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.

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

“… 10 The KTP, which ran between 2012 and 2015, sought to make policy for sustainable development more legible and defensible by fostering different spaces for engagement for City officials and other stakeholders (see Greyling et al 2016 ). …”

Linking Local Projects With Global Processes: Learning From Transdisciplinary Collaborations in African Cities

“…Less well-documented and understood are the factors influencing urban change in African cities. African cities display a number of unique characteristics which may or may not have a role to play in shaping knowledge co-production practices; but nonetheless have a role to play in shaping the outcomes and hence effectiveness of co-production efforts (Greyling et al, 2017). These features include weak governance systems, inadequate capacity, high levels of inequality, corruption, increasing levels of informality (presenting a data challenge), informal governance systems, amongst others (Parnell and Pieterse, 2014).…”

The Embeddedness of Urban Climate Politics in Multilevel Governance: A Case Study of South Africa’s Major Cities

“…However, the fact that the revenues generated from reselling energy to local consumers are the largest source of municipal income prevents cities from achieving strong reductions in energy consumption and causes a gridlock in the implementation of energy efficiency programs (Elsässer, Hickmann, & Stehle, 2018; Greyling, Patel, & Davison, 2016). Nonetheless, a few cities have established tariff structures to incentivize the installation of small-scale solar photovoltaic systems for private consumption (South African Local Government Association, 2017).…”