Landing the Climate SDG into South Africa’s Development Trajectory: Mitigation Policies, Strategies and Institutional Setup

Abstract

Landing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into national development policies and development trajectories remain one of the desired outcomes to 2030. This paper teases out how South Africa landed the climate action SDG into its development trajectory, with a focus on mitigation policies, strategies and institutional setup. The study uses an online survey, key informant interviews, as well as policy documents and critical discourse analysis. The study concludes that South Africa has landed SDG 13 into its policies designed to respond to climate mitigation. However, there were several inherent challenges in the policies and strategies resulting in implementation inefficiencies, including the fact that the policy on climate change is driven more by international pressures and expectations rather than domestic awareness and activism. There are also challenges with institutional capacity to implement the policies at sub-national levels. Furthermore, reliance on a few experts makes the system vulnerable and fragile. The study also found that not enough is being done to support sustainable consumption and production (SDG 12) as there are energy intensive industries failing to comply with mitigation policies in place. Hence the paper recommends the need to fix the disjuncture between the energy policy and climate mitigation.