The drive towards increased renewable energy generation and its application in South Africa are codified in a variety of policy documents and pieces of legislation, which together embody the national renewable energy legal framework. In many instances these legal instruments differ in terms of the nature of the field of law influencing their objectives and the governmental department of their origin. This situation is generically labelled as fragmentation and is widely seen as a hindrance to the achievement of the Constitutional objective of promoting sustainable development in South Africa. By necessary implication, integration is proposed as the solution to fragmentation and it is in this regard that this study puts forward the French approach to legal and institutional integration as a possibility for South Africa. The study presents the French energy transition legal framework for consideration by the South African legislature as a potential roadmap towards a more holistic and integrated renewable energy governance effort. In pursuing this objective, the study discusses the suitability of the French approach in the South African context and concludes that a hybrid of the French governance framework could fruitfully be applied locally.
The negligible levels of energy-related GHG emissions attributable to the Southern African sub-region translates into the sub-region contributing relatively little towards global climate change. Notwithstanding, the member states comprising the Southern African Development Community (SADC) are among the most vulnerable to the trans boundary effects of global climate change. Existing SADC climate change policy documents highlight the important role of the energy sector in climate change mitigation. Furthermore, various international, African Union and SADC legal instruments stress the crucial role of harmonised law and policy as climate change adaptive measure. It is the central hypothesis of this paper that harmonised sub-regional law and policy aimed at regulating SADC member states’ mitigation efforts in the energy sector is a crucial climate change adaptive strategy. This hypothesis is based on the mandates for the formulation of a SADC climate change action plan and for mitigation in the energy sector. These mandates are contained in the texts of the SADC-CNGO Climate Change Agenda, 2012 and the Southern Africa Sub - Regional Framework on Climate Change, 2010 respectively. It is the main aim of this paper to investigate recent developments in the formulation of harmonised SADC law and policy on climate change in general and law and policy pertaining to mitigation in the energy sector specifically. In achieving the stated aim, themes to be investigated by means of a literature study are those of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions and global climate change and harmonised sub-regional policy on mitigation in the energy sector as adaptive measure in the SADC.
At present no binding human rights instrument referring to an explicit right to water exists within the Southern African Development Community's (SADC) human rights legal framework. There are, however, implicit references to such a right within a number of SADC policy documents, and three Constitutions of SADC member states (South Africa, Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of the Congo) explicitly contain a right to water. In order to provide the peoples of SADC a legal basis upon which to enforce these implicit and explicit human rights, a SADC human right to water must be constitutionalised within a binding human rights instrument. In giving content to this proposed constitutionalised human right to water the 'reading in' approach found in General Comment 15 of the Committee on International Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as interpreted by the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights will be applied to specific SADC water policy documents. In this manner, references to aspects related to the right to water-most notably water quality and water quantity will be identified and discussed. These references will be interpreted and will be applied to inform the content of the proposed constitutionalised SADC human right to water.
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