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South Africa’s commercial capital, Johannesburg, owes its existence to the discovery of a gold-bearing reef on a farm in the Witwatersrand basin in 1886. Over time, gold-mining on the Witwatersrand reef developed to sustain a “minerals–energy complex” that formed the basis of apartheid’s racialized capital accumulation model.2 While many of the major gold-mining houses have long-since decamped due to the depletion of gold reserves and declining profitability of these mines since the early 1990s, the landscape is still emblematically littered with numerous gold-colored mine dumps, or tailings dams, which provide a very visible reminder of the history of gold-mining in the area.3
The embrace of socio-economic rights in South Africa has featured prominently in scholarship on constitution making, legal jurisprudence and social mobilisation. But the development has attracted critics who claim that this turn to rights has not generated social transformation in practice. This book sets out to assess one part of the puzzle and asks what has been the role and impact of socio-economic strategies used by civil society actors. Focusing on a range of socio-economic rights and national trends in law and political economy, the book's authors show how socio-economic rights have influenced the development of civil society discourse and action. The evidence suggests that some strategies have achieved material and political impact but this is conditional on the nature of the claim, degree of mobilisation and alliance building, and underlying constraints.