OAiS Lab 05 · Years 5–6
Xolobeni Coast
The decision that sets the frame for a continent
- Location
- Eastern Cape, South Africa
- Coordinates
- -31.35°, 29.75°
- Field intensive
- Years 5–6
Transworld Energy and Resources, an Australian mining company, plans to mine the sands along twenty-two kilometres of the Xolobeni coast. The Amadiba community has held this land through colonialism and apartheid. Mining would remove them from it and strip an endangered coastal forest to reach the sands beneath.
The ground
What this site holds
- 01
The case turns on a conceptual question: is environment integrated with economy, or opposed to it? The answer decides the outcome.
- 02
This is the pivotal environmental struggle in South Africa. Its conceptual frame will carry across the African Union's Agenda 2063, the continental parallel to Agenda 2030.
- 03
The work builds on Lesley Green's CzASE Studies project and its account of how environmental decisions get made.
Research questions
- What does habitability require here, and who is authorised to define it?
- How does a community defend land it has never legally been granted?
- How do the frames used in one coastal dispute travel into continental policy?
Planned outputs
- White paper on habitability and environmental decision-making
- Community-led documentation with the Amadiba Crisis Committee
- Summer Institute and Spec Life Symposium, Trent (Year 5)
Cluster leads
Philip Aghoghovwia
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Hugo Canham
University of South Africa
Jesse Arseneault
Concordia University
Lesley Green
University of Cape Town
Partners on this lab
University of Cape Town
Cape Town, South Africa
Future Earth
Montréal, Quebec