How to ensure SA’s just transition is truly just

Across South Africa, development is often celebrated through the language of approvals, investment and growth. New mines are authorised. Infrastructure projects are announced. Economic opportunities are promised. Success is measured by what gets approved and how quickly projects can move forward.

Far less attention is paid to what happens after approval.

For many communities living alongside mines, industrial facilities and other development activities, development has meant polluted air, contaminated water, environmental degradation, dust, noise and declining health rather than jobs and prosperity.

Although section 24 of the Constitution guarantees the right to a healthy environment, poor implementation and weak accountability continue to leave communities exposed to harm. This gap between legal protection and lived reality results in the violation of environmental rights.

Closing this gap depends not only on strong laws, but on whether those laws are monitored, enforced and translated into real protection for affected communities.

The accountability gap

All environmental approvals contain conditions designed to prevent environmental harm. Compliance monitoring and enforcement (CME), primarily regulated by the National Environmental Management Act, is the mechanism through which regulators ensure those conditions are being met and through which polluters are held accountable when they are not.

In theory, CME should be one of the strongest tools available to protect South Africans’ constitutional environmental rights. Yet in practice, it often remains one of the weakest links in our environmental governance system.

A major challenge facing the CME system is capacity. In 2022, the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources reportedly had only 94 environmental mineral resource inspectors to monitor about 1,800 authorised and operational mines, alongside 6 600 derelict and ownerless mines that have become hotspots for illegal mining activities. With planned capacity to conduct only around 1,100 to 1,500 inspections a year, many sites go uninspected, enabling environmental violations to perpetuate and communities to remain unprotected.

The second challenge is weak and inconsistent enforcement. Communities continue to report environmental violations that persist for years despite ongoing protests and regulatory engagement. Environmental harm often continues unchecked, whether due to resource constraints, competing priorities, or inadequate political will, with little accountability for those responsible.

The third challenge is fragmented environmental governance. Environmental management responsibility is spread across multiple departments and spheres of government, often resulting in poor coordination, regulatory overlap and uncertainty regarding accountability.

Taken together, these challenges reveal a deeper systemic problem: South Africa has invested more energy into facilitating development than ensuring compliance with the conditions intended to make that development lawful and sustainable.

A development model that prioritises approvals over enforcement creates a dangerous imbalance in which projects proceed while oversight lags, compliance becomes reactive and environmental harm is often detected too late, leaving communities to suffer. This is a constitutional and just transition failure.

Why CME matters for a just transition

The just transition is often framed as a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy. While decarbonisation is essential, this framing is too narrow.

A just transition is fundamentally about reforming the political, economic and governance systems that produce environmental harm, inequality and exclusion. It requires changing not only how energy is generated but also how decisions are made, how benefits and burdens are distributed and how accountability is exercised.

In short, a just transition is a systems change project.

This means that the institutions responsible for regulating development are as important as the technologies driving it. If weak governance, poor enforcement and environmental injustice persist under a low-carbon economy, then the transition may be green, but it will not be just.

Strong compliance monitoring and enforcement advance a just transition because they ensure that environmental rights are protected, polluters are held accountable, and the costs of development are not unfairly shifted onto vulnerable communities. This strengthens public trust, improves environmental governance and helps ensure that development occurs within the limits established by law.

Without accountability, justice becomes little more than policy aspiration.

Shifting from approval to accountability

South Africa does not lack environmental laws. The Constitution provides a strong foundation and environmental legislation establishes extensive obligations and regulatory safeguards. The challenge lies in implementation.

Environmental rights cannot be protected by institutions that are not equipped to fulfil their mandates. Strengthening compliance monitoring and enforcement must therefore become a central component of the just transition agenda. This begins with significantly increasing investment in regulatory capacity, including inspectors, technical expertise and institutional resources.

It also requires a shift in regulatory culture. Development approvals should not be treated as the end of the governance process but as the beginning of ongoing oversight, monitoring and accountability. Meaningful consequences for non-compliance must become the norm rather than the exception.

The real measure of a just transition

In essence, the success of South Africa’s just transition should not be measured solely by the number of renewable energy projects approved, investment commitments secured or critical minerals extracted. It should be measured by whether the environmental rights of communities are protected and whether environmental harms are prevented rather than merely managed after the fact.

Environmental CME sits at the heart of this challenge. Without stronger enforcement, environmental rights remain vulnerable. Without accountability, environmental justice remains elusive and without environmental justice, there can be no genuine just transition. DM