injustices of apartheid capitalism and address climate costs. Against a broader context of high-level corruption and collusion, the deep-rooted minerals-energy complex and the related lack of climate action, LFFU approaches that are being deliberated in South Africa include stranded assets, vulnerabilities to international trade, extractivism accounting, climate debt and the social cost of carbon (SCC). South Africa serves as a vital case of considering the politics of ideas that play an important role in changing dominant patterns.

The world’s most unequal country suffers from various housing crises, especially when it comes to excessive reliance upon a private sector prone to market failures, especially affordability. State housing finance strategy during the transition from apartheid to democracy relied upon augmentation of formal banking finance so as to promote home ownership. But as macro-economic conditions changed in the late 1980s, the resulting mass defaults on individual families’ home mortgage bonds led not only to foreclosures by a (white) state, but (black) working-class resistance organised by the country’s leading urban social movement, known as the ‘bond boycott.’ Even after democracy, a worsening housing backlog coincided with resurgence of household debt crises in the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown. That generated a new housing finance strategy led by Mastercard and a local fintech firm (supported by the World Bank): collateralisation of welfare grants which in turn allowed debit orders for repayment of microfinance (typically used for minor home improvements). Again, social resistance played an important role, as the strategy caused even worse personal debt crises, and a welfare NGO’s successful fight to close Mastercard’s partner. But beyond periodic revolts of these sorts, a durable housing finance policy has remained elusive.

Author details: Patrick Bond is Distinguished Professor at the University of Johannesburg, Department of Sociology, where he is Director of the Centre for Social Change. From 2020-21 he was Professor at the Western Cape School of Government and from 2015-2019 was a Distinguished Professor of Political Economy at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Governance. From 2004 through mid-2016, he was Senior Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Built Environment and Development Studies and was also Director of the Centre for Civil Society. He lectured from 1997-2004 at the Wits School of Governance. He has held visiting posts at a dozen universities and presented lectures at more than 100 others.

Prior to the 2023 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference (hosted in Dubai) there were summits of global, so-called 'multipolar' and continental-African elites. An assessment offers the basis for pessimism about low-income African communities' ability to withstand further extreme weather events. In the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa bloc, as well as in African Union, G20 and United Nations summiting in recent months, self-interest and internecine competition prevailed. A reassertion of climate justice and an expansion of African activism are in order, with some oppositional seeds beginning to bear fruit in even the most brazen sub-imperial climate power, South Africa.

At a time, international climate finance was most hotly contested, demands again rose for major greenhouse gas emitters' contributions to climate change to be costed and compensated. One central aspect was to address the loss and damage thus created, the expenses associated with climate-proofing, and the inability of poorer countries to industrialise using the traditional Western and emerging markets' carbon-intensive strategies. Paying governments to leave fossil fuels underground and to decarbonise - a climate-finance 'carrot' - was one means to a more climate-just world, and to 'Just Transitions' especially in energy. The case of South Africa was especially important in 2021-23 given its extreme reliance upon coal for local electricity generation. If a climate carrot was insufficient, a climate stick - trade sanctions - also appears as a powerful weapon. But in practice, the carrot appears rotten, and the stick broken. As a result, South Africa's ruling class remained uncommitted to a new energy system, even as the old one fell apart.

On 11 April 2022, more than 350 mm of rain fell in Durban in only 24 hours. Hundreds of people were killed or are (still in early 2023) missing, mainly in landslides and floods after rivers broke their banks and washed away shacks. To address the overlapping crises of climate injustice experienced that day, a new theory of knowledge is emerging. Three epistemologies continue to develop through praxis in relation to climate change: solidaristic disaster relief appeals, service delivery failure critiques, and climate adaptation and mitigation failure critiques. This chapter begins by noting how President Cyril Ramaphosa explicitly blamed climate change for the flood but did so for apparently opportunistic reasons. We term this the state's epistemological approach to creating a diversion narrative. We then describe the response and narratives of different groupings of civil society strategists and grassroots activists. We show how their epistemologies can either remain isolated as alternatives, be pursued in tandem, or move towards what we consider a desirable synthesis. We conclude by posing questions about the roots of these approaches in reinforcing a neo-liberal approach or mounting challenges to capitalism. The chapter is based on our analysis of more than 100 news articles and our individual experience as action researchers and activist academics over the past three decades.

Can cost-benefit analyses change the terms of debate over resource utilisationin political and civil society and the state, among environmentalists, in the courts, and especially with respect to community, grassroots-feminist, labour and youth activists opposed to extractive industries and in particular, fossil fuels?Since late 2021, hundreds of protests against gas exploration along the coastline of KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape, Western Cape and Northern Cape, which is the site of debate in this paper, have helped society better consider fossil fuel costs and benefits.There are revealing controversies regarding the application of natural capital accounting (especially the Gaborone Declaration), overdue reforms to Gross Domestic Product national accounts, the 'Social Cost of Carbon' (and related carbon taxation and liability accounting), and intergenerational sustainable development calculations (such as the Hartwick Rule).In some cases, Environmental Impact Assessments allow for such narratives, but more important was a court case in 2022, Sustaining the Wild Coast et al. versus Shell et al., initially won by community critics of offshore gas (although subsequently being considered on appeal).On all these terrains, dangers of technicism and legalism abound, but if conceptualised with care, the merits of a broader, multi-scale environmental-economic consideration of the extractive industries could ultimately be foundational in resistance narratives and practices.

Critics of multinational corporate power in the Southern Africa region, the world’s most unequal, are increasingly concerned with the super-exploitative sources of wealth extraction from labor, society, and nature. Historically and especially today under the influence of corporate social responsibility and social engineering by philanthrocapitalists—including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—that power comes dressed up as charity. It is reflected not just in the economy but also public policy spaces—in South Africa’s context, from health care to agriculture to sanitation—and ultimately threatens life on earth due to the untenable implications of leading climate-control strategies. These can be identified from two high profile visits to South Africa—one in 2009, when Bill Gates visited Durban slums, and the other in 2016, when Gates received accolades from the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Pretoria. Resistance narratives against Gates’ ideas spiked at those stages, but the crises his messages addressed continued, in part because of his own orientation to profiting from “false solutions” instead of promoting serious solutions.

Samir Amin's critiques of both apartheid-era and post-apartheid political economy contributed to his scathing view of the crucial 'semi-peripheral' layer of the world system, a perspective typically ignored in binary formulations of Global North and Global South. Amin's 1977 article 'The future of South Africa' was among his first statements of how, using that era's dependency theory language, 'South African capital requires an outward policy of expansionism, so that ultimately, internal colonialism becomes coterminous with sub-imperialism'. Amin also labeled post-apartheid South Africa sub-imperialist because of the domination of 'monopoly capital' in the extractive-industry circuits (depleting what Marx called 'free gifts of nature') and the below-survival-level wages that have long shaped the economic structure. Two other coterminous factors were Pretoria's imposition of continent-wide neoliberalism through the New Partnership for Africa's Development and the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa BRICS network - both of which proved incapable of transcending neoliberal economic policies insisted upon by contemporary imperialism. Following the BRICS 2023 Sandton summit's elite failure to advance de-dollarisation or other 'delinking' strategies, Amin would nod, knowingly, when hearing the term 'sub-imperial' to describe the bloc - and look for inspiration instead to successes of grassroots campaigners.