Towards the application of the precautionary principle in South African law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The precautionary principle has gained general acceptance in international, regional and a number of domestic jurisdictions. In South Africa the principle has found a tentative foothold in legislation and case law but generally has had limited practical application. Much needed economic development in the country has seen, amongst other things the enactment of the Infrastructure Development Act 23 of 2014 to promote large infrastructural developments. This article outlines the development and importance of the precautionary principle in international law, its incorporation into in some regional and domestic jurisdictions, such as the EU, Canada, and Australia and motivates for it to be given serious consideration in South Africa's development agenda. It points out that the principle is fundamental to furthering the global ideal of long term sustainable development, a constitutionally mandated goal in South Africa. The principle is therefore a vital constituent in the decision-making process of all proposed future large scale infrastructural developments such as nuclear power stations and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) undertakings. In short, it is argued that the time is ripe for the more robust application of the principle, particularly where administrative decision-making entails large-scale developments having a potentially significant bearing on sustainable development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".