The COP 17 delay in finding a solution
to save the planet will have the most extreme impacts on African rural women
because of the ecologically-vulnerable geography in which they find themselves.
They also experience specific vulnerabilities by virtue of their structural
powerlessness within their families, communities, countries and the world as a
whole, weakening their ability to adapt to climate change when it happens. They
constitute numbers of the 300 000 people that die every year as a result
of climate change, and make up a majority of those whom the UN considers at
extreme risk of being a climate change victim. The Rural Women’s Assembly
national and regional organising for COP 17 and its impacts is therefore of
great significance to a wider civil society understanding of impact.
Background to the
RWA
The first regional Rural Women’s Assembly was held in the last
quarter of 2009 in Limpopo, South Africa, creating a significant political
space for more than 300 rural women from farmer unions, peasant movements,
smallholder farmer and landless people organisations in the SADC region to
share perspectives and knowledge, find convergence, and create alliance. The
second regional assembly coincided with the COP 17 in Durban from 1-5 December
2011 and brought together over 700 rural women from 9 countries in the
region. The SADC
Rural Women’s Assembly (at a much smaller scale) met in the year intervening
between the two assemblies to consider the AU Framework and Guidelines on Land
Policy as well as the threats of food (in) security in the region.
In South Africa, organising towards COP 17 prompted
the emergence of a national ‘chapter’ of the Rural Women’s Assembly, which held
a coming together in Pretoria on the 13 and 14th October 2011,
culminating in a march on the Union Buildings on International World Rural
Women’s Day (15 October 2011).
Why are the perspectives of
rural women in Southern Africa so critical?
Feminists working with rural South African women to tackle rural
poverty and inequality have long theorised that rural women carry the triple
burden of race, class and geographical marginalisation, and the experience of
other rural women in Southern Africa is not dissimilar. Climate change,
projected to have the most extreme impacts in the Africa region because of its
vulnerable ecology, and high poverty levels negatively impacting preparedness,
represents the fourth burden for poor rural women. They carry the greatest
burden of climate change impacts and of the false solutions being imposed in
the place of real structural solutions. In summary, the RWA believes that
considering climate change from the vantage point of poor rural women is
important for the following reasons:
Firstly, rural populations comprise the majority of the world’s
population of poor people, with IFAD’s
2011 Rural Poverty Report concluding that 3.1 billion people or 55% of the
total global population live in rural areas, and of these 1.5 billion live on
less than US$1.25 per day. At least 79% of the world‘s very poor people live in rural geographies, and South Asia and
sub-Saharan Africa account for the bulk of the rural poor.
Secondly,
women constitute the majority of the rural poor. The IFAD 2003 roundtable
discussion paper ‘Women as Agents of Change’ tells us that “women own less
than 2% of all land, and receive only 5% of extension services worldwide. It is estimated that women
in Africa receive less than 10% of all credit going to small farmers and a mere
1% of the total credit going to the agricultural sector.” In addition, the IFAD
2011 report states that, at the global level, men’s landholdings are almost
three times the size of women’s, and that in most developing countries, rural women’s triple responsibilities for
work on the farm, household reproduction, and income earning means they may
work up to 16 hours a day, much longer than their male counterparts, with
inadequate services, infrastructure and technologies to ease their work burden. [2]
Thirdly, Africa, a continent of 800 million people, is projected
to experience the worst impacts of climate change. Africa has already
experienced a temperature increase of 0.7C during the
20th century[3], and according
to UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change director R.K.
Pachauri, Africa’s ‘crop net revenues could fall by as much as 90 percent by
2100.’ Projected climate impacts in this region include rapid desertification,
water scarcity, drought and floods, heightened incidence of malaria, rising
starvation etc. Rural women will be deeply impacted as the primary producers of
food throughout the continent, and as the main reproducers of family
(provisioning of safe water supplies, care for the sick etc.) and given a weak
structural location in society will be less able to defend their natural
resources from the incursions of avaricious companies, government officials and
male elites as the effects of climate change bear down and the land, water
sources and forests upon which women depend are raided for profit.
Finally, women will carry the weight not just of
climate change but of the ‘green solutions’ (GMOs, biofuels, carbon trading)
that developed countries, multinational institutions and corporates are posing
to the triple crisis of climate, finance and fuel. In all cases, these
‘solutions’ push the burden of responsibility for climate change mitigation
onto the poorest and most marginal global citizens that have made little
contribution to the climate crisis - rural peasant farmers, most of whom are
women.
Organising for COP 17 – the political agenda and key strategies
The political agenda (positions and
strategy) of the Assembly was constructed over time and in fact evolved on a
consistent basis as workshops and awareness raising work led to deepening
understanding, as the context threw up new challenges and opportunities, and as
government’s policy making processes took concrete forms. In July, the rural
women’s caucus (at this time driving the Assembly process) made a first
statement of the objectives that would guide organising work with rural women
around COP 17 as follows: (a) organising
and strengthening a movement of rural women nationally and regionally, and (b)
gathering ‘asks’ and bringing ‘South African and African rural
women’s voices and their experience of climate change to COP 17 (and other
forums or processes they sought to influence). The final memorandum of the
Southern African rural women’s assembly outlines the clearest expression of the
Assembly’s position on climate change and the demands of rural women for action
by governments and the UN (see Appendix A).
The objectives of the RWA were advanced through a
combination of strategies:
(a)
Awareness raising workshops and activities – four
provincial cluster workshops took place in May and August 2011 with the aim of
building awareness and analysis about climate change, its impacts on rural
women producers particularly, and to enable the exchange of responses by women
to climate change. The ‘targets’ for these workshops were CBOs, representatives
of popular organisations and movements, and NGOs supporting the struggles of
rural and landless people for land and food sovereignty. A clear focus of these
workshops was to generate demands to inform local level organising and
campaigning, and input to policy and government COP 17 negotiating positions.
(b) Assemblies (National and Southern
African) - The
national assembly from 13-15 October 2011 aimed to create a political platform
for rural women to exchange, deepen solidarity and press government on rural
women’s demands on climate change, land, food, rural governance etc. On 15th
October the participants followed the path of their sisters in 1956 marching to
the Union Building to deliver a memorandum to government outlining their
demands of government and its positioning towards COP 17. The RWA targeted the
Presidency and five key government departments. [4]
A very junior government representative, from a
marginal unit (the gender unit), in one of the weakest ministries of government
(the DRDLF) was mandated by the presidency to accept the memorandum and address
the women on behalf of government. Rural women are largely disorganised, poorly
represented (if at all) in major institutions of influence (Business, Labour,
Church, indeed even Government) and lacking in resources, altogether read a
grouping with little influence, power to disrupt or embarrass and therefore
quite unworthy of a fair audience.
The second regional
assembly of well over 700 women in Durban had an ambitious agenda to deepen
understanding about the systemic nature of the climate and food crisis,
exchange experience of climate change and its impacts, share strategies for
responding to climate change, strengthen local and international movements, and
build a shared political platform on climate change regionally. The Assembly
comprised the following types of activities/actions: exchanges (of seeds,
responses to climate change etc.) speak outs, exploratory sessions using
creative techniques, actions (marches, demonstrations etc.), teach-ins, and
political discussions to forge political decisions.
(c)Media and publicity work – this was
specifically tied to the two Assemblies and aimed to attract the attention of
the media, and through this, the attention and sympathy of the wider public (in
the case of the Regional Assembly – a global public) to the particular impacts
of climate change on rural women, and their demands of governments and the UN.
(d) Policy research, analysis and
‘engagement’ of government and its policy processes - The COP 17
organising of rural women galvanised grassroots linked policy analysis and
influencing work, mainly oriented to the national climate change policy
process. The Green Paper on Climate Change, released in November 2010, and the
public hearings that took place in the first quarter of 2011, preceded the
formation of the National RWA. A discussion and analysis of the RWA’s effort to
influence the Climate Change Policy from May 2011 is outlined in section _ of
this paper. The RWA and its constituting organisations participated in a very
long list of European Commission, DIRCO and DEA conferences, stakeholder meetings
and workshops, and a few provincial meetings in the period May to December
2011. In addition, representatives of some organisations making up or working
with the RWA – but no grassroots women – took up an opportunity to meet with
Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane on the
7th December 2011 for a South African ‘civil society consultation’
held inside of the International Convention Centre (ICC), meaning that only
those accredited (mainly the big INGOs, policy think tanks, or blue chip
national NGOs) could participate. The complaints of organisations like the RWA
against such an exclusionary process may have helped inform government’s
decision to build a civil society-government platform at the City Hall on the
morning of 8th December. The RWA and the faith community were
invited to speak on a platform, alongside the President, the Premier of
KwaZulu-Natal and the Minister of Economic Development. This ‘civil society’
consultation was organised as a deal had already been struck in backrooms, and
was obviously meant to secure some level of CSO endorsement of this deal and
convey to global leaders the open democratic consultative orientation of the SA
government. The meeting was disrupted by physical attacks (sponsored by the
same municipal employed ‘green goons’ that had assaulted activists on the GDA
march) against climate justice activists expressing their perspective on the
South African government’s failure to secure a deal that would safeguard the
planet, and prevent the death of hundreds of millions of African compatriots.
(e) Direct action – Over the
course of the two assemblies, and discounting any local actions of which we
might not be aware, the RWA participated in three marches (one impromptu, and
two planned), and one demonstration. The first march upon the union buildings
was of the National Assembly and took place on 15 October. The second march on
2nd December was an entirely spontaneous one – see the ‘Anarchic
People’s March’ on page _. The RWA marched as a block on the Global Day of
Action (GDA) – for more on the GDA see section_. The RWA, supported by Friends
of the Earth International and Action Aid International, also held a solidarity
action (on the 4th December), meeting with the lead negotiator for
the Africa Block to show allegiance and solidarity to the positions this block
was pushing in the negotiations.
(f) Networking and solidarity – The RWA
made every effort to network with and act in solidarity with a range of
progressive formations engaged in actions and campaigns surrounding the COP. This
included the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), One Million Climate
Jobs Campaign, the Democratic Left Front (DLF), the South African Waste Pickers
Association and their ally Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and
Organizing (WIEGO), and La Via Campesina.
This solidarity took numerous forms – participating in joint actions
(marches, pickets and demonstrations); creating linkages in political
discussion across spaces (by having a representative/s address the RWA or
sending a representative or a nominated group to address another forum);
endorsing petitions and memorandums etc.
The ‘impact’ and key lessons from the RWA
The RWA,
over the period May to mid-December 2011, undertook an impressive number of
workshops, awareness raising activities, marches, demonstrations, and two
assemblies; and wrote no less than five different memorandums, policy
submissions and a dozen letters to different government departments, but what
did this all add up to in terms of ‘impact’?[5]
The RWA had
success in its building of a national and then later a regional platform of
rural women, and informing the public (nationally and internationally), and
some politicians and elected officials of governments at the COP 17 about the
experiences and demands of rural women for national and international action on
climate change. Despite this profile, the Durban outcome does not, in any way,
respond to the needs and interests of rural women and sentences them instead to
a future of less water, greater hunger, the threat of land loss, lowered
production levels and a high likelihood of premature death.
One of the key questions that emerges from the RWA experience, as
it does from many other campaigns and organising efforts surrounding the COP
17, is how to link the inside and outside if at all. This was barely discussed
in the RWA in the lead up to COP, and only touched on in the early 2012 RWA
review of COP 17. Some of the organisations constituting and working with the
RWA had seats inside the negotiations, but there was no agreed ‘inside-outside’
strategy and no space on the programme of the RWA until one of the last days to
receive information on and analyse the trajectory of the negotiations, the
different blocks of actors, the SA government’s role as convenor etc. This flow
of information from the inside to the outside is critical to deepen analysis
about the power interests that come around the multilateral process, to refine
strategy, and to communicate positions back to supportive negotiation blocks.
The RWA is
politically diverse and some of the key fissures come around (a) the
multilateral process and (b) state-civil society relations, no different from
the C17 and other alliances. Some of the organisations had an inside presence
(as mentioned above) and were typically more confident and invested in the
possibility of an inside resolution that would be ‘fair’ to global citizens.
Other organisations and individuals working within the RWA held a much more
critical perspective on multi-lateral processes, based on the understanding
that it is not the interests of poor global citizens represented there but
rather the interests of rich global citizens, and the MNCs in particular, that
drive decision-making. There are also different positions in respect of
state-civil society relations mapping out to different orientations to
government and government-led policy and legislative processes. Some
organisations still have a vested interest in participating in, trying to
influence and, in the end, giving credibility to deeply flawed government
policy and law making processes that are compromised by the nexus of
state-party-business interests. Some organisations and individuals hold a
contrary perspective and are critical about drawing community groups into government-led
processes that only lend credence to predetermined positions that have been
constructed in back rooms and do not represent the interests of poor citizens.
These are the elephants in the room that do need to be surfaced and addressed
by the RWA as it moves forward.
While the
RWA organisers may not really have imagined that they would ‘influence’ the COP
17 negotiations there was a small hope that they would be able to influence the
national Climate Change Response Policy from the perspective of rural women.
According to members of the policy team of the RWA, influencing work did result
in some small text changes in the final policy outcome (the White Paper) –
however there is only one reference to rural women, who clustered together with
children and the aged are identified as a ‘special needs group’. The policy
addresses agriculture from a mitigation and adaptation angle, highlights the
importance of a movement to climate resilient sustainable agriculture, and does
address the needs of subsistence farmers for attention within an integrated
rural development framework, but could have gone much further in privileging
subsistence and small scale farmers, proposing the reorientation of existing
policies and programmes across government to support their needs, and
addressing this sector as a budget priority for adaptation support. The failure
to set an adequate emissions reduction target required to keep temperature
increases below the scientifically accepted 1.5 degree standard will have
dramatic consequences for rural women, the major subsistence and small scale
producers, and their offspring in just a decade or two. In summary, the RWA may
have achieved some small success in influencing the final outcome of the
Climate Change Response policy.
The greatest
achievement of the RWA was that it did help to strengthen a movement of rural
women nationally and regionally. Over a thousand rural women and
representatives from organisations working alongside rural women obtained more
information about climate change; understood more about the institutional
processes – policy making and negotiations – that shape their lives in such
distant but deeply profound ways; had opportunity to exchange concrete
experiences of climate change and their responses; and shared concrete examples
of alternatives (indigenous seeds, technologies, agro-ecology farming methods
and techniques, traditional forms of local trading etc.) to ‘false solutions
(GMOs, agrofuels, carbon trading etc.); and had chance to take action (to
emerge from invisibility to visibility, to talk out their demands, to test
against power etc.). Related to this, the work towards COP 17 helped to ‘bring’
the climate change question to rural women and the organisations that support
them - to help them understand the changing soil conditions, weather and
rainfall patterns they mention, to assist them think through and ‘trade’ in a
truly open market their responses and the alternatives they construct on a
daily basis, and to enable them to articulate their demands and frame their
ideas for follow on actions. The challenge going forward is to ensure that the
insights, lessons and work started through the RWA is sustained and developed
going forward.
The Climate Change Policy Process –
a story of compromise and exclusion
The RWA’s experience of the Climate
Change policy process is very illustrative of the many challenges poor
citizens and the organisations that work in solidarity with them experience
in respect of policy-making. Firstly, while the Green Paper was released in
late November 2011 and the time frame for comments concluded on the 15th
February 2011, the traditional long holiday period over December effectively
reduced the real consultation time to 6 weeks. Informants to this short paper
indicated that this was way too contracted a period to do any meaningful
consultations with rural and affected communities in advance of the
deadline.
Secondly, most of the organisations
constituting the RWA complained that they only heard about the provincial
consultation ‘public’ workshops (contracted out to a company called Linkd,
which is closely associated with leadership of the DEA) conducted over
January and February 2011 after the fact. It is therefore unlikely that rural
communities and organisations, poorly networked and informed, would have
participated in these workshops. The same experience applies to the thematic
consultative workshops held at more or less the
same time.
Thirdly, the initial timeline for
the conclusion of the White Paper had been June 2011, but by August there was
still no sign of the Paper and no clear indication from government as to when
it would be released. Towards the end of August, the two big INGOs (Oxfam and
ActionAid), closely associated with the RWA, met with the DEA Chief Director of
Air Quality Management and Climate Change, Mr Peter Lukey, which meeting was followed by a ‘carefully handpicked’
civil society consultation on the White Paper arranged by the WWF (another
INGO) shortly after that. Just a few days after that a member organisation of
the RWA – also an NGO with close international links, Gender cc – was able to
appeal to a collegial connection with Peter Lukey to open up space for the
rural women’s caucus to give input to the White Paper. At this time the White
Paper had not yet been officially released. Carrying the mandate of the RWA,
representatives to this latter mentioned meeting raised deep concerns about
the content of the White Paper – specifically the absence of focus to women,
the gendered impacts of climate change and rural women’s needs in terms of
adaptation support – and complained about the delays in release and the real
failure to solicit input from poor rural women to the policy making process.
In these
various August encounters with Mr Lukey, he indicated that in the period
February to August 2011, the DEA had been deeply immersed in intra-government
negotiations in respect of the White Paper and in July 2011 had ‘talked with
some stakeholders in business and civil society’. He indicated that the DEA
would not be opening the White Paper up to a further round of consultation
for fear it would be ‘watered down’ by business and some government
departments. Cabinet was also pressing hard for the release of the White
Paper in advance of the COP 17. Mr Lukey opened a door for the RWA to give
detailed input to the July draft of the White Paper from a rural women’s
perspective – this input, undertaken with track changes, drew upon the
outcomes of the awareness raising workshops and emerging policy positions of
the RWA – and was submitted to the DEA in early September 2011. The White
Paper, released nearly six weeks later, retained some of the policy change
suggestions made by the RWA.
Fourth, the White Paper (as a policy
proposal) was eventually gazetted in the third week of October (nearly 4
months past the deadline announced in November 2010) with parliamentary
hearings scheduled to take place on the 31st October. This was an
extremely tight and unrealistic process, allowing only fourteen days for
consultations of members. Given the RWA’s unhappiness with the White Paper
and its deep critique of the failures of the public consultation, the RWA
elected not to make a formal submission (which some RWA members felt would
lend credibility to the process), but instead wrote a letter of complaint to
the Minister of Environmental Affairs, and the Chair of the Portfolio Committee. This letter indicated that the RWA would be
exploring options for legal action to hold government accountable to legal
requirements for citizen participation in public policy-making.
While it
would be easy to default to a formulaic (but important) liberal analysis
about the constitution and its “requirement that government engage with
citizens when making the decisions that affect their lives” (see IDASA and
Buccus), we must ask a deeper question about why this problem of exclusion of
poor citizens from participation in decisions that deeply concerns every
aspect of their lives now and into the future (as exactly this policy process
does) repeats itself over and over again. Why are constitutional
prescriptions for public participation, transparency and accountability not
followed; and why do policies and laws not substantively represent the
interests of the majority of citizens? This is about power – whose counts and
who does not. It is the voices of business first, other actors second (for
example, the politically influential INGOs) that really shape the policy
process. And in the case of the RWA’s ‘crack in the door’ informal hearing on
the White Paper, this was created through the intervention of some in the
‘inner circle’ that Buccus talks about. It is also likely that DEA officials
were of the view that rural women (traditionally regarded as ‘gentle and
cooperative’) would not overly rock the policy boat and could therefore be
accommodated. DEA officials will cry that they are trying to balance multiple
interests in the policy process and that it is not possible to satisfy the
interests of all ‘actors’, but this is at the heart of the neo-liberal problematic.
The policy and legislative process is cast as a neutral multi-stakeholder
process, when this is indeed not so – while the White Paper is a great
improvement on the Green Paper, its failure to align to a scientifically
accepted 1.5 degree global warming target, its global emissions peak post
2020, and its privileging of market based mitigation solutions do not reflect
the interests of the majority of citizens nor the radical changes needed to
reduce our high carbon emissions that will have dramatic implications for our
brothers and sisters on the rest of the continent. Corporate interests and
their backers in government have carried the day.
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[1] The author
was employed by ActionAid South Africa during the RWA’s organising for COP 17
and this paper, with a few inputs gratefully received from some colleagues in
the RWA, represents her perspective and not that of the RWA as a whole.
[4] The Department for International Relations and
Cooperation, the Department of
Women, Children and People with Disabilities, the Department of Agriculture,
Forests and Fisheries, the Department of Environmental Affairs and the
Department of Rural Development and Land Reform.
[5] The RWA held two different internal
self-reflections over the period January to March 2012 – the one telephonic and
the second face to face – upon which this section draws.
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