Critiquing Efforts to Water-Down the Regulation of Activities in the Kruger National Park

In 2024, the South African Government proposed a streamlined EIA process to fast-track decision-making and expedite a broad range of activities linked to the construction and upgrading of tourism infrastructure, maintenance, conservation, and rehabilitation within the Kruger National Park (KNP). Founded on the adoption of the KNP’s Management Plan and a Generic Environmental Management Programme as environmental management instruments (EMIs) under the National Environmental Management Act, the intention is to exclude South African National Parks, the management authority for the KNP, from having to undertake any form of EIA and secure an environmental authorisation from the competent authority prior to undertaking these activities. 

Professor Alexander Paterson and some colleagues recently published an article that critically explores the merits of implementing such an approach within a state-owned national park. It highlights an array of issues and risks associated with the proposal which if implemented, hold potential to undermine the effective management and conservation of the KNP. These include: a perceived fundamental misunderstanding between the role of management plans, EMIs and EIA; the potential broad scope of the exclusion; the extent to which it potentially undermines key constitutionally entrenched principles of administrative justice; and anomalies in the array of proposed conditions built into the exclusion that may undermine their operation as satisfactory safeguards. 

You can access a copy of the article published in Southern African Public Law here.