South Africa

The regions of Eastern and Southern Africa, embracing the countries of Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia(land), Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Lesotho, Swaziland and South Africa display a great richness and diversity of cultures and peoples, geographical features and biodiversity. This complexity has created great diversity in resource use and management by rural people.

A critical component in ensuring effective environmental governance is the existence of a vigilant civil society which can activate relevant statutory agencies to enforce environmental policy and legislation. Lawyers are in a special position to provide leadership in this domain, although the lack of formal training in environmental law and policy advocacy in this region has highlighted the need to provide some.

An increasing number of land reform projects are taking place in conservation areas. Many of these are concerned with the restitution of land rights to people dispossessed of their land, and others are more generally concerned with effecting tenure reform and redistributing land to the disadvantaged and the poor.