Claire Bénit-Gbaffou

Are practices of local participation sidelining the institutional participatory channels?: Reflections from Johannesburg

While public discourses emphasise the growing role of ward councillors in service delivery and urban policy implementation, as well as underline their role as mediators between local government and urban residents, local councillors are increasingly the target of mass urban protests. They are also relatively absent from the public scene as far as municipal decisions and debates are concerned. What can explain this discrepancy? This article argues that institutional channels (be it representative democracy, or various institutions and instruments set up by local government to enhance participation) are currently not working in the South African city, and the city of Johannesburg in particular. Whether in low-income or high-income areas, suburbs or townships, residents have to resort to other means, sidelining in particular their ward councillor, to be heard. The article analyses the structural and contextual constraints that may be responsible for this lack of bottom-up dialogue, and concludes that both the limited power of ward councillors in Council, and the lack of incentive for fostering their accountability to voters, lead to the development of patterns of clientelism at the local level. After examining the actual implementation of some urban projects in Johannesburg, the article argues that local government fragmentation (in different tiers, in several city agencies and utilities, and with the widespread use of contracts and consultants) is also an important factor in the failure of participatory processes.

Communities, the Private Sector, and the State Contested Forms of Security Governance in Cape Town and Johannesburg

In postapartheid South African cities, civil societys loss of confidence in the ability of public authorities to protect citizens reflects the international trend toward the States delegation of a number of public functions. It has led to the proliferation of private and community initiatives which quickly spread across urban space, taking different forms according to the level of segregation, the shape of the urban fabric, the local culture of urban development and planning, the political context, and the pace of urban growth. This article, informed by the examples of Johannesburg and Cape Town, discusses the specific South African way of handling these delegation processes: a complex mix of neoliberal policies and practices and of the ANCs agenda toward equality and redistribution for democratic South Africa. Indeed, after a transitional period where these initiatives were tolerated, public authorities are currently reasserting their power over some of these forms (community-led initiatives) while still encouraging public-private partnerships (CIDs).

Accessing the State: Everyday Practices and Politics in Cities of the South

This special issue explores everyday practices and politics of accessing the state and state resources from a southern, urban perspective. The collection of papers documents, urban low-income residents’ everyday relationships with the state, through the study of actual practices of interaction with a range of state representatives at the local level (councilors and officials, at various levels of local government). Formal and informal, legal and illegal, confrontational and cooperative, we analyze the multiple tactics of engagement with the state by low-income residents to understand the extent to which they allow access to state resources and to degrees of state recognition, even in contexts of mass poverty, informality and scarce public resources. The modes of interaction with the state also embody and frame low-income residents’ representations of the state, of their expectations, and of their own citizenship. This special issue critically draws together a wide-ranging and important debate on governance, and the relationships it constructs between state and civil society. The main question we raise is how the dynamics of governance reform, with attempted development or deepening of both decentralization and participation, affect everyday practices to access the state and the resulting politics that shape state–society relations in southern contexts? Collectively, the papers in the special issue reflect on the ways in which low-income citizens’ access to the state challenges existing theories of the state and democracy. Stemming from a research programme entitled ‘The Voices of the Poor in Urban Governance: Participation, Mobilization and Politics in South African Cities’,1 this special issue focuses on South African cities primarily but not exclusively. Although the contexts examined have their own specificities, we argue that they provide an interesting and critical context in which to work through the debate from a Southern perspective. South African societies are specific in the huge expectations residents have in the post-apartheid state, and in the ways that ideals continue to be framed in modernist terms, as emblematized by policies of mass public housing delivery and effort towards mass access to urban

‘Up Close and Personal’ – How does Local Democracy Help the Poor Access the State? Stories of Accountability and Clientelism in Johannesburg:

The paper revisits participation and decentralization in relation to local clientelism, arguing that they share the personalization of links between residents and the state and the local possibility to adapt state policies. The line between decentralization-participation on the one hand, and clientelism on the other, is therefore easily blurred. The paper then argues that clientelism is not per se anti-democratic, some forms allow for local and immediate accountability of politicians. However, in most cases, it contributes to fragment or sedate local organizations or social movements and it prevents contestation of existing policies and dominant power structures. The paper thus challenges the idea that the promotion of decentralization and participatory institutions intrinsically leads to more democratic forms of government.

Community Leadership and the Construction of Political Legitimacy: Unpacking Bourdieu's ‘Political Capital’ in Post-Apartheid Johannesburg

Apart from local monographs and normative texts on community participation, research on community leadership constitutes a blind spot in urban leadership, urban politics, social movements and urban studies. This article, based on case studies in post-apartheid Johannesburg, contributes to theorizing community leadership, or informal local political leadership, by exploring Bourdieus concepts of ‘political capital’ and ‘double dealings’. Considering community leaders as brokers between local residents and various institutions (in South Africa, the state and the party), we examine how leaders construct their political legitimacy, both towards ‘the bottom’ (building and maintaining their constituencies), and towards ‘the top’ (seeking and sustaining recognition from fractions of the party and the state). These legitimation processes are often in tension, pulling community leaders in contradictory directions, usefully understood under Bourdieus concept of ‘double dealings’. Community leaders are required, more than formally elected political leaders, to constantly reassert their legitimacy in multiple local public arenas due to the informal nature of their mandate and the high level of political competition between them — with destructive consequences for local polity but also the potential for increased accountability to their followers. We finally reflect on the relevance of this theoretical framework, inspired by Bourdieu, beyond South African urban politics.

Do street traders have the ‘right to the city’? The politics of street trader organisations in inner city Johannesburg, post-Operation Clean Sweep

Abstract Street trader organisations are paradoxical objects of study. Their claims resist being analysed through the ‘right to the city’ lens, so contested are rights to inner city spaces between multiple users, not all of them in dominant socioeconomic positions; and so ambiguous is the figure of the street trader, oppressed but also appropriating public space for profit, increasingly claiming, in neoliberalising cities, an entrepreneurial identity. In the aftermath of the 2013 ‘Operation Clean Sweep’ (in which the City of Johannesburg unsuccessfully attempted to evict street traders from its inner city), this paper unpacks the politics of street trader organisations: how they organise their constituencies, frame their claims, forge unlikely alliances and enter into disempowering conflicts in engagements with a divisive municipality.

Introduction: The place of participation in South African local democracy

The existing literature on South African local democracy and participationis extremely rich, inspiring and diverse, its development contingent on thepost-apartheid context which gave rise to great expectations in terms ofdemocratic development and social transformation (Harriss et al 2004).South African research has focussed on social movements and civil society(Ballard et al 2006, Cherry 2001, Heller 2003, Miraftab 2006, Oldfield andStokke 2006, Zuern 2001), on municipal institutional history and change(Cameron 1999, 2006, Tomlinson 1999, Harrison 2006, Mabin 2006) and onelectoral patterns and behaviour at the national, but also at the local, level(Southall 2001, Lodge 2001, 2005, Cherry 2004, Mattes 2005, Friedman 2005).This collection of papers attempts to start bringing together these differentapproaches, relying on different methodologies and disciplines, in order todeepen our understanding of the interaction, at the local level, betweensocial movements and the political system, understood as the powerstructures of local government, the electoral system and local party politics.In other terms, what are the relations between civic and social movements

Mediation and the Contradictions of Representing the Urban Poor in South Africa: the case of SANCO leaders in Imizamo Yethu in Cape Town, South Africa

The formal system of local governance in South Africa has the ‘ward’ as its lowest and smallest electoral level — a spatial unit consisting of between 5,000 and 15,000 voters. The ward is equivalent to the ‘constituency’ in much of the rest of the world. Notably, the history of South Africa means that the vast majority of people live in ‘communities’ or neighbourhoods that are far smaller in scale than the ward, and most of these are the site of multiple claims of informal leadership by a variety of local organisations and their leaders. For example, the Cape Town ward, in which our case study is located, includes at least five different communities, distinguished in racial and class terms.

Governing street trading in contemporary cities anatomy of the policy instruments used by the city of Johannesburg in the post-apartheid era

The paper interrogates how street trading is governed in contemporary cities of the South, based on the example of Johannesburg. It excavates policy choices made by municipal officials and politicians, understood through the set of policy instruments (not only policy documents, institutions and tools, but also non-tools) that they have framed and used for almost two decades, beyond public rhetoric that is arguably misleading. The paper provides a critical analyzis of policy instruments for governing street trading, scantly absent from existing literature, it also brings back into the urban studies debate issues of municipal officials’ agency, political objectives and policy choices.

Unpacking State Practices in City-Making,in Conversations with Ananya Roy

This special section originates in a reading group organised around the visit of Ananya Roy in the School of Architecture and Planning, at Wits University, in May 2013. Focused around the politics of informality and city-making, participants reflected on the echoes of Roy’s work with their own research. All authors were interested in interrogating state power, its modalities and its effects in building Southern African cities. They grounded their interrogation in a shared regional context, Southern Africa, where ambitions for the reconstruction of society and space, after apartheid in South Africa and a long civil war in Angola, are driven by relatively resourced and interventionist states. Those ambitions of reconstruction, however, stand in tension with accounts of neopatrimonialism, authoritarian temptations, and deeply rooted politics of resistance and contention, albeit in different ways in the democratic South Africa and authoritarian Angola. Engaging with Roy’s work helped us navigate these broad understandings of post-colonial states, at city level. There, the difficulty in understanding how state power shapes spaces and society is further complicated by several elements: the multi-layered nature of state intervention, the juxtaposition of bold and ambitious public interventions directly reconfiguring urban spaces, and evidence of state inconsistencies and efficiencies in shaping urban spaces, which cause some to dismiss its relevance (Landau & Monson, 2008; Simone, 2004). Roy alerts us to both the reductionism of these narratives, and their relevance as multiple facets of states’ interventions (2009a). Papers in this collection have approached this shared interrogation in two different ways that can aptly be described as the governability of cities on the one hand, and the uses of governmentality in cities on the other. ‘Governability’ is a fuzzy but useful concept that refers both to the capacity of the state to steer society, and to the capacity or inclination of societies to comply or to resist being governed. Although the two are linked, we focus here on the first meaning (state’s ability to steer society), as we are attempting to direct an analytical gaze towards the state and its practices. ‘Governmentality’ on the other hand is a more classic, Foucauldian concept that we understand here as the ways in which governable subjects are produced through the internalisation of urban policies’ dominant visions and norms. These two ways of interrogating state practices correspond to two threads in Roy’s work. Although not using the term ‘governability’, she explicitly questions ‘why India cannot plan its cities’ (Roy, 2009a), building on previous work excavating the role of the state in framing urban informality (Roy, 2005). In other work (Roy, 2009b), she analyses the ambiguities of ‘civic governmentality’ and how the politics of cooperation of NGOs in India and Lebanon are caught between dynamics of genuine empowerment, the perhaps necessary pragmatism of constrained negotiations, and a problematic contribution to the manufacture of consent amongst the poor in the city. In so doing, she coins two concepts that were relevant for this