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While literature extensively examines waste management issues in urban areas, limited attention has been given to rural developing waste contexts. This paper aims to understand the policy/implementation nexus between national and local government within the rural waste management context in two rural municipalities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The research utilizes a directed deductive content analysis applying a framework proposed by Pollans. Originally designed for urban contexts, this framework has proven valuable for comprehending solid waste management policy implementation challenges in rural settings. This paper proposes an adjustment to this framework, differentiating the disposal mode of governing into government-based and self-reliant-based approaches. The authors found a significant implementation gap in both municipalities, characterized by a predominant, incremental disposal-oriented governing mode. This contrasts with the visionary and aspirational modes of governing promoted by the national government, focusing on diversion and eco-efficient waste strategies. These divergent modes of governing influence current waste management practices, especially in rural municipalities. We recommend strategies towards narrowing the implementation gap by formulating policies tailored to local development needs. Finally, the research sheds light on the challenges and disparities in rural waste management policy implementation and provides insights into how rural areas can transition towards sustainable waste management practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transdisciplinary research has gained traction globally for mapping pathways for sustainable urbanisation. The involvement of local communities is believed to central to knowledge co-production needed to address sustainability challenges. But working with local communities can be challenging. This paper is structured around the authors' personal reflections on undertaking transdisciplinary household energy conservation projects in Ghana and South Africa. The paper reflects on the assumptions and challenges of doing transdisciplinary research in urban Africa and suggests some guidelines for consideration when doing transdisciplinary projects. An inductive analysis of our reflections showed five key challenges: lack of integration, divergent problem identification, tensions in knowledge co-production, asymmetrical power relations, and distrust and managing expectations. We draw on our collective experiences to develop guidelines for conducting transdisciplinary research in urban Africa. These guidelines are not prescriptive but can be useful for a growing and broader audience interested in undertaking transdisciplinary research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the existence and significance of transnational municipal networks (TMNs) in the realm of environmental governance have been well documented, the implementation and impacts of their local programmes, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, remain underexplored. This paper contributes to addressing this gap of knowledge by examining what obstructs or facilitates TMNs' local actions and the extent to which they can catalyse wider transformative impacts on local environmental governance. We focus on an urban wetlands programme implemented by ICLEI Africa from 2015 to 2018 in 9 district and 2 metropolitan municipalities in South Africa – the Local Action for Biodiversity: Wetlands SA (LAB Wetlands SA) Programme. From an insider perspective, this paper reviews the implementation of the LAB Wetlands SA Programme in three locations, namely the Overberg, iLembe, and Frances Baard District Municipalities of South Africa. Based on comparative analysis, the paper identifies three key influential factors – political buy-in, policy champions and institutional capacity – that interact in combination to affect the practices of the LAB Wetlands SA Programme. These three factors are closely interlinked and strongly depend on the social, economic, political and cultural aspects of local context. In advancing local environmental actions and promoting transformative environmental governance, the design and practices of TMNs' local programmes and projects must be informed by, tailored to, and able to adapt to the local context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mass urbanisation in cities of the global South, is causing cities to evolve, with informal settlements being central to this evolution. While local government is the official point of interaction for urban informal settlement dwellers, those interactions are often characterised by a lack of meaningful participation. Engaging with the co-production literature and two case studies of informal settlements in Cape Town, South Africa, this paper examines how they shed light on the shifting and constantly evolving roles and practices of local government and community actors within a co-production engagement. Based on the findings from these cases, the paper argues that co-production as a practice of collaboration between the local state and citizens can allow for the forging of new relationships, built on trust, sharing of resources and a more equal distribution of power where communities can shape the outcomes of service delivery projects to respond to their needs and demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Persistent poverty is a major developmental challenge for South Africa and has multifaceted dimensions. This paper profiled and investigated poverty transitions among rural households in 22 district municipalities in South Africa. Foster-Greer-Thorbecke indices were applied to panel data from the National Income Dynamics Study from 2008 to 2017. Findings indicate that poverty levels varied across districts and poverty was most prevalent in Zululand, OR Tambo and Sisonke districts. Furthermore, districts with high poverty rates also had high poverty gap ratios. Poverty transition analyses revealed that in 82% of the districts, poverty declined between 2008 and 2017, while it increased in 13% of the districts. This transition was not mirrored between waves, with the majority of households remaining in the same poverty status between waves. The study recommends that these traditional rural districts be a major focus of poverty alleviation efforts. The role of the state in providing stability to combat poverty is encouraged through promotion of higher education. Additionally, support for agriculture as a business is also recommended. Collaborations between district municipalities and provincial departments of agriculture could facilitate this. The study adds to existing literature by providing insights from disaggregated profile and analysis of rural poverty in district municipalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of public space governance in delivering and managing qualitative public space in South African cities is inadequately documented from a municipal governance perspective. The article focuses on the governance of public space delivery and management in the Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality to unlock the best urban design practices concerning creating and sustaining high-quality public space as an essential element of urban infrastructure. The paper argues that the delivery and management of high-quality public spaces in South African cities are underpinned by several essential governance prerequisites that influence the significance, nature and role of public space within these cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban agriculture offers numerous environmental, economic, and social benefits. However, it is often hampered by limited engagement in cities of the global South. This article offers bottom-up perspectives on how to increase the uptake of urban agriculture activities. It draws on urban gardeners' perspectives in the low-income neighbourhood of Mitchells Plain, Cape Town. The mixed-methods approach combined a questionnaire survey, semi-structured interviews with urban gardeners, and interviews with civil society actors and a state official. The results indicate that climate and soil conditions are major deterrents to urban agriculture. However, community dialogues about urban agriculture's social and environmental benefits could play a crucial role in increasing uptake and in facilitating conversations about urban agriculture and food more generally. The paper offers recommendations for future interventions seeking to promote urban agriculture and support actors in low-income neighbourhoods in Cape Town and other African cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South African municipalities increasingly celebrate prepaid water and electricity meters for enabling them to build more resilient cities. This framing has been critiqued for its neoliberal underpinnings, where the discourse of resilience masks the reality that people are being coerced into surviving with consistently diminishing resources. While these infrastructures undeniably materialise neoliberal logics, this paper considers the labour compounds of nineteenth-century Kimberley to suggest such infrastructures also have a racialising function with a much older lineage. The Kimberley compounds were designed and managed by various technical experts tasked with maximising productivity and balancing economic constraints with mortality rates. In so doing, they relied upon and produced racialised theories of the body. Where the experts framed their work as turning on the observation of "the native races," in fact those experts were producing the very racial truths they claimed only to uncover. The compound, most often studied as an infrastructure of racial domination, has rarely been recognised as productive of emergent notions of "race." Read through this lineage, continued infrastructural coercion in contemporary South Africa, which relies on the techno-racial expertise developed in earlier eras, reveals itself as critical to race's continual reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-date Landsat images were used to ascertain the nature, causes and extent of degradation in the savannahs of Raymond Mhlaba Local Municipality in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa by comparing changes in land-use and land-cover in one commercial farm and two communal areas over a period of 30 years between 1984 and 2014. Results revealed a persistent increase in bush encroachment, persistent decrease in grassland in all areas, and abandonment of arable farming in communal areas. The paper concludes by providing strategies to change the adverse effects of these changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with a key concern in boundary studies namely what are the major forces which inform boundaries and boundary demarcation/making. Boundaries being quintessentially geographical are infused with social, political and spatial content. While the Berlin Conference imposed national boundaries using geography as a colonial tool, the principle of boundaries imposed at the intra-national scale is a current concern. The paper focusses on boundary demarcation in post-apartheid South Africa through a consideration of the Matatiele boundary dispute. Matatiele, a small town, situated towards the south-western corner of KwaZulu-Natal, but now part of the Eastern Cape Province, has been the subject of a longstanding boundary dispute between the two provinces. The matter has been a subject of a number of protracted court battles between residents of the town and the different tiers of government, the provincial and national tiers of government in particular. The paper details the struggle for spatial justice – the political strategies, in particular – of proponents for the inclusion of Matatiele into KwaZulu-Natal. The paper demonstrates that in a (quasi) federal spatial formation such as South Africa, boundaries are politically overdetermined at the national scale. The local democratic content, therefore, is rendered inconsequential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how entangled layers of use and contingencies of open spaces in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa, relate to their structural, material and symbolic aspects. Reflecting on research at Pieter Roos Park, Constitution Hill and Gandhi Square, this paper emphasises the walking route that connects these three spaces, mostly along Rissik Street. It examines the rhythms of people's navigation of the city, according to perceptions of fear and safety, opportunity and adversity, and offers an initial understanding of the continuous interaction between structure and agency. It reflects on reading about these spaces, and how this connects with walking and writing about the city, all acts with particular, overlapping rhythms. Interpreting these in relation to each other, and in relation to my own rhythms, provokes questions that unsettle linear and straightforward understandings of time and memory as well as the individual and their connection to the public. Whilst linear rhythms are predominant, subject to the working week, surprising and paradoxical practices frequently punctuate these rhythms. Both rhythms and their disruptions are influenced on a variety of levels, often linked to perceptions, which intersect with lingering histories and memory in layered, complex ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Municipal infrastructure asset operations and maintenance are critical for municipalities to provide basic services to communities in South Africa. The paper discusses the performance of municipal assets using Key Informants and literature review based on three metropolitan areas in Gauteng province and four rural municipalities in Limpopo province of South Africa focusing on asset operations and maintenance. Municipal assets in South Africa are saddled with poor performance because the infrastructure is aging in a context of rapid urbanisation and population growth and this impacts on the level of service delivery to the communities. The method used to analyse and unpack the findings were obtained from the review of literature and information obtained from Key Informants. The major official documents used includes the Sector Plans, Spatial Developments Frameworks, Integrated Development Plans as well as the review of books and journals on the general performance of the metros and rural municipalities with respect to municipal asset operations and maintenance. The information obtained from the Key Informants was used to refute or confirm the notion from the literature reviewed that inadequate operations and maintenance of municipal assets contribute to under performance in the provision of basic service delivery to the communities. The study shows that insufficient funding and low revenue base of the municipalities impacts on the renewal of municipal assets and provision of basic services to the communities in both metros and rural municipalities. The study recommends appropriate systems and asset management practices that can be put in place to improve on the under-performance of operations and maintenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa's National Development Plan entrenches the importance of a capable developmental state for the country's social and economic development. Likewise, the potential of science, technology and innovation to address development challenges is emphasised. The developmental state and inclusive innovation ideas have been in and out of the policy agenda since 1996 but have recently gained renewed policy attention. As part of an inclusive innovation for development agenda, the Department of Science and Technology facilitated the demonstration of a suite of basic service innovations in 'distressed' municipalities. This paper, using a mixed-methods approach, draws on the assessment of these demonstrations to reflect on key features which come to the fore in both the developmental state and inclusive innovation literature as crucial for success. In order to enjoy a measure of success in terms of developmental states and inclusive innovation for development, similar conditions are necessary: the encouragement and fostering of active participation by all stakeholders; sufficient financial resources and human capabilities at all levels; and strong collaborative and cohesive networks with similar purposes in mind. Once these form part of practice we are likely to see better implementation of inclusive innovation for development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informalization and casualization have been twin meta-trends in African development over the last several decades. However these processes are also now being articulated with, and altered by, processes of virtual accumulation and informationalization, giving rise to what some have called Uberization. What does the rise of the 'sharing' economy mean for employment practices and labor relations and conditions in Africa? This paper examines the implications of this phenomenon through a case study of 'ride sharing' operations in Cape Town. It finds hollowing out of the formal sector and the creation of a new (in)formal sector, where drivers are engaged through use of a mobile phone applications, but are still liable for taxes to the state. This has led to the emergence of a new form of 'virtual capital' which extracts 'value' from assets it doesn't own, and labor it doesn't manage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a commentary on the papers in this special issue, drawing out the ways in which they bring forward tactics for comparative and global urbanism, contributing to urban theory on the basis of experiences in a range of post-socialist contexts. The paper begins with an analysis of a short story by the South African novelist, Ivan Vladislavič, which provocatively brings post-apartheid and post-socialist contexts into conversation. Inspired by this drawing of lines of connection, the potential for ex-centric and regional studies traditions of urban studies to inform global urban theorising is explored through a reading of the comparative tactics adopted by the papers in this collection – reading practices informed by area studies; thinking with the multiple processes shaping urban outcomes; contributing to the revision and invention of concepts; and extending theory. An invitation, inspired by the scholarship reflected in these papers, is extended for drawing new lines of comparison across a wider range of different urban contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 2011 Durban Adaptation Charter for Local Governments calls on local governments, worldwide, to institutionalise climate response, with the aim of minimising the impacts of climate change on local livelihoods and vulnerable communities. This paper, through the use of case studies, in-depth interviews and document review, assesses how three non-metropolitan municipalities in KwaZulu-Natal, a district municipality, and two local municipalities under its jurisdiction, are responding to this call. The results suggest that while the municipalities have adopted measures to institutionalise climate responses, the responses are relatively new and implementation is slow, complex and fraught with limitations and competing demands. Furthermore, there appears to be a lack of co-ordination of responses between the two levels of government, which has the potential to lead to duplication. Given the multi-scalar nature of climate change, emphasis on co-ordination and the inclusion of all municipal departments in the development and implementation of responses is necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rainwater harvesting (RWH) technology has been in use for a long time, however its contribution towards urban water supply has been negligible in South Africa. Through a comprehensive literature review and analysis of interviews with key stakeholders, this case study presents implementation challenges and policy gaps in relation to the scale of adoption in the City of Johannesburg (CoJ). Findings show that only 0.1% of CoJ's population utilises RWH due to various reasons, varying from financial viability, reliability, quality concerns, and system maintenance. This paper attributes these to the scale of adoption and suggests upscaling the system to larger commercial buildings to optimise benefits. However, there is an urgent need to bridge the policy gaps for successful implementation. Three categories of policy reforms are therefore proposed to facilitate innovation uptake, stakeholder engagement and compliance. This knowledge can guide future research towards urban water management, scientists and policymakers nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the experience with an NGO-initiated recycling programme in Hangberg Township, Cape Town. The 11-week trial project achieved 70% sign-up but suffered substantial drop-out. The NGO's attempt to brand block leaders as 'eco-heroes' was unsuccessful and there were concerns about the distribution of project benefits. The project diverted 26% by mass of the estimated solid waste refuse stream of 2.5 kg per person per week and made R1752 from selling 1.965 tons of recycling. Some 970 kg of compostables were diverted but not processed as part of the project. Project accounts revealed a benefit-cost ratio of 0.123 in which the sale of recyclables and landfill costs avoided were the only benefits and wages and consumables the main costs. While a more equitable distribution of benefits could improve the cost-benefit ratio, there are other good reasons for donors to fund projects of this nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of the ‘polycentric urban region’ has been popularised both as a theoretical concept for understanding regional urban systems in an era of reduced transport and communication costs, and as a normative policy objective in its own right. This paper explores its relevance to the rapidly urbanising Cape Town city-region. First, empirical evidence for the emergence of polycentric regional development patterns was considered. Shifts in relative settlements sizes (morphological polycentrism) over the period 1991–2011 were examined using population data, and patterns of inter-settlement interactions (functional polycentrism) were explored by analysing commuting information. Contrary to expectations, trends toward polycentric development were found to be weak. Second, the paper considers the relevance and value of polycentric development thinking for regional economic and spatial planning policy, concluding that there are insufficient grounds for policy intervention aimed at encouraging polycentric regional development or countering the dominance of Cape Town in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There has been a surge of interest by geographers in contemporary South African small towns. This paper reports on the sale of municipal land in small towns from 1974 to 2014 in selected municipalities of the Western Cape. Attention is focused on the sale of municipal golf courses as an example of privatized municipal land that has not contributed to undoing apartheid spatial legacies or integrating small-town communities. The rate of municipal land sales increased appreciably after the introduction of the neoliberal Growth Employment and Redistribution macro-economic strategy in South Africa. Neoliberal processes have adapted to local conditions and morphed into what is known as the Third Way: essentially a marriage between the neoliberal agenda and postapartheid egalitarian principles. The divisive nature of privatized, once municipally owned, spaces is supposed to be offset by investment in social development funds for some small towns. It is intended that these funds be managed by municipalities and spent on projects identified in the Integrated Development Plan. Documentation of environmental impact assessments of privatized golf courses provides insights into the logic of the privatization of small-town municipal golf courses and the addition of residential components to them. It is concluded that the secure, gated and fortified housing spaces of the golf estates are aimed at the monied classes and have become enclaves of wealth within the broader small-town milieu. The developmental dilemma is that while municipalities may benefit from such land sales and their subsequent revenues, socio-spatial integrative opportunities are being sacrificed for monetary gain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Izikhothane, is an urban youth phenomenon that has taken some of South African Townships involving the preoccupation with extreme forms of materialism; fatalistic obsession with fashionable clothing brands and expensive alcohol. Local popular music provides the soundtrack. The paper aims to shed light and contribute to discussions about the evolving nature of South African culture concerning youth. It is informed by a constructivist paradigm according to which knowledge is self-constructed. The argument presented is that this youth phenomenon should be understood in the context of a state of flux in contemporary South African society and culture, spiritual malaise and anomie, and commodification, all of which have given rise to a sense of nihilism. The pervasive sense of superfluity belies the bleak economic background of the majority of the youth. The concept of black urbanism provides a different framework for theorizing this subculture as a black experience and phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]