Consensus Building: The Clash between Governance and Everyday Life
In this recorded online discussion, accompanied by an edited transcript, Nikiwe Solomon and Adrian Van Wyk present a live exercise in consensus building that addresses its challenges in the context of urban river management. Bringing insights from the fields of environmental anthropology and artistic practice, Solomon and Van Wyk trace the undercurrents of socio-territorial relations along the Kuils River near Cape Town, South Africa, where postcolonial identities navigate continued marginalization caused by land development schemes and resource extraction. The discussion is structured by four key questions that explore the harmful effects of assumed objectivity when creating environmental management procedures and policy, and how such governance can be accountable to the communities it impacts.
One of the greatest challenges in environmental management is the contestation of whose knowledge really matters in the resolution of environmental issues. What is evident is that there is often an assumed objectivity that is asserted—a kind of unified understanding or agreement—as to what constitutes caring for the environment. A key concept in understanding these logics is “equivocation,” where a particular word or expression becomes conflated with others, and is then understood to mean just one thing. However, when environmental management and protection are enacted in practice, very different ideas of what they constitute are involved—based on context, discipline, and tools of enquiry—and play out differently across various levels of society, service delivery, intervention, and policy development.
This edited transcript highlights the key points from a conversation and live exercise in consensus building between Nikiwe Solomon, a lecturer in environmental anthropology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and Adrian van Wyk, who works across artistic disciplines as curator, producer, writer, and director. They discuss the challenges of consensus building in the context of urban river management in Cape Town, South Africa.
Introductions
Adrian: I am Adrian van Wyk. I am a producer, filmmaker and writer who occasionally teaches and conducts different facilitation moments for writing and the expression of creativity. I grew up next to the Kuils River in Cape Town and that has also become a source of my creative work as an artist and researcher, thinking about the relationships the river has had with the community, and using that as a point of departure for artistic expression. My films explore socio-political content through the lens of culture and expression. So, I explore the resilience of people through their cultural expression.
Nikiwe: I am Nikiwe Solomon, also based in Cape Town. I am a lecturer at the University of Cape Town, based in the Anthropology Department and also in the Environmental Humanities programme, which is part of the Anthropology Department. My interests are around urban water systems, particularly focusing on rivers and that’s how I met Adrian, through looking at the Kuils River, which is part of my doctoral research. What I am really interested in understanding are the geo-socio-political-hydro relationships that are happening with this river and how this shapes how the river flows or shapes relationships with people, policy, governance, management, and so on. My other key interest is looking at the river in the moment of the Anthropocene. How do we think about these relationships during a moment where the Anthropocene is this big “buzz word”? How do we understand it particularly from the global south and marginal communities?
Is there a consensus on what the Anthropocene is and who caused its worst effects? What procedures and mechanisms have made it possible?
Adrian: The worst effects on the environment in our context, an African context, are seen when unpacking the impacts that colonial occupation and colonialism have had on the environment. What are the perpetuated effects of colonialism? In a postcolonial society, what are the effects that continue to happen within the environment? I think the important part is to take a step back and reflect on this. Especially through working with you, Nikiwe, I learnt about the logic that capitalism tries to impose on nature, through “command, control, and predict.” That was very eye-opening for me; I have started to look at my environment and see the different ways in which the environment has been manipulated to do these three notions, to be compartmentalized into them. For instance, look at the plantocracy of the winelands of the Boland in Cape Town and how that has been a massive imposition on the environment there. They are made to look as if they are natural; however, they have been imposed there. Similarly, the massive effects that mining has had on the landscape of different provinces not just in South Africa but also across the continent. Or the mining of cobalt, which contributes to your smart phone, and which involves a massive expropriative process that enriches a one hemisphere and extracts from another. This is simply a continuation of an unequal extraction process, which causes mass damage to the environment and harms the grassroots communities in the African continent who have had centuries long relationships with it. Those relationships were shifted during the colonial era and now in the postcolonial one; the effect continues to be perpetuated through capitalist expropriation.
Nikiwe: I want to take a step back in thinking about the term “Anthropocene.” What is this universalistic understanding of it? The Anthropocene is seen as this current era in which humans are altering the planet to such an extent that there is a permanent and irreversible mark left in the planet’s atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the biosphere and the geological sphere, through the way we mine, “upside downing” the earth. So we are taking what’s deep inside the Earth and putting it on the surface. While this is happening, extreme levels of inequality and human rights violations are taking place across the world—the displacement of populations in Lesotho, for example, through the water highlands project, where they are building dams to ship water to South Africa. We have the effects of mine tailing dams collapsing in Brazil, the oil spills in the Niger Delta, raging fires in Australia and in the Arctic and the Amazon—the list goes on. And yet there isn’t the urgency to act by the political leaders because it will require a change in our unsustainable policies and require the mobilization of funds. This unsustainable way is what Jason Moore1 refers to as the Capitalocene. The term Anthropocene suggests that all humans have polluted equally and all humans are at fault for transforming the Earth’s systems—but not all humans pollute equally.
The decision-making around the governance of these fast depleting resources often occurs in the absence of the people that are going to be directly affected by these environmental policies in the Anthropocene. So, some of the Anthropocene debates around other terms, such as the Plantationocene with Witman or the Capitalocene with Moore, draw attention to these devastating transformations of human-earth relationships that are a result of these extractivist modes of relating. The relationships between us humans and the environment, the soils, and other life forms are being subsumed by the economic agenda—by economic growth and by the development logic. While the Anthropocene calls us to decenter the human, and pay attention to the multiple species that have been relegated to the margins of what it means to live everyday life, we also need to start to think of the term itself and how it has this language of ahistoricity. It suggests that there is a universalistic geologic commons and that everybody started at the same place.2 It neatly erases the histories of racism that were incubated through settlement and the building of these settlements, and the language of development that we are experiencing now.
How can the effects of the Anthropocene be justly mitigated in such a way that considers these many perspectives and ways of living in this age, rather than falling back into the tropes of hegemony and violence?
Nikiwe: We were talking about the violence of the forced removals of the District 6 area of Cape Town and the Two Rivers Urban Park [a holy site in Cape Town that is being sold off for development]. It’s not just violence against humans, it’s violence against ecosystems that are reliant on that part of the river. So for me, the key concern is how we think about development. How do we bring in more voices in policy making? It’s not just about this tick-box approach, where in order to develop we need policy that orients around employment, GDP, taxes, property sales and stuff like that. It needs to be more than that. These policies, or the way in which we enact development, can’t happen without the people on the ground who are going to be affected. Usually these decisions happen in the corridors of the already elite in the City, the already elite in the government and again, it’s like a cycle of exclusion, especially of poor Black people and Indigenous local communities. Then there are the bees, the fish, the trees that are impacted. They don’t have a voice in these spaces. How do we create policy that allows the voices of these marginalized beings into these spaces of decision-making?
Adrian: Bureaucracy has no way of dealing with people; it is very cold, it has no soul, it has no creativity, it has no imagination. And that shows in the way that policy is developed, because the perpetuation of that soulless driving force that is bureaucracy continues to assume what is best for communities without engaging with the communities, and we have clear examples of that within the city of Cape Town. Ideas and policies are rather dictated to communities. However, as soon as communities articulate any form of being disgruntled, whether it be through protest action, the city is very quick to enable and showcase what new weapons and force it has at its disposal to control those disgruntled voices. There is no bridge between the people and bureaucracy. We have these elites and people who are protecting their jobs and incomes driving the bureaucracy forward and that creates a further gap between the people and policy. We need to understand how people are self-organizing and policy needs to be informed by that. But at this moment the opportunity for civic engagement in policy is very controlled and kept in the board rooms of the City of Cape Town. How can we create platforms of dialogue that help to inform policy, and make policy development accessible so that it can be impacted through creative thought of communities?
Nikiwe: Where does all of this come from, the idea of governance that is separate from the people, decision-making that is separate from the people? It’s supposed to be governance for the people and not governance of the people. What informs policy the most is science, hard disciplines that are said to be objective, neutral and so on. These so-called objective, neutral decisions are happening at the upper echelons of society and are completely removed from how they are going to be felt and dealt with at the grassroots level. It’s quite useful to think of it, the way Lesley Green3 taught me, as a map. The way in which governance happens is understanding, for example, that “this spot on the map is the municipal area of Belville, of Kuils River,” and therefore you come up with these different policies, because you are seeing it from above. But the map is not a full representation of the complexities that are happening in those spaces. The map is flat, it doesn’t show you how the mountain is in relation to river, to the wastewater treatment plant, how it is affecting communities down the river. If you are making decisions on this top down view, we have a problem; google maps that doesn’t show you these complexities or violences that are happening at grassroots level. These so called objective, neutral approaches have major shortcomings—especially if you want to deal with issues of injustice and inequality in South Africa. There needs to be a broader way of looking at our geological footprint, the environment, issues around justice, inequality… There needs to be a more holistic way of how we look at these things.
Adrian: The detachment between the instrument of governance and communities of people who have been subjected to forms of marginalization only perpetuates the marginalization that people experience. The assumption that is made about what people need, rather than engaging with what people are saying they need. Making that assumption also carries out a particular kind of violence—exclusion, erasure—even at the local level, with public officials not being held accountable for their practices.
Nikiwe: I like the way you use the term, “the instruments of governance.” So what tools are being used to govern? Isn’t it time we question the tools that are being used to govern? They are not objective, they are not neutral, and they have real life impacts on the ground.
What are the metrics and models that are used to understand the effects of the Anthropocene and how do they factor into how consensus goals are reached?
Nikiwe: It’s about understanding that these instruments, metrics, and models are not neutral things. They are historical. They are based on certain assumptions and particular knowledge. And we need to recognize that these partial knowledges are being incorporated into these metrics and models. If we acknowledge that these metrics and models are laden with other meanings and other effects then it opens us up to asking questions such as; “by focusing on this particular model, or this particular metric, what are we not seeing?” As Lesley Green taught me, we have been taught to see what we see; we don’t see what we don’t see, we don’t see what we don’t know. We are taught to think a particular way and we see what we have been taught to think. So what are we missing when the focus is on these particular metrics and models? What have we learnt from the last 10 years of dealing with climate issues? What are we not seeing?
Adrian: I thought about how easy it is to vanish into a silo, especially if you have access—a privilege of a resource—and how easy it is to slip into a space where you don’t have to see or recognize other knowledge. A lot of the metrics have been developed from the top down, imposing what the problem is and what the solution should be, which is often assumed to be one-size-fits-all. As you mentioned, if we look at the historical layout and institutions of different countries, the history of extractive procedures and the violence that has been imposed on the environment and the people, those metrics cannot be a one-size-fits-all thing. No way if you take into consideration all of this, including the intergenerational trauma and knowledges that have been lost. I am thinking about how such violence is overlooked or normalized within the society we live in. A lot of the information and research that informs policy can be extremely quantitative and doesn’t have a qualitative relationship to the communities that have been subjected to these different forms of displacement and violence.
Nikiwe: Looking at these one-size-fits-all metrics and models, for me what this resonated with was the work of Isabelle Stengers4 and Bruno Latour5—they talk about how the concern shapes the question. So if your concern is about managing carbon emissions, you will develop models and frameworks around management policies that are going to address that. We have the REDD+ program where you can buy carbon credits in order to conserve a forest, for example, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. One of my colleagues, Guy Dakamela, is working in the forests of the DRC that is implanting the REDD+ program. When you look at it from the global level, it would make sense that in order for us to reduce our emissions we should slow down on deforestation and reduce our emissions. But what is not being made visible is that consumers and polluters continue polluting. You still have people in the global north continuing what they are doing because they can buy carbon credits that goes towards conserving an area in the global south and that offsets their carbon footprint. This is the unbalanced nature of the Anthropocene that we are grappling with, especially if we rely on technical responses to it. What also is not being seen are the relationships that local people have with these forests. These relationships are being completely reconfigured. The forests have been a part of their identity for generations and generations, yet suddenly people are being criminalized because the forests are being fenced off and they can’t legally enter into these spaces. So now you are criminal for practicing something your family has done for generations in order to respond to the climate crisis that is happening at a global scale and someone in the global north is dictating how you should deal with these kinds of effects, which you are not really a part of, because your carbon footprint is very different to someone that lives in North America.
How do we coordinate collective action at a planetary scale?
Nikiwe: We talked about these dominant ways of knowing in the Anthropocene, so for me we need to open the space up more, rather than just providing this so-called expert knowledge. The community members are experts on their environment. They understand what’s happening on the ground, in their spaces. So how do we bring them into these conversations, to have more democratic conversations about the Anthropocene and not present it as this ahistorical thing? Four hundred years of colonialism is real and has had real effects that we still feel today in the global south. So how do we bring that into addressing these inequalities of the Anthropocene?
Adrian: How do you bring conscientization to young people for instance? What are ways to get young people excited about the environment, environmental rights, different knowledges attached to the environment? I am a firm believer that artistic expression and cultural production hold potential in bringing about collective action and collective knowledge building into evoking new change and disrupting the logic of extractive forces that have been normalized within our context because it is made to feel so big. Bigger than us, as if the problem is unsolvable. However, you start to break it down when you work with new generations and articulate the problems differently, particularly since these new generations are going to inherit these problems. We need to find innovative ways of sparking collective action, and also ways that are rewarding for these communities, where the rewards are illustrated in ways that are not academicized or removed from the practical experience of someone’s existence. What happens when you intellectualize someone’s problems is that you are not connecting with them about their problems. You are speaking about them; you are not speaking with them. That sometimes happens when we write these amazing reports and come up with all these amazing statistics. However, what is the practicality of those statistics, what is the tangibility of change? What does change look like, smell like, taste like, feel like? What is the sense-making of change and how do we illustrate these change-making factors to people who are at risk or the recipients of these various forms of violence?
Nikiwe: From that, the key issues for me about consensus building concern the issue of language. How do we use the language that we have—or don’t have—to express the concerns of the Anthropocene? Like you said, different forms of practice, such as artistic practice, can transcend this need for this complex language. How do we bring that into the space of scientific debate? How do we bring that into conversation with climate science? Key here is an understanding of what building consensus means. What is consensus? It is often assumed to be “reaching agreement.” But it doesn’t always have to be about agreement, but rather about respecting difference. Acknowledging that the world is diverse, people are diverse, environments are diverse, and therefore the way we respond to the Anthropocene/Capitalocene requires a continuous metamorphosis.
Adrian: Democracy is robust. It’s about the difference of opinion and how that difference can be respected and acknowledged… With our diverse opinions, how do we come to a form of healthy disagreement ands debate that doesn’t sideline, marginalize, or perpetuate forms of violence that result in people being erased or not heard?
Nikiwe: So, it comes to back to the aspect of democracy, fairness, and equity. Being able to provide these spaces of fairness and accountability to the people, to the environment. I am not sure what the solution is, and I think the way we end this discussion is by asking more questions rather than providing answers, which I think is what consensus building is. How do we create these procedures of being accountable to people and the environment?
