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

____________________________ AbstractThe effective and equitable delivery of public services remains a challenge for all countries but it is especially problematic in newly democratised states with highly diverse and unequal populations. Influencing the design of more inclusive administrative systems is the notion of a universal citizenship which applies the concept of the equality of individuals to the needs, identities and sense of agency of citizens both between and within states. Reinforced and intertwined with the notion of the universal, citizen, is the uncritically constructed notion of community. The construction of a single identity citizen living in communities imbued with homogenous characteristics is carried forward into the policy construction of participatory governance, which has become part of the orthodoxy of administrative thinking in many states in the global south. This paper examines the how the notion of community forms part of service delivery, and particularly the delivery of public housing to poor areas of Cape Town, South Africa, through participatory processes. It argues that official understandings of homogenous communities which infuse development and service delivery policies not only undermine the stated objectives of participation but they also ultimately impede effective service delivery.

Changing People, Changing Lives Through Public Participation and Social Transformation: A South African Case Study of a Rural Development Programme

“…In South Africa, the rural development literature can be split into two camps: on the one hand, there are the supreme sceptics who argue that rural development since 1995 has been an unmitigated failure with several false starts because the 'real issues' of agrarian change have been ignored in favour of disjointed micro-projects (Cousins and Walker 2015;Hall 2015). On the other hand, there is a strong body of scholarship that insists on the importance of democratic agency in rural development programmes (Ntsebeza 2005;Du Toit 2018;Thompson, Tapscott, and Wet 2018). This article firmly positions itself with the latter scholarship and seeks to provide indicators of the positive role and potential of the CoS in the Rural Development Model.…”

“…The establishment of the CoS as the authoritative representatives of communities makes assumptions. The first relates to the concept of community, which, as pointed out in the literature, it's difficult to define; means different things to different people in different contexts; is inherently unstable; and takes a long time to cohere (Bozzoli 1987;Thompson, Tapscott, and Wet 2018). Community expectations, protests, cultural and political conflict and the possibility that more powerful social groups may capture civic structures also pose higher risks, such as the fragmentation and de-legitimisation of CoS structures (Impact Economix 2015).…”