New Agenda: South African Journal of Social and Economic Policy

Environmental entrepreneurialism and the limits and possibilities of socio-economic transformation in the Karoo

William Beinart — 2025-12-11

In recent decades, a new and multi-crested wave of investment has washed across the Karoo, much of it focused on aspects of what we are calling environmental entrepreneurialism, especially wildlife farming, conservancies, ecotourism, and renewable energy. ‘Sustainable’ copper mining, green hydrogen, and carbon credits are also promised. While driven by the private sector, this has not replaced the state, and it intersects with national and provincial projects that extend protected areas, facilitate conservancies, and regulate renewable energy infrastructure. The latter, with investment largely by private companies on privately-owned land, is probably the most significant area of investment. Renewable energy infrastructure is not directly aimed at benefitting the Karoo environment but at augmenting and decarbonising provincial and national electricity supplies. Other enterprises are similarly complex. While copper mining may enhance global environmental conservation, it is environmentally destructive locally.

In this article, we explore some of the dynamics of these environmental trends across different sectors. Generally, they are resulting in national environmental gains and enhancing local biodiversity. However, as we discuss briefly in each case, they are making little impact on socio-economic inequality. Landowners are benefitting and land ownership is increasingly concentrated. New networks of expertise have emerged between farm-owners, government agencies, universities, and private consultancies. We focus primarily on private sector environmental entrepreneurialism as a process of increasing significance and a shift away from the state as the key agent in conservation. Evidence suggests that redistributive processes are marginal, with the partial exception of those resulting from renewable energy licences.

Dust in the wind

Stephanie Paula Borchardt — 2025-12-11

South Africa’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (REIPPPP) is widely celebrated for attracting private investment into renewable energy while embedding socio-economic development goals. Positioned as a flagship initiative of the country’s green developmental state, the programme promises inclusive growth through job creation, skills development, and community ownership. Yet this article critically examines the disjuncture between the programme’s technocratic design and its uneven implementation in remote host towns. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and a 2024 household survey in Sutherland, Northern Cape, it explores how the REIPPPP’s scorecard-driven framework struggles to engage with the layered social, institutional, and labour dynamics of marginalised rural towns in the Karoo. Despite substantial financial commitments to local development, implementation is undermined by skills shortages, substance abuse, fragmented governance, and limited community agency.

These challenges expose the limits of South Africa’s developmental state, where technocratic procurement frameworks and rigid compliance metrics falter amid structural inequality and weak local capacity. By centring the construction phase and local experiences, the article argues that without more grounded, participatory, and justice oriented approaches, the REIPPPP risks reproducing the very exclusions it seeks to redress. The findings call for a reimagined energy transition, one that moves beyond metrics to engage meaningfully with the social realities shaping project outcomes in South Africa’s arid regions.

Beyond the “decarbonised minerals–energy complex”

Robert Smith — 2025-12-11

This article interrogates South Africa’s green hydrogen ambitions as a key site of the financialisation of development. While hydrogen is increasingly framed through the lens of a ‘decarbonised’ or ‘financialised’ minerals-energy complex (MEC), such readings risk reproducing a power-bloc conception of finance that overstates its expansion while casting the state as a conduit for interests. Drawing on recent critical interventions by Reddy (2025) and Bernards (2025), in combination with initial fieldwork as part of ongoing PhD research, this article argues that these dominant frameworks obscure two central features of the current conjuncture: the persistent financing gap and significant institutional fragmentation within the state itself. Rather than demonstrating the consolidation of a ‘decarbonised MEC’ or the expanding dominance of finance capital, South Africa’s hydrogen landscape reveals the absence of substantial financial participation, alongside a state labouring − often unsuccessfully − to construct conditions of investibility. The article, therefore, calls for rethinking the political economy of hydrogen beyond inherited paradigms and reopening empirical inquiry into how state–capital relations are being actively assembled in the emerging hydrogen economy.

From bloom to bust

Shannah Maree — 2025-12-11

As global demand for copper intensifies − driven by its essential role in renewable energy systems and technological advancement − previouslydormant mining regions such as Namaqualand in South Africa’s Northern Cape are being reimagined as new extractive frontiers. This article examines Concordia, a quaint town in Namaqualand, as a case study to interrogate the socio-ecological implications of renewed copper extraction under the guise of the green transition. While framed as ushering in development, these renewed mining ventures risk reproducing historical patterns of capitalist extractivism, now reframed as ‘green’ or sustainable.
Drawing on fieldwork, interviews, and historical context, this article employs the concept of ‘green sacrifice zones’ to analyse how residents and subsistence farmers in Concordia confront threats to land access, cultural heritage, water resources, and livelihoods. It argues that unless inclusive, participatory, and historically informed approaches are adopted, the green energy transition may deepen existing inequalities and lead to reimagined forms of socio-ecological dispossession.

Karoo Diary

Martin Nicol — 2025-12-11

A selection of events about, and from across, the Karoo that are significant or interesting, or both. Compiled by the New Agenda Editorial Collective at the Institute for African Alternatives and the Guest Editor.

Karoo crossroads

Stephanie Paula Borchardt — 2025-12-11

Stellenbosch University’s DSTI/NRF SARChI Research Programme on the Sociology of Land, Environment and Sustainable Development exposes a fundamental contradiction in the resource-rich Karoo; global scientific, environmental, and financial development initiatives collide with local realities of inequality, dispossession, and ecological fragility. In this editorial, STEPHANIE PAULA BORCHARDT asks if the impoverished communities who live there have reason to celebrate?

This special issue of New Agenda: South African Journal of Social and Economic Policy emerges from the work of the DSTI/NRF SARChIResearch Chair1 in the Sociology of Land, Environment and Sustainable Development at Stellenbosch University, and reflects the Chair’s central focus: to interrogate the meanings and practices of sustainable development in the Karoo, a region marked by environmental vulnerability, historical marginalisation, and speculative futures. The research looks beyond policy to examine how development is experienced, imagined, and contested on the ground. Drawing on sociological and anthropological approaches, the Chair seeks to build theory that is locally grounded, attentive to power and place, and responsive to the complexities of rural transformation.

Glossary

Stephanie Paula Borchardt — 2025-12-11

Glossary

Contested Karoo

Lorato Mokwena — 2025-12-11

As I was reading this book, various keywords ‘jumped out’ from its 12 chapters. Using these keywords, I strung together a
sentence which (for me) encapsulates the take-home message of the book: The Karoo is a resource frontier entangled in jackal management and grapples with sacrifice zones, unjust sustainable development and dispensable indispensability.
The Karoo is home to various in-demand resources − minerals, shale-gas deposits, renewable energy (wind and solar power), clear skies for astronomy purposes, fauna and flora and people. Unfortunately, its resource-abundant environments have contributed to the Karoo being a resource frontier − “a territory in which selected resources are up for grabs as new social forces move in to exploit them and in the process disrupt and displace prior arrangements” (Walker and Hoffman in chapter 12).

Youth development, vulnerability,

Caitlin Rickerts — 2025-12-11

This commentary draws on fieldwork conducted in a small Karoo town to explore how large-scale national renewable energy projects, which are lauded for providing much-needed socio-economic resources, can have unexpected and disruptive outcomes in the context of poverty, limited access to services, and social inequalities. CAITLIN RICKERTS focuses on the impact on young women and girls who,
despite their agency, encounter new forms of vulnerability.

Silence as a Room #1 of #5

Coral Anne Bijoux — 2025-12-11

An unknown individual drove a grader across a veld in the Karoo outside Richmond and levelled an art installation that had been carved and constructed over three long, hard years into the heat-baked desert soil. Ari Sitas interviewed the artist, CORAL ANNE BIJOUX, who developed the land artwork in the Karoo veld, after months of consultation, research, and development, to emulate a womb in the earth. However, her decision to create it in the open veld instead of on a private farm to allow equal and free access to all resulted in bitter consequences.

New Agenda 99

Martin Nicol — 2025-12-11

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