An Exploration of the Concept of Community and Its Impact on Participatory Governance Policy and Service Delivery in Poor Areas of Cape Town, South Africa

ABSTRACT

The inclusion of citizen participation as a means to the equitable delivery of public services has distinguished South Africa’s democratic development trajectory over the last 20 years. While equitable resource allocation remains high on the agenda of more recently democratised states, most of which have highly diverse and unequally resourced populations. Influencing the design of more inclusive participation is the notion of a universal citizenship that applies the concept of the equality of individuals to the needs, identities and sense of agency of citizens both between and within states. The liberal democratic theoretical conceptualisation of the individual centres on the notion of universal citizen, who is the recipient and embodiment of democracy through the rights bestowed through the democratic model. This conceptualisation has been criticised for its inability to deal with the imprecision of individual and collective political identities, especially as these evolve in newly democratic contexts. The construction of a single identity citizen living in communities imbued with homogenous characteristics is carried forward into the policy construction of participatory governance. This article explores and challenges the notion of the single identity citizen that belongs to one homogenous community that can be identified and drawn into formally constructed government spaces. The paper explores the construction of political and socio-economic identities and how notions of community are constructed by citizens, on the one hand, and government policies, on the other.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The research on which this article draws spans a 10-year-period. We acknowledge and thank the Ford Foundation and Vlaamse Inter-Universitaire Raad (VLIR) for funding the longitudinal research programme. Between 2006 and 2016, the research programme comprised of bi-annual quantitative surveys focusing on basic service delivery and governance issues in poor urban areas as well as ongoing ethnographic and action-based research with community groups and leaders in poor urban areas in Cape Town, predominantly, Khayeltisha, Langa and Delft.

2 Service delivery protest statistics to date show a rapid increase in protests, especially before elections. In 2014, there were 218 protests across the country, mostly in the five metropolitan areas (Civic Protest Barometer, 2015).

3 This section refers to research engagement and action-based capacitation fieldwork with Sivukile Sonele, a small social movement in Langa that, unlike other more successful movements such as the Social Justice Coalition in Khayelitsha, is currently unfunded. It is also entirely led and managed by community leaders and members. The activist-based research undertaken with Sivukile Sonele took place over the period 2014–2016. The nature of the capacitation/action-based research involved information sharing and discussions on key policy and legal obligations of CoCT towards local communities with regard to service delivery, so as to provide the necessary technical policy knowledge to assist Sivukile Sonele in their engagements with the City. We thank the Ford Foundation for their funding support of the Sivukile research. See Thompson and Tsolekile de Wet (2017) for a more in-depth analysis of the movement.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ford Foundation [01450184].