5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

This will be a regular session made up of 5, 20 minutes presentations of multidisciplinary research on Africa’s development and global sustainability concerns. The urgent call for global action towards responsible living and sustainable livelihoods forced us to explore diverse disciplinary epistemes that offer comprehensive knowledge about the real threats to our planet. The world is forced to confront the effects of, for example, ‘the idea of progress’, modernisation, and industrialisation. It has become important to acknowledge the cost of development but also to evaluate the impact of such development-oriented actions. The nature and extent of the impact derived from development-oriented activities in African societies needs to be revisited within the context of Anthropocene concerns, especially since Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has always been widely accepted as an important driver of development across the globe. Countries found themselves bound to be receptive to opportunities that encourage FDI inflows, including South African FDI. South Africa is recorded as one of the most advanced economies in Africa and a major investor in the rest of the African continent and yet, projections estimate that it will take another 150 years for many African countries to achieve the 2030 SDGs or meet the Agenda 2063 goals. Presentations in this sessions will share multidisciplinary research outcomes that specifically examined the role South African investments have played in either advancing or threatening sustainable development in its host countries. Research will present sobering findings on how South African investments have fared in the deepening of Anthropocene economics.