Zarina Patel

Rethinking Sustainable Development in the Post-apartheid Reconstruction of South African Cities

This paper aims to initiate a debate through which the gap between rhetoric and the local-level implementation of sustainable development might be addressed. It seeks to contribute towards a conceptual as well as a practical basis for the understanding of what contribution sustainable development can make in the context of the post-apartheid reconstruction of South African cities. The analysis draws on an examination of the incorporation of sustainable development in post-apartheid policy as it relates to the urban environment, and its implications for implementation as experienced by formal (local government) and informal (community groups) local-level institutions. In order to ensure that capacity exists for the implementation of sustainable development, it is argued that this rethinking of sustainable development should be informed by the present transformation of formal and informal institutions, whilst the transformation of institutions should occur in a manner that reflects these new conceptual understandings.

Scalar Politics and Local Sustainability: Rethinking Governance and Justice in an Era of Political and Environmental Change

The local was institutionalised as a key scale for environmental action at the Earth Summit, and remains salient in discourse, policy, and action. However, given both real changes and geographical insights into the politics of scale in the past twenty years, we suggest it is time to (re)consider this focus. We assess local sustainability through the lens of scalar politics, arguing for the need to consider what challenges particular scale frames foreground and which they silence. We focus on three changes which have occurred in the last twenty years—the growing salience of the Global South, shifts from environmentalism to sustainability, and new governance patterns—and reflect on the significance of these changes for local sustainability. We suggest the local frame occludes questions of international responsibility and justice, and that the changes since Rio require that we reconsider the scalar frame of local sustainability. We conclude by questioning who benefits from the local frame, and when, where, and for whom a focus on local sustainability may be relevant and ethical.

Developing and testing the urban sustainable development goal’s targets and indicators – a five-city study

The campaign for the inclusion of a specifically urban goal within the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was challenging. Numerous divergent interests were involved, while urban areas worldwide are also extremely heterogeneous. It was essential to minimize the number of targets and indicators while still capturing critical urban dimensions relevant to human development. It was also essential to test the targets and indicators. This paper reports the findings of a unique comparative pilot project involving co-production between researchers and local authority officials in five diverse secondary and intermediate cities: Bangalore (Bengaluru), India; Cape Town, South Africa; Gothenburg, Sweden; Greater Manchester, United Kingdom; and Kisumu, Kenya. Each city faced problems in providing all the data required, and each also proposed various changes to maximize the local relevance of particular targets and indicators. This reality check provided invaluable inputs to the process of finalizing the urban SDG prior to the formal announcement of the entire SDG set by the UN Secretary-General in late September 2015.

Environmental justice in South Africa: tools and trade‐offs

Despite constitutional commitments to environmental justice in South Africa, evidence indicates that the poor and the natural environment continue to be marginalised in decision making. This paper examines the role of environmental assessment procedures, specifically Environmental Impact Assessments, in shaping outcomes at the local level to understand how injustices are perpetuated and maintained. Injustices are understood here by examining the relationship between power, knowledge and rationality, and the effects these have on including the public in decision‐making processes. In the revamping of environmental assessment regulations in South Africa, much attention has been paid to streamlining the process of assessment. However, this paper argues that environmentally just decisions cannot be made in a context where debates are centred on process. Instead, debates need to be redirected to qualities of outcomes, foregrounding the need for an approach grounded in questions of value. Recognising that the poor and the natural environment tend to systematically lose out in a context where environment is pitted against development, environmental assessment must be able to take into account the distributional consequences of decisions. Furthermore, the paper makes a case for the need to challenge the broader political context within which environmental assessments are conducted, as environmental assessments cannot replace broader strategic and policy debates. In the absence of this broader institutional challenge, political power will continue to work through decision‐making tools to perpetuate and maintain systems of injustice.

Tackling wicked problems and tricky transitions: change and continuity in Cape Town's environmental policy landscape

This paper offers a reflection on 15 years of policy change in the City of Cape Town aimed at fostering sustainability from the perspective of a City practitioner. The persistent continuation of unsustainable outcomes, despite ongoing policy reforms, is understood as a combination of the emergence of wicked problems, within a changing local government mandate, in the absence of a transformation of institutional structures, tools and approaches. While the approach to policy reform in Cape Town has focussed on reducing substantive uncertainty through its knowledge-based approach, we show that in the context of an expanding local government mandate, sustainability becomes an aspect of many departments’ directive resulting in strategic uncertainty. The untransformed traditional line-function-based structure of local government in turn works against integration between departments (fundamental for addressing non-linear wicked problems), thus promoting institutional uncertainty. In addressing this combination of strategic and institutional uncertainty, our findings indicate that integration has to happen in the policy stage in order for sustainability principles to be implemented in relevant departments; that implementation requires resourcing across the institution, and ought to be included in departments’ targets; and that competing and conflicting rationalities underpin the policy–practice gap. It is suggested that a first step in breaking down the strategic and institutional uncertainties would be to foster shared values through creating deliberative spaces within the City in which debate, discussion and learning can occur.

Local responses to global sustainability agendas: learning from experimenting with the urban sustainable development goal in Cape Town

The success of the Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11) depends on the availability and accessibility of robust data, as well as the reconfiguration of governance systems that can catalyse urban transformation. Given the uneven success of the Millennium Development Goals, and the unprecedented inclusion of the urban in the SDG process, the feasibility of SDG 11 was assessed in advance of its ratification through a series of urban experiments. This paper focusses on Cape Town’s participation in piloting SDG 11, in order to explore the role of urban experimentation in highlighting the partnership arrangements necessary to allow cities to meet the data and governance challenges presented by the SDG 11. Specifically, we focus on the relationship between data and governance that lie at the heart of the SDG 11. The urban experiment demonstrates the highly complex and multi-level governance dynamics that shape the way urban experiments are initiated, executed and concluded. The implications of these dependencies illustrate that more attention needs to be paid at the global level to what data are important and how and where the data are generated if SDG 11 is to be met. Overall, this paper makes the case that the success of SDG 11 rests on effecting local level change and enabling real opportunities in cities.

Urban sustainability disjunctures in Cape Town: learning the city from the inside and out

ABSTRACT South African cities have focused on sustainability as a policy and strategic objective. Nonetheless, realising the transformative potential of fostering sustainable transition pathways is challenging. Our entry point for understanding this impasse is that the ability of cities to transform lies in the opaque spaces between policy rhetoric and implementation. We unpack these policy disjunctures in two ways. Firstly, we posit that the potential of the City to ensure that policy based on progressive and transformative principles is implemented in ways that foster the intended action is tied up with its ability to perform as a learning institution. The transformative role of learning is in turn dependent on accessing the situated tacit knowledge that informs decision-making and action. Secondly, we propose that researching the capacity of the City to learn requires alternative spaces for research and deliberation. To illustrate these arguments, we draw on a knowledge co-production urban experiment in Cape Town to improve the efficacy and analysis of both policy development and implementation. Tacit knowledge surfaced practices that are found to hamper learning within the City. Engaging with identified barriers to learning and change provides alternate entry points for identifying feasible points of leverage to address sustainability disjunctures.

Engaging geographies : negotiating positionality and building relevance

Abstract As a discipline and field of knowledge, South African geography has been defined in and by critical societal debates, highlighting how, as geographers, we produce knowledge and teach to address societal imperatives. Inspired in our own and others’ research practice engaging in collaboration between the university and activist groups and knowledge co-production between universities and local authorities, we reflect on the varied engagements, commitments and movements of scholars and practitioners across South African geography. How do these approaches to research through co-production and collaboration navigate postionality and expertise, enriching the research process? In reworking the process of generating knowledge, what alternate kinds of knowledge(s) are produced? Through exploring these questions in this paper, we reread the ‘turn to development’ and our commitment to applied geographical work, not as the degeneration of theory production, but as an opportunity to reflect on what is theoretically and empirically rich in the commitment to relevance in contemporary South African geographical work.

Africa: A continent of hope?

The worlds’ leaders and decision makers have focused their attention on Africa, with a clear mandate to rescue it from its reputation as a ‘basket case’ by aiding its transformation into ‘a continent of hope’ (Wolfowitz, 2005). While Africa has been described as a ‘wonderful, diverse continent with an extraordinary, energetic people’ (Blair, 2004), it is the only region in the world that has got poorer in the last generation. According to the G8 (2005), Africa’s share of world trade halved between 1980 and 2002. While 13% of the world’s population reside in Africa, Africa is also home to 28% of world poverty. Furthermore, Sub-Saharan Africa has faired worst in the world’s AIDS epidemic. These trends are disturbing, given that the international community pledged to reverse the spread of poverty and disease by 2015 at the Millennium Summit in September 2000. Despite these disquieting trends, African governments are showing a new vision, both individually and collectively through the African Union and its New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) (Commission for Local Environment Vol. 11, No. 1, 7–15, January 2006

Women and environmental management

Are women closer to nature? In exploring the link between women and nature, ZARINA PATEL examines the role of women in environmental management in urban and rural systems