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.

KEYWORDS:

• Learning
• knowledge co-production
• sustainability
• policy-making
• Cape Town
• South Africa

1. Introduction

The City of Cape Town (CCT) was an early leader in embracing a sustainable development agenda at a policy level since the 1990s. Despite the explicit commitment to supporting sustainable transition pathways at the highest level through the Constitution (Constitution of the Republic of South Africa 1996), the interconnections between inequality and access to environmental resources and benefits for the majority of citizens remain a matter of concern (Davison et al. 2015). Multiple approaches, including understanding the discourses of sustainable development in different contexts; the role of knowledge and tools for decision-making (Patel 2006, Sowman and Brown 2006); and understanding the role of power and stakeholders (Scott and Oelofse 2005, Lawhon and Patel 2013, Arendse and Patel 2014), have been pursued by South African scholars. These studies show that the imperative of situating sustainable development within a context of social justice, equity and human rights must be closely knit. Although this “just sustainability” approach (Agyeman and Evans 2004), spearheaded by activist coalitions, was the catalyst for the policy uptake of sustainable development in the mid-1990s, in its execution, the two agendas have defied integration (McDonald 2002, Roberts 2003, Cock 2007, Patel 2014). Furthermore, urban governments remain ill equipped to close the gap between aspirations and outcomes (Swilling 2014). Understanding urban sustainability disjunctures, then, requires approaches that are more radical than the content, knowledge, skills and governance analytical lenses at our disposal.

Our point of departure builds on two claims made by reflexive practitioners. The first was a position put forward at a conference, that “Local government in South Africa is a knowledge institution, but not a learning institution.”¹ And the second, written from a perspective from within the CCT that we make in a previous paper (Davison et al. 2015), argues that the factors hindering sustainable development transitions could be decreased through the creation of deliberative spaces (fostered through co-production of knowledge between practitioners and academics) to enable learning to occur. These provocations then lead us to the following three questions: Firstly, what is the distinction between knowledge and learning? Secondly, what is the relationship between co-production and learning for fostering change in policy development and implementation? And thirdly, what is the tacit knowledge surfaced through this particular methodology? Our approach to understanding the policy impasse then is that the transformative potential of cities to implement progressive policies that realise a sustainable and just new order lies in the translation between policy rhetoric and implementation. We posit, firstly, 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, which influence policy implementation. Our second proposition is that researching the capacity of the City to learn by accessing tacit knowledge requires alternative spaces for research and deliberation that are created as a means of understanding and learning about policy disjunctures.

This paper draws on the Knowledge Transfer Programme (KTP),² a City–University partnership based on a knowledge co-production methodology that saw academics embedded in City processes and City practitioners co-authoring research outputs with academics. Specifically, the Governance and Policy for Sustainability project (GAPS) sought to understand how sustainable urban development has been conceptualised and understood in different contexts (“what”), and to illustrate the role of knowledges in shaping different responses to the challenges of sustainable urban development (“how”). Through researching these questions of sustainable development using instruments that reflect this more engaged research methodology, we challenge the way we learn about the City and focus our analysis on the relationships between knowledge and learning and how they operate both within the City and how we as researchers and practitioners learn about the City.

In the following section, we differentiate between the roles of knowledge and learning in fostering change in the process of policy development and implementation, arguing that even knowledge that is empirically based and from a variety of stakeholders does not necessarily result in better policy or its implementation. In the third section, we show that the City’s³ ability to learn is an indicator of its potential to transform⁴ and respond to policy catalysts in ways that are both implementable and that serve the needs of society. We suggest here that learning allows for the surfacing of a situated tacit knowledge, which is crucial for effecting change. In the fourth and fifth sections, we turn our attention to how we (as practitioners and scholars) learn about the City and its decision-making and governance processes. We posit that a knowledge co-production approach lends itself to producing new knowledge about policy formulation and decision-making. In the sixth section, we describe the conditions that tacit knowledge makes legible, including the knowledge that is included in policy development and the politics of who is and is not included; the importance of socio-economic and political context in shaping policy imperatives; the ways in which risks associated with change are avoided, and compromises are sought in order to develop policies; and the importance of harnessing the tacit knowledge of institutional functioning in order to advance issues related to sustainable development, and the significance of new spaces for interaction that can operate outside of formal institutional structures.

2. The limits of knowledge for urban policy

Policy-makers typically address the need for policy reform by prioritising knowledge-based approaches based on the assumption that increased knowledge inputs will result in the development of more effective policy. While practical knowledge has been foregrounded in policy processes, the rise of wicked problems in recent years has witnessed an active seeking out of academic and evidence-based approaches to address the partial responses elicited through traditional policy approaches (Swilling 2014). Drawing on Van de Ven and Johnson (2006, p. 806), academic knowledge’s purpose is described as being “committed to building generalizations and theories that often take the form of formal logical principles or rules involving causal relationships”, whereas the purpose of practical knowledge is, they suggest, “knowing how to deal with the specific situations encountered in a particular case”. Van de Ven and Johnson (2006, p. 808) argue that for policy responses to be robust, neither one of these knowledges should be favoured, nor be seen to be more significant than the other. Rather, both types should be recognised as “partial, incomplete, and involving inherent bias”. In order to better tackle complex problems, co-producing knowledge using both knowledge types – increasingly recognised as engaged scholarship – is proposed.

While policy responses that include both academic and practical knowledges are likely to be more durable, the assumption that increased input of these explicit knowledge types will seamlessly lead to better policy outcomes has been questioned by Schön and Lasswell in Parsons (2002); Owens (2005) and Davison et al. (2015) show that the relationship between the knowledge that goes into policy and its outcomes is often disconnected. Similarly, Mosse (2004) argues that the relationship between policy and practice is understood in terms of the unintended “gap” between theory and practice, and he questions whether this can be reduced by better policy more effectively implemented. These authors show that the assumption that more knowledge equates to better policy fails to take into account the differentiation between formal policy-making and the ad hoc, implicit policy-making that occurs when decisions are made outside of formal structures and processes (Adger et al. 2003) and that subsequently become de facto policy for an organisation. Furthermore, Head (2010a, p. 83, following Lindblom 1980), points out that “the policy process comprises many activities in which scientific rigour rubs up against power, interests and values”.

Owens (2005) brings to our attention the importance of the opaque political and power aspects that frame policy- and decision-making and can lead to contrary decisions. Similarly, Head (2008) highlights the existence of data-resistant policy positions as evidence of this disconnect, and points to power relations and politics as underlying causes. Leck and Roberts (2015, p. 62 drawing on Pelling et al. 2008) refer to “shadow spaces” as the informal settings where actors with common challenges and experiences interact, and suggest that there is a need to understand the “role of informal/shadow systems and spaces; the significant inner social workings that constitute … the ‘invisible aspects’ of municipal institutions”. These findings point to the importance of accessing the spaces where ad hoc policy-making occurs in order to be able to better articulate the power, interests and values that are often masked from both insiders and outsiders that are difficult to uncover without a deep understanding and immersion in the institutional setting.

3. The learning city

Within an organisation such as local government, learning goes beyond accessing knowledge and the commissioning of scientific studies or reports. Learning, as understood by various authors (May 1992, Owens 2005, Grin and Loeber 2007, Head 2010a, McFarlane 2011) necessarily implies a shift in the way that an organisation functions. Turok (2014, p. 766) calls for experimentation, learning and flexibility in order to better “develop the techniques and capabilities required for meaningful change on the ground”. Head (2010a) differentiates between the learning that takes place when new knowledge is acquired about a simple problem and the solutions offered by this knowledge consequently implemented, and the organisational and policy learning that occurs when organisations attempt to tackle complex, or wicked, problems. In this case, the definition of learning expands to include the significant shifts, or transformations, in organisational structure or culture that are precipitated by this process.

McFarlane (2011) identifies three components of learning: translation, which emphasises the importance of both actors and spaces of knowledge generation; co-ordination of knowledge including the politics of how knowledge emerging from the process of translation is packaged and presented; and dwelling, which describes shifts in ways of seeing and doing. Turok (2014, p. 766) identifies that “meaningful change” requires a nimbleness and responsiveness that is seldom displayed in large, slow-to-change institutions such as local government, where maintaining the status quo is achieved through structures (or the “rules of the game”⁵) that can remain opaque. Taking this into account, Head (2010b, p. 178) suggests that there “may be ‘stages’ in the policy learning process, such that the learning opportunities arise at different points in the policy cycle. Thus, learning opportunities may be episodic rather than continuous”. A learning institution, therefore, is one that is willing to “challenge, alter and name new worlds” (McFarlane 2011, p. 6). Learning is thus an active and reflexive process that is both a practice and an outcome, bringing together people, sources and knowledges, as well as embracing the “different ways of seeing issues – an education of attention” (McFarlane 2011, p. 97).

A third type of knowledge is thus relevant here. Nonaka and Konno (1998, p. 42) identify the knowledge of the inaccessible spaces and opaque contexts and processes in which policy decisions are made and effected as tacit knowledge. They differentiate between explicit knowledge (both practical and academic), and tacit knowledge that is “highly personal and hard to formalize … Subjective insights, intuitions, and hunches fall into this category of knowledge”. Furthermore, tacit knowledge includes technical “know-how”, but is also “deeply rooted … in the ideals, values, or emotions” of individuals (Nonaka and Konno 1998, p. 42; see also Rydin 2006). Tacit knowledge is crucial in surfacing power dynamics in order to understand and address the opportunities and limitations of policy responses (Bulkeley 2006), although it should be remembered that tacit knowledge is situated in time and space, and within particular contexts (McFarlane 2011). By adopting a research methodology that focuses on surfacing the various dynamics that tacit knowledge reveals, we have sought to understand the factors shaping learning, and thus policy disjunctures, in the CCT.

4. Learning the City’s tacit knowledge through co-production

McFarlane (2011, p. 23) invokes “assemblage” as a means to understand how cities might be learnt differently. Moving away from an analysis based on knowledge inputs, he argues that policy change and decision-making are products of an assemblage of interactions, including “the context of their historical production and transformation”. The importance of grappling with context and its influence on transformation is then at the root of shifts towards engaged scholarship as a means through which to learn the City.

A knowledge co-production methodology provides, in our case, for insights into the day-to-day functioning of government,⁶ which allows researchers and officials to articulate the aspects of the “assemblage of local interactions” that produce policy change and decision-making to which McFarlane (2011) refers. Following Gibbons et al.’s (1994) Mode 2 knowledge, the co-production of knowledge has been posited as an experimental approach to co-creating urban policy responses to wicked problems. Characterised by knowledge produced in the context of application, the co-production of knowledge calls for the fostering of new relationships between different stakeholders. This methodological approach is based on the acceptance that an equal interplay⁷ between the partners can potentially provide a new way of both learning about the City (learning it from within), whilst generating more appropriate policy inputs (through the surfacing of tacit knowledge) (Polk and Kain 2015). A knowledge co-production methodology sees the combination of both “scientifically valid” academic and “socially useful” practical knowledge types in order to shape policy processes. In such an experiment, the researcher engages in a complex mode of double participation – as both “participating insider” and as “observing stranger” (Swilling 2014). Despite the advantages of a knowledge co-production methodology, we accept that there is a politics of how knowledge is used and its relationship to outcomes.⁸ Even a knowledge co-production approach has limited potential when decisions are made which re-direct outcomes.

In Cape Town, the co-production of knowledge is considered to be an experimental space where alternative modes of operating are pursued in order to make policy more legible and defensible, and, over time, more robust. As local government in South Africa has been restructured numerous times in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Sowman and Brown 2006), the potential for further restructuring that might address the silo-like separation of departments is unlikely under the current fiscal and political climate (see also Leck and Roberts 2015, p. 63 on “resistance to change of formal structures” in Durban). Thus, an innovative intervention that “opens up both the sites and processes” through which transformation of policy processes occurs (Bulkeley and Broto 2013, p. 362) has a potential role to play in processes of urban transitions. Furthermore, the liminal spaces (Geels and Raven in Bulkeley and Broto 2013, Davison et al. 2015) found in experimental projects provide opportunities for networking interactions between actors, and in so doing, generate social learning.

5. Co-producing knowledge in Cape Town

The KTP was formed between the CCT and the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town in 2012 as an urban experiment that sought to make sustainable development policy more legible and defensible. The KTP’s rationale recognised that a knowledge co-production methodology would impart a better understanding of, and thus better responses to, local government’s mandates, policies and implementing roles in relation to the wicked problem of sustainable development.

The KTP as an urban experiment provided a space for interaction through the embedding of four researchers in the local government for seven months of the year, over a three-year period. By spending time at the City, participating in City processes as “observing strangers” (rather than City employees), the researchers were privy to the day-to-day functioning of their “home” departments, and were thus able to absorb and collate an institutional knowledge. Through their “participating insider” position, they could assimilate the tacit knowledge that is often overlooked as a key influencer of policy debate and implementation. It is this insider knowledge that we draw on in the findings in the following section.

This GAPS programme research was undertaken by harnessing the experimental opportunities presented by the KTP, and thus multiple modes and instances of co-production were possible. A research instrument was designed in partnership with the embedded researchers and the City partners in order to ensure relevance and usefulness to the local context. Following this, the embedded researchers, their City counterparts and the City-based programme coordinator responded to questions about the factors within local government that enable and constrain decision-making for sustainable urban development. They responded to these questions by focusing on a significant policy or strategy documents in their fields of research,⁹ drawing on their experiences as embedded researchers/officials working in the City on various policy processes, interviews they undertook with policy elites and key stakeholders, and their insights into political know-how gained through first-hand observation and experience. The responses to these questions were analysed by a research team at the university, and once clustered thematically, were workshopped with the wider research team (including the embedded researchers), and other City officials to triangulate and validate the findings. The final report – detailing the research methodology, the rationale for the research, and the research findings – was submitted to MUF (Greyling et al. 2013). This paper has been co-authored between members of the university-based research team, and the City programme coordinator both as a means of consolidating the findings and to ensure that views in the report were not misrepresented in the translation into an academic output.

Conducting an intra-City comparison of policy allowed for the surfacing of tacit knowledge that can elucidate the gap between the rhetoric and action across a range of policies. The high-level documents (strategies, policies and plans) that were examined have benefitted from significant political support and have had influence across a number of departments in the City. These documents demonstrate willingness at many levels to succeed, learn and effect change on the ground. Drawing on the insights of those whose work is guided by these documents shines light on the gap between policy rhetoric and implementation.

6. Learning for change at the city scale

We focus here on the data that illuminate the tacit knowledge held by officials who understand the politics of the opaque and often inaccessible realms of decision-making, rather than the explicit “academic” and “practical” knowledge types generated through the partnership. In other words, rather than focusing on the rhetoric of high-level documents and political speech, content of policy, skills of practitioners, and effectiveness of governance structures, we are interested in the political know-how that astute policy-makers employ as they navigate between policy rhetoric and implementation.

Four key themes – knowledge for policy development; the socio-economic and political context; risk avoidance and compromises in policy processes; and institutional knowledge for change – arose from the analysis of the policies and strategies which broadly speak to issues that pose as constraints to learning and the potential for changing the rules of the game.

6.1. Knowledge in policy development

The first finding speaks to the knowledge that is included in policy development. Who is and is not included in policy drafting and decision-making is a key factor in effecting change in how local government operates (see also Leck and Roberts 2015, p. 65). The drafting of policy may at times exclude officials, City departments other than the core drafting department team, as well as external stakeholders. Policies are shaped by the knowledge that comes from the team developing the particular policy. Teams may include external consultants who may be responsible for drafting key stages in the policy process as well as carrying out review processes, officials from both the lead department and other relevant departments, the Strategic Policy Unit¹⁰ and external stakeholders from other public and private organisations that may be consulted during the research or review process. The combinations of experts, officials and external stakeholders, together with policy framing, determine options that are opened for discussion (Researcher A in Greyling et al. 2013). In addition, policies are drafted by officials and/or consultants with often vastly different academic and professional backgrounds – it is misplaced to assume that City officials have equal knowledge on topics, or share similar priorities; variations exist both within and between departments. Similarly, City councillors who are politically appointed are not necessarily experts on issues related to the environment, planning, or engineering, so the technical knowledge that is brought to policy processes by officials may not align with the political know-how brought to the process, and additional learning by both politicians (the technical knowledge of the issue under discussion) and officials (a more acute understanding of the political requirements for policies/projects) may be required to create better alignment. Interaction is limited through the imposition of a highly formal structure and environment in which informal discussion and debate are not possible in formal committee systems, which perpetuates divisions between officials and politicians. Thus, policy development can be influenced by both unequal knowledge bases, uneven opportunities to input into policy processes, and unequal power dynamics. Knowledge that is used to inform policies is a reflection of power inherent in hierarchical institutions, and thus is rarely objective. It is here where experiments such as the KTP play an important role; by creating non-formalised spaces where traditional power dynamics are disrupted, such opportunities allow for interactions and learning to occur that is not possible in a more formal system.

This is not to say that formal spaces for accessing policy-relevant knowledge do not exist. The question of knowledge is addressed formally in two ways. First, public participation processes (where external stakeholder knowledge is sought as part of a constitutionally required process) are acknowledged to be a key part of the process of writing policies and strategies, partly because stakeholders – including academic knowledge and civil society groups – bring different knowledge to bear on proceedings. Yet, it has been noted that public participation often

does not sufficiently engage external stakeholders in policy decisions. In order to consider the opinions, views and concerns of a broad range of stakeholders and incorporate these views in policy there is a need for an institutional structure which engages tiers of government, the private sector, academia, communities and not-for-profit organisations.

(Researcher C in Greyling et al. 2013)

Because of the lack of sufficient structured engagement with different knowledges in policy development, the knowledge that is included can be uneven, favouring some interests above others (Fischer 2006).

Second, the knowledge that comes from monitoring and evaluation of policy is central to ascertaining whether or not the policy works, to what extent it works and why, and to determine how it could be changed to improve its functioning if necessary – knowledge that is crucial for a learning institution. There is a growing acceptance that monitoring and evaluation no longer has to be solely quantitative, and that other measures must be incorporated to provide a more accurate evaluation of policies and strategies and their programmes. However, the current system of monitoring and evaluation through “service delivery implementation plans, directorate score cards, corporate dashboards and the City’s risk register” (Researcher C in Greyling et al. 2013) reinforces a compliance-based approach that focuses on achieving targets. This has significant implications for the implementation of more complex policy interventions required to address wicked problems, which are not easily boiled down to specific targets.

Questioning how the City is a learning institution has shown that different knowledge types underpin policy- and decision-making; these knowledge types are rarely neutral. In the process of learning the City from within, the KTP has surfaced tacit knowledge that shows the factors that challenge any assumptions of a neat, linear relationship where policy rhetoric and action are directly proportional to academic and practical knowledge inputs.

6.2. Cape Town’s socio-economic and political context

Contextual issues are key to how sustainability challenges are framed. Of significance in South Africa is what has been termed the “triangle of tensions” between neoliberal urban initiatives that are globally promoted (for example, best practices – see Patel et al. 2015), the need to include structures and mechanisms for participation in the policy development process (as a Constitutional requirement), and welfare type social delivery (Haferburg and Huchzermeyer 2015, p. 11). The research presented here suggests that these tensions, as well as the City’s political priorities, mandate and leadership, are taken into account when shaping policy interventions.

In Cape Town, prioritising the socio-economic needs of the poor – for example, access to housing, basic services and employment opportunities – is a social justice imperative, and is targeted through key City policies and strategies, including the Integrated Development Plan (IDP), the City’s five-year strategic framework. Environmental justice is incorporated into the broader understanding of sustainability, where sustainable development is understood to strive for a balance between economic, social and natural environment needs (the triple bottom line). Despite this broad sustainability focus, the environmental sustainability agenda is often less clear in such high-level City documentation (see Davison et al. 2015). Furthermore, the links between the environmental agenda and the social justice agenda often remain disconnected, resulting in a marginalisation of both the environmental agenda and the social justice agenda in the sustainability realm, despite high-level commitments and action supporting social justice in other policy domains (Patel 2014).

Cape Town’s political context was found to be an important consideration in terms of how it shapes all of these policy initiatives. National, provincial and local governments have taken on board numerous new and challenging deliverables over the last 20 years in the post-apartheid context (see Parnell et al. 2002, National Development Plan 2012), with the CCT changing in structure, mandate and role. These changes have included a significant shift from a hierarchical system in which local government operated as the lowest tier of national government, to a system in which national, provincial and local governments operate as independent spheres of government, requiring, as part of this decentralisation, local governments to take on more strategic roles.¹¹

This research found that the prioritisation of Cape Town’s socio-economic context can affect the policy and implementation of new local government mandates such as climate change adaptation and the green economy. Expanded mandate areas compete for budget and staff capacity with the provision of basic services and functions that are essential to the efficient running of a city. Furthermore, addressing challenges of wicked or complex problems in an evolving institutional architecture (which requires much capacity in and of itself) has major capacity implications as well as increasing requirements for new knowledge and policy responses. This research shows that environmental issues rarely gain traction and buy-in without a focus on financial and social imperatives; generating appropriate knowledge to make this link remains a challenge. The development of a green economy framework for the City highlighted this, as economic, financial, and social imperatives formed the basis for the development of the framework, which has subsequently enjoyed significant political buy-in and broad-based support (see De Lille 2013).

The City’s political leadership context is also an important consideration. Since democracy, leadership in Cape Town has shifted from the African National Congress to the Democratic Alliance (DA) by way of a set of alliances between the DA and other opposition parties before the DA was able to achieve a clear majority (Mottiar 2015). Although the DA has governed the Western Cape province since 2009, prior to that, the City was governed in opposition to the province for a number of years, contributing to intergovernmental tension (Okecha 2011). These factors all contributed to an environment of political uncertainty and perception of instability in the City during much of the 2000s (Okecha 2011). One researcher suggested that Cape Town’s status as the only metropolitan municipality governed by the DA means that the City is “used as a showcase for the economic, environmental, human settlement and municipal governance of the DA” (Researcher B in Greyling et al. 2013); being able to benchmark against other metropolitan municipalities in the country is important for the DA’s credibility. The combination of the CCT being used as a “showcase” for the DA’s capabilities, and being scrutinised by the opposition provides opportunities and constraints; for example, given the increasing movement internationally to integrate all three aspects of sustainability into local government, the desire to showcase the CCT could strengthen and further embed sustainability in its strategic plans (see Holgate 2007, p. 476). Conversely, because policy- and decision-making in Cape Town are highly scrutinised by the opposition (Robins 2014), an associated compliance culture creates an environment in which innovative approaches to wicked problems are challenging to implement.

In exploring how we learn within the City, these socio-economic and political contextual issues have been shown to both provide opportunities and constraints for urban sustainable development.

6.3. Risk avoidance and compromise in policy processes

The research found that there is a relationship between how the City responds to emerging risks and the dilution of policy in order for it to be passed and implemented. This section explores some of the ways in which risks associated with change are avoided, and compromises are sought in order to develop policies that maintain structures and tools that are out of sync with the nature of the urban problems being addressed.

Local government’s expanded mandate that requires the maintenance of a high level of service delivery is challenged by socio-economic, sustainability, and environmental quality transformation pressures. Addressing this multitude of requirements in a context where cities and processes are “locked in” to certain systems that are difficult to change can result in compromises being sought. An example of conflicting rationalities that leads to compromises when cities are locked into certain systems was found in the analysis of energy policy. The CCT buys electricity from the national provider, and sells the electricity to consumers at profit; accounting for a large proportion of the City’s total revenue (Researcher C in Greyling et al. 2013). The profit cross-subsidises a number of other general municipal services, as well as providing a subsidy to poorer households through the allocation of free basic electricity (up to 60 kWh a month) and lower tariffs (see Dubresson and Jaglin 2014). Due to a national electricity shortage (see Büscher 2009), as well as the City’s stated intent to lower its carbon footprint (City of Cape Town 2009), measures have been put in place to reduce overall electricity consumption (see Froestad et al. 2012). However, paradoxically, the associated decrease in revenue from electricity sales affects the CCT’s ability to continue the rollout of energy savings programmes, as well as negatively impacting on the overall budget, thus creating “a potential severe disincentive for municipal support for renewable energy, energy efficiency, demand-side management and behaviour change campaigns” (Researcher C in Greyling et al. 2013). System lock-ins and “[e]stablished institutional cultures and structures [that] can … be highly resistant to change” (Leck and Roberts 2015, p. 66) are thus a real constraint to experimentation.

Given the tensions between new mandates and the traditional “service delivery” functions, policy developers find astute ways of combining these in order to address the newer “nice to haves” within projects that are necessary for a functional city (Researcher B in Greyling et al. 2013). Tacit knowledge is thus at work here, with an emphasis placed on experience in and an understanding of how Cities work and how decision-making occurs. For example, respondents noted that projects are more likely to be successful if they speak directly to the priorities formalised in the IDP, and ought to demonstrate that they align with the fundamental service provision responsibilities of the City.

Respondents suggested that in order to ensure that policies are supported and passed, compromise is required – it was noted that it is better to have some aspect of environmental sustainability included in policy as opposed to none, even if the final policy version bears little resemblance to the first proposals presented to policy-makers (Researcher D in Greyling et al. 2013). As a result, respondents indicated that final drafts that are put before policy decision-makers often appear less demanding, with a “watered down” adherence to the principles underpinning the original policy vision. This dilution occurs through the process of adopting language that resonates with those who approve policy (Researcher B in Greyling et al. 2013), compliance with the budgeting requirements of the City (Researcher B in Greyling et al. 2013), and ensuring that the proposed policy does not expose the City to any legal risk (Researcher C in Greyling et al. 2013). The potential cost of this tactic is that pressing issues that face the City and its practitioners may not be debated at the highest levels. Furthermore, these unspoken requirements that policies have to meet can mean that policy drafters avoid risks and pursue a more compliance-focused path.

To overcome issues of compromise and dilution, it is crucial for officials working on matters of sustainability to have a deep knowledge of the City and how it functions in order to elevate this agenda in areas of strategic decision-making within the City. The research showed that ultimately, policy has to take into account external drivers including the revenue implications of policy interventions, compliance with national legislation and the political defensibility of the proposed policy. Action is prioritised through budget allocations, which reflect the traditional service-delivery mandate of the City; in order to be allocated funds, projects must speak to the City’s strategic priorities. Additionally, most of the City’s budget is allocated to sustaining its traditional service delivery functions – water, waste, electricity, transport – with little left over to fund innovative projects and programmes within those and other departments (Researcher B in Greyling et al. 2013). As shown through this partnership, partnering with stakeholders with external funding can be a strategic way in which to undertake urban experiments, as, like Leck and Robert (2015, p. 62) point out, “[s]hadow systems and spaces are not subject to canonical scrutiny or monitoring, and [thus] open the potential for risk taking and creativity; central underpinnings of institutional adaptive capacity” for supporting transformative policy action.

These results highlight the relationship between the City’s aversion to risk and the ensuing compromises that are made in the policy process. Understanding the factors affecting and influencing the City’s cautious approach to policy development and implementation is an important step in shifting the rules of the game in order for the City to transform.

6.4. Tacit knowledge for change

Although there is a general move in the City towards developing evidence-led policy and decision-making to construct effective policy, for which empirical knowledge is a critical component (see Parsons 2002, Davison et al. 2015), tacit knowledge and an understanding of how the organisation functions, or political know-how, are important for learning how to effect change in the City. Tacit knowledge of institutional functioning, including the recognition that successful policy development requires the correct political climate in order to garner support, has surfaced through this research. For example, initiatives that are linked to a topical or high-profile issue, and those that address the City’s social development and policy alleviation priorities have gained political support. Other policy catalysts (following Hodson and Marvin 2010) include support from external stakeholders and trends driven by external institutions. This was demonstrated in the development of Cape Town’s City Development Strategy, which was partially motivated by international trends and the knowledge that other South African metropolitan municipalities had already developed similar strategies (Researcher A in Greyling et al. 2013).

Respondents also highlighted the role that additional spaces for interaction, deliberation and real dialogue and sharing could play in learning the City, as we propose in Davison et al. (2015). The experimental space provided by the KTP introduced numerous opportunities for interaction, including feedback sessions from City officials, workshops, cross-departmental coffee meetings, brainstorming sessions, focus groups, multistakeholder reference groups, and impromptu informal discussion and debate, amongst other mechanisms for engagement. Although officials and politicians involved in policy and decision-making have formal structures through which to interact, including through council and portfolio committee meetings, often, officials involved in detailed policy formulation and implementation do not get the opportunity to engage with other officials at similar levels in other departments on issues of mutual interest. Unconstrained by the rules of the game of the City, the KTP experiment was able to introduce new spaces – “niches”, following Bulkeley and Broto (2013) – and opportunities for non-hierarchical cross-departmental and multistakeholder interactions. The value of these interventions can be seen in calls for the institutionalisation of more deliberative spaces for understanding complex issues (Davison et al. 2015). Respondents noted that additional opportunities for interaction could assist in promoting the “whole organisation”, transversal management approach that the City desires, while providing additional opportunities to interact with external stakeholders who bring different knowledge to bear on proceedings, and can provide evidence to policy design and management, ensure knowledge exchange and facilitate joint strategy development. If becoming a learning institution is an objective for the City, then interacting beyond the City’s traditional structures and confines is essential.

7. Conclusion

In engaging with sustainability disjunctures in Cape Town, we have raised questions about how the City learns and transforms and about how we learn about the City, whilst exploring the factors which shape potential for the City to shift from a knowledge institution to a learning institution. In this research, the shift in focus from the role of explicit knowledges in policy formation to tacit knowledge has been made possible through a City–University partnership, the KTP, founded on a knowledge co-production methodology. While the KTP might be a relatively small-scale experiment, in creating a “potential space” (Soal 2014, p. 20) and a working culture between the City and the University, it has allowed for new insights to be surfaced through a form of engaged scholarship, which in this case show where points of leverage for sustainable transitions might be.

The “opportunity to collaborate and build” (Soal 2014, p. 12) created an experimental space for the surfacing of tacit knowledge that in turn allowed for the exploration of more innovative policy responses. Through this process, the academic engagement with the “how” and “what” of the City processes has deepened. The roles of uneven explicit knowledge, socio-political context and political know-how have emerged as key factors contributing to sustainability disjunctures.

The surfacing of tacit knowledge has highlighted the need for shifting focus from the nature of explicit knowledge inputs into policy to the political and institutional context within which policy must gain traction. The interplay between how to learn the City and how the City learns aids engagement with the City on its own terms. Nonetheless, the full implications of the relationship between a deeper understanding of transformative potential and a shift in approach to a just realpolitik require an analytical lens that focuses explicitly on the power dynamics inherent in the spaces where informal policy-making takes place, as well as the politics of co-production and urban experiments. “There is a difference between seeking a model for change … and actually doing change in the hands-on and rolling manner of engaged city governance” (Soal 2014, p. 4, emphasis in the original) – and learning the City is a vital (but not the sole) step in seeking pathways for transformation.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Knowledge Transfer Programme's Project Steering and Advisory Committees for their participation in discussions and workshops informing this research. In particular, we acknowledge the detailed inputs from the embedded researchers, Anton Cartwright, Rob McGaffin, Saul Roux and Anna Taylor into the Governance and Policy for Sustainability project. We thank too Tim May and Simon Marvin, guest editors of this special issue, our GAPS colleagues at the other city platforms, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on previous versions of this paper. Any errors or omissions are those of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This article is based on work undertaken as part of the Mistra Urban Futures programme, which is mainly funded by Mistra – the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research – and Sida – the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency.

Notes

1. “Co-producing knowledge for tricky transitions: Urban experimentation and innovation in Cape Town”, Panel discussion at the Southern African City Studies Conference, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 27–29 March 2014.

2. This research was part of the Mistra Urban Futures (MUF) programme. MUF is an international centre for sustainable urban development. The headquarters is located in Gothenburg, Sweden, and the centre operates in four cities around the world including Cape Town, Gothenburg, Greater Manchester and Kisumu. MUF focuses on co-production of knowledge as well as creating Fair, Green and Dense cities for a sustainable urban future. A global arena provides for interaction between the four cities.

3. The term CCT refers to the metropolitan municipality encompassing Cape Town and surrounds, and its institutional and governance structures, and is often referred to simply as the City. In this paper, we refer to the CCT as “the City”, “the municipality” and “the organisation” interchangeably.

4. “Transformation” has a particularly institutional connotation within the South African context, and is used here to refer to shifts in organisational structures and processes, and may include more radical paradigm shifts within an organisation.

5. We acknowledge Ralph Hamann for this expression, which he in turn borrowed from Milton Friedman reflecting on the social responsiveness of business.

6. Knowledge can also be co-produced with other partners, including state–society engagement (see Mitlin 2008, Watson 2014).

7. While co-production experiments attempt to overcome power relations that exist within and across organisations, we acknowledge that this is not always achieved. However, examining the power dynamics of this partnership lies beyond the scope of this paper.

8. In this paper, we refer to politics in general terms, not limiting our analysis to formal party politics. This therefore encompasses institutional and organisational politics, including what is often termed “office politics” and refers to the acknowledged and unacknowledged values, biases, and perspectives that shape decision-making on a day-to-day basis.

9. The policy areas included: The Economic Growth Strategy (CCT 2013), which outlines the importance of competitiveness, infrastructure, inclusive growth, trade and sector development and environmental sustainability; the City Development Strategy (CCT 2012a), a strategic framework that provides a vision for the city in 2040; the Energy and Climate Action Plan (CCT 2010), which is a guiding document in the CCT for decision-making, policy and implementation around a broad range of energy-related goals and objectives; the Spatial Development Framework (CCT 2012b), which is the primary document guiding the spatial development of the city; and the review process of the Integrated Metropolitan Environmental Policy, “a statement of intent, a commitment to certain principles and ethics and to the development of sectoral strategies … needed to ensure sustainable resource use and management” (CCT 2003, p. 4).

10. For more information on the Strategic Policy Unit, see De Lille (2012).

11. In its current formulation, the CCT metropolitan municipality has been in existence for 12 years. Prior to democracy in 1994, Cape Town had 39 local authorities and 19 administrations. Because these were racially based entities with limited capacities, these were condensed in 1996 into seven municipalities (CCT 2011, p. 4). This number decreased to one in 2000, when the CCT became known as the “unicity” – the metropolitan municipality as it is today – following which a period of organisational restructuring took place, with the process more or less completed by 2007. As a result of these changes, the municipality could be considered to still be settling into its role following these multiple structural shifts.