In 2000 a string of incidents across the country provoked strong media interest and hence public reaction. The KwaZulu-Natal provincial legislature passed a motion calling for a health study in the area.
In December 2000 the national and provincial government as well as the Durban City Mayor announced a multipoint Plan (MPP) for environmental management.

The plan signalled the intention to make the co-operative government work by combining action at national and local levels.

The South Durban Community Environmental committee (SDCEA), welcomed this as a step forward for participatory democracy and a solution to difficulties in accessing key decision makers, but were sceptical about the presence of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) who were set to jointly finance the plan with government. For the civil society group this was problematic as it gave industry an advantage in negotiations. They had been wizened by Industry’s tendency to push its own agenda by the SEA experience — a result of the good intentions of Agenda 21.
 

However the plan itself was good and the intention was to use South Durban to test new approaches to environmental management and to use it as a model for other pollution hotspots in the country. Two other national processes ran alongside the MPP. The first was a national air quality programme, which promised an Air Quality Management Act to set legal standards to replace the previous APPA. And the second was and the DEAT’s environmental Protection Support Unit’s national framework for compliance and enforcement of these laws, including incident response. This unit was not first understood by civil society to be a kind of national environmental protection agency, but rather a co-ordinator within the system of "co-operative government”.

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