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ith the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) opening in Johannesburg, this series of five booklets gives an environmental justice perspective on key challenges for sustainable development in South Africa. Development largely defines people's relationship with their environments. Governance is about who decides that relationship. It is a means through which a global contest for control of resources, including environmental and labour resources, is fought out. The booklets report from several 'fronts' of the struggle we call development. They look at how South Africa has adopted critical aspects of international governance, at whose interests are served and at the impacts on people and their environments. They indicate that, while another world is possible, it is not being built in South Africa. 1. The invisible fist: Development policy meets the world by David Hallowes Booklet 1 focuses on South Africa's approach to development in relation to the global order defined by the neo-liberal agenda of the 'Washington consensus'. The corporate push for self-regulation is part of the neo-liberal agenda. Booklet 2 looks at what advances they have made in South Africa. 3. The cost of living: How selling basic services excludes the poor by Mark Butler Booklet 3 picks up on the democratic promise to provide people with services, such as clean water and energy, in relation to global injunctions for cost recovery and privatisation. Booklet 5 touches on climate change, another point of conflict between the northern powers, so as to relate it to the local impacts of South Africa's oil refineries. Everyday life for urban and rural black South Africans continues to bear the scars of apartheid. The backlogs and distortions in terms of access to basic services and infrastructure that were created by apartheid were huge and racially defined. They describe some of the key features of environmental injustice that characterized the lives of the majority of South Africans. Rural areas By the end of the apartheid era, African rural areas had at least ten times the population of 'white' commercial farming areas and they suffered chronic poverty and erosion. Despite this, agricultural production and resource gathering remained critical to survival and livelihoods in rural and peri-urban areas. Because apartheid denied permanent residential rights to black workers in 'white' South Africa, migrant labour was dominant and black workers were compelled to return 'home' to the 'homelands' or 'bantustans' when their labour power was no longer required. Therefore, redundancies …