ABSTRACT
There is a fundamental disconnect between the right to development under article 22 of the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights and the right to a satisfactory environment favourable to development under article 24. This disconnect makes balancing and promoting environmental sustainability problematic in Africa, as development has a dominant and negative hold across governance processes. It is unclear whether the right to development that guarantees the peoples of Africa entitlement and control over land and its natural resources, enabling them to develop socially, economically, and culturally, equally safeguards and promotes their claim for a right to a satisfactory environment.
In this chapter, we revisit the normative provisions of the right to development and the right to a satisfactory environment under the African Charter, highlighting that the juxtaposition between them currently allows for potential trade-offs, posing fundamental questions about environmental sustainability in Africa. Our view is that (as in the SERAC case) this trade-off permits, the sidelining of environmental protection in favour of more established rights and not least the right to development. Because of their interrelatedness and interdependence, we argue that any claim by the peoples of Africa to pursue their right to development and exercise exclusive control over their land and natural resources should be considered holistically, not in isolation, encapsulating the need to protect the environment and their right to a satisfactory environment. Furthermore, the operation of the development-environment nexus necessarily requires careful consideration to ensure that long-term sustainability is not sacrificed to short-term priorities. Accordingly, the mandatory obligations on the African states devolving from these rights should be deployed to provide a regulatory normative compass and used holistically to inform efforts to strike a sustainable accommodation between development and environment, in Africa.
