Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
2019, Urban Studies
Written by long-standing research practitioners Ian Palmer and Nishendra Moodley, as well as one of South Africa’s leading academic urbanists, Professor Sue Parnell, Building a Capable State tackles the hard question of whether the post-apartheid state is up to delivering rights-based, sustainable development, and more specifically the task of providing local services like water, electricity, roads and housing.
ABSTRACT The introduction of democracy in South Africa brought some hope to millions who were previously marginalised. The new government transformed the public service by developing and enacting policies that would ensure fairness and equity in the provision of services. Notwithstanding the progress, government’s failure to adequately meet communities’ needs has led to recent service delivery protests. The empirical evidence has revealed that communities are unhappy because of, among other things, the deployment of unskilled, unqualified and inexperienced cadres to municipal management positions, the accumulation of wealth by a few individuals through the abuse of the tendering system, inadequate revenue due to centralisation of funding, and absence of proper systems of collecting revenue by municipalities, which have impacted negatively on service delivery.
This article sets contemporary challenges to good water governance in South Africa within important historical context. While it is correct to say that ‘the world water crisis is a crisis of governance’, it is problematic to assume that all states can follow a similar path toward environmentally sustainable, economically efficient and socially equitable water resource governance and management. The nexus of decision-making power varies within and beyond states, and over time. Gramsci describes this as the ‘constellation of social forces’. Where this constellation of social forces achieves consensus, an ‘historic bloc’ is said to emerge giving rise to a particular state form. The South African state form has varied greatly over several centuries, giving rise to various historic blocs. The resulting body of laws and policies and the varied forms of infrastructure that were developed to harness water to and for multiple social practices over time constitutes a complex political ecological terrain not easily amenable to over-simplified frameworks for good water governance. This article outlines the role of water in the history of South Africa’s multiple state forms. It shows that over time water policy, law and institutions came to reflect the increasingly complex needs of multiple actors (agriculture; mining; industry; cities; the newly enfranchised) represented by different state forms and their characteristic political regimes: the Dutch East India Company; the British Empire; the Union of South Africa; the apartheid and post-apartheid Republics. Authoritarian, semi-authoritarian and democratic state forms have all used central-state power to serve particular interests. Through time, this constellation of social forces has widened until, today, the state has taken upon itself the task of providing ‘some water for all forever’ (slogan of the Department of Water Affairs). As this article suggests, despite the difficult challenges presented by a mostly arid climate, this means ‘adding in’ the water demand of millions of people, but not ‘allocating out’ those privileged under other constellations of social forces as they contribute most substantially to economic growth. The implication, therefore, is a modified hydraulic mission involving significant new infrastructure and, in all likelihood, inter-basin transfers from beyond South Africa’s borders.
Administratio Publica
A municipality is an autonomous sphere of government, and the Constitution of South Africa (1996) provides that all spheres of government must exercise their powers and perform their functions in a manner that does not encroach on the geographical, functional or institutional integrity of government in another sphere. These constitutional provisions largely protect the autonomy of the municipal council from encroachment by any other sphere of government. Furthermore, the Constitution explicitly assigns an oversight and policy-making role to municipal councils. But, municipalities receive ‘support’ and funding from the provincial fiscus. Because of this, should municipalities not account to the provincial legislature? This article engages this question by raising issues of parliamentary oversight and service delivery as they relate to the accountability system of the local sphere of government in South Africa.
A wide body of scholarly literature on social movements on an international level emphatically, but uncritically, declares that ‘another world is possible’. This paper investigates this trend and its implications for political and academic practice in postapartheid South Africa, where community-based movements have emerged primarily in order to access basic services. In particular, it highlights the pivotal role that the state and poor people’s immediate basic needs play in limiting social movements’ contribution towards a transformative development agenda. Paying close attention to poor people’s struggles and needs, the paper argues that there is a sharp disjuncture between the ideologies manufactured by academics, and the worldviews that the working class and poor possess. It concludes by providing insight into the possibilities for post-apartheid political struggles – praxis – to lead to the formation of class consciousness and to a formidable challenge to neoliberalism.
The institutionalisation of cultural policy has, to date, become an effective tool for cultureled development in some parts of the world. South Africa is yet to fully embrace this phenomenon in its developmental matrix. While the government has introduced certain strategies, such as the Integrated Development Plan (IDP), to coordinate its post-apartheid development imperatives across all of its spheres, role players, such as politicians, town planners and developers, continue to carry on with their subjective approaches to development, without culture as the mediator. This perpetuates the fragmentation of spatial landscapes and infrastructure networks in these areas along racial and cultural lines. This article suggests that South Africa may benefit from formulating local, cultural policies for the revitalisation of decaying cities into new integrated, liveable and vibrant residential, business and sporting environs.
Master's dissertation, Stellenbosch University, 2011
Recognising Community voice and dissatisfaction
Harrison, P., Huchzermeyer, M., Mayekiso, M, 2003
putting participation at the heart …
African Urban Economies: Viability, Vitality or Vitiation? edited by D.F. Bryceson and D. Potts. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 2-38., 2006
Recognising Community voice and …