Speaking for the trees: a study of the relationship between discourse, power and organisational culture in competing constructions of nature
Social Dynamics, 2021
ABSTRACT In order to demonstrate the effects of competing constructions of nature by different in... more ABSTRACT In order to demonstrate the effects of competing constructions of nature by different interest groups, this article describes a dispute in Cape Town, South Africa, through the lens of cultural theory and Foucault’s notion of discourse linked to power. Controversy arose over the felling of a small plantation of non-indigenous pine trees, situated amidst indigenous “fynbos” vegetation in a suburban park. The matter was adjudicated in the Western Cape Division of the South African High Court, and subsequently in the Supreme Court of Appeal. The case turned on the meaning of public power and the affected community’s right to be heard. During argumentation the scientifically framed and institutionally supported discourse of the conservation entity was pitched against the symbolically oriented discourse of a community action group representing ramblers, joggers, horse riders, and dog walkers. The analysis focuses on how opposing arguments were shaped by perspectives of what nature, in the context of a suburban park, should look like and the purpose it should serve. The study shows how the dominant discourse of nature, rooted in the assumed supremacy of science and expert knowledge, was challenged by a multivalent and contextually moulded discourse of nature as amenity.
Knowledge Co-production in Sub-Saharan African Cities: Building Capacity for the Urban Age
Science for Sustainable Societies, 2020
Current research suggests that knowledge co-production processes offer an alternate and enduring ... more Current research suggests that knowledge co-production processes offer an alternate and enduring approach to addressing urban sustainability challenges. This chapter explores the potential of such alternative approaches to knowledge production for informing urban management and tackling the different sustainability challenges that cities in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) face. The aim of this chapter is to extract the main lessons learned from how knowledge co-production approaches were established to engage with urban sustainability challenges in SSA cities and eventually unfolded. We draw on three applied and transdisciplinary urban research projects conducted at the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town, spanning the neighbourhood, city and national urban policy scales. We identify some of the key aspects of these urban knowledge partnerships related to the quality of the knowledge collaborations and their influence on outcomes. We adopt an analytical framework based on the criteria of legitimacy, credibility and salience to explore these relationships between collaboration and outcomes. The findings show that context and history are key variables in shaping each knowledge co-production partnership. Whilst urban policy change is often slow, the data and outputs generated through these knowledge collaboration and co-production processes can serve to increase the confidence and commitment of urban stakeholders in addressing urban sustainability challenges in SSA.
This paper examines the role and effectiveness of sustainable development as a planning and polic... more This paper examines the role and effectiveness of sustainable development as a planning and policy tool in the post-apartheid reconstruction of South African cities. Through the case study of the South Durban Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) the paper argues that it is within policy development and implementation that sustainable development becomes conflictual rather than consensual. It is argued that interventions supporting a sustainable development agenda fall short of attaining their goals, as these initiatives are often reduced to technical processes, whereby inadequate attention is paid to the politics of the environment. The paper offers some insights for understanding the politics of the environment and the implications this has for environmental decisionmaking at the local level.
This article focuses on a community-development programme (case study) in Bonteheuwel on the Cape... more This article focuses on a community-development programme (case study) in Bonteheuwel on the Cape Flats, viz. ‘No Messing in Bonteheuwel’. In a period of just over a decade, this community has transitioned from a degraded natural, built and social environment to one where the community have cohered to realise a vision of a place of which they are currently proud. This case study adds to the understanding of sustainable community development, by tracing the transition from a vicious to a virtuous cycle of community development. The development of social capital within the community, coupled with the development of partnerships and the building of trust with local government, have been identified as key ingredients in this transition. The benefits derived from the current virtuous cycle for the Bonteheuwel community as well as local government are demonstrated. This article contributes towards the understanding of how to foster sustainable communities, and is, therefore, of rele...
We write as the inaugural editors of a new addition to the Environment and Planning family of pee... more We write as the inaugural editors of a new addition to the Environment and Planning family of peer review journals. It is called EPF: Philosophy, Theory, Models, Methods and Practice (phonetically, our subtitle sounds as pee-tee-em-pee). Geography today should be more than the sum of its many lively parts, but as a discipline cannot dance to one tune-be it ontologically, epistemologically, methodologically or otherwise. We believe that the action lies in forging connections, in mutual learning and in productive disagreement. In this editorial, we detail the context, aims and scope of the journal. At the end, we call for guest editors of special sections and issues, and for articles that fit the remit of this exciting new venture. As a discipline, Geography today is both distinctive and exceedingly vibrant. Many other disciplines are increasingly interested in people-environment relationships, in local-global connections, in the nature and significance of various boundaries and borders, in movements (e.g. of people, goods, knowledge and information) between places and regions, in landscape and land use change, in the difference that proximity and distance make, and in the functioning of biogeochemical systems at various scales-but Geography has historic pedigree in all these areas. It remains the discipline dedicated to understanding why, how and with what effects people utilise-and are affected by-both natural and created environments (in both a material and semiotic-representational sense). In the Anglosphere, if not necessarily elsewhere, the discipline is also extraordinarily heterodox: variety of focus, methods and aims in both research and degree-level teaching is the rule, not the exception. This heterodoxy is both the product and lubricant of Geography's breadth of focus, of the virtues of specialisation and-in some parts of the discipline-of a belief that we can learn valuable things by eschewing orthodoxy. Today, albeit not equally across the globe and in different modalities, Geography is burgeoning. Its practitioners have formed lively communities with shared interests in some of the most important issues of our time, such as destruction of the nonhuman world, voluntary and forced migration, rapid urbanisation, new patterns of economic development, the identification and amelioration of concentrated poverty, reduction of the impacts of various natural hazards, emerging geopolitical rivalries and the new cartographies of war, trans-border political struggles for justice, environmental conservation and restoration, infrastructure development and planning for the future, multicultural localities and cities, and much more besides. Even so, many geographers might believe all is not well in the house of Geography. Some lament the lack of unity of purpose and focus in the discipline; others feel that Geography does not offer enough exemplars of 'integrated analysis' that make a virtue of the many specialists we have working side-by-side in the same departments. Yet others believe Geography's public image remains too weak in several countries, allowing other disciplines to encroach on its fundamental research and teaching areas; some assert that geographers borrow too much from other disciplines and do not make formative contributions of wider significance; and still others maintain that what passes for 'geography' in many departments is really 'geography lite' practised by geologists, sociologists or ecologists with little to no sense of the history and achievements of Geography over the last century or so. This is the immediate academic context in which EPF is being launched. The wider context is febrile: the first pandemic in a century, with grave economic and social knock-on effects; the forced 1005376E PF0010.
While government housing can raise living standards for the urban poor, it has environmental impa... more While government housing can raise living standards for the urban poor, it has environmental impacts and contributes to urban resource consumption. In Gauteng Province, South Africa, government housing aims to improve quality of life, reduce poverty and inequality, and transform unsustainable urban forms. This paper draws on survey and interview data to explore the social justice and environmental sustainability outcomes of Gauteng’s government housing programmes. The data reveal improved access to basic services and amenities. However, the developments tend to be poorly located with regard to economic opportunities, and residents are forced to explore other income generation opportunities. This paper highlights the complex interplay between justice and sustainability, where the outcomes are aligned in some instances and conflictual in others. It points to the need to move beyond linear, reductionist relationships between justice and sustainability to further the conceptual understa...
Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 2019
Applied research has evolved to play an important role in understanding and reorienting relations... more Applied research has evolved to play an important role in understanding and reorienting relationships between different knowledge partnerships in urban sustainability. This paper reflects on experiences from the global South on knowledge co-production experiments through 'CityLabs', which are forums for bringing together different knowledge brokers (particularly government and academia) to co-produce policyrelevant urban knowledge. Each CityLab experimented with different configurations to generate knowledge relevant for addressing urban sustainability challenges. This paper reflects on these experiences and identifies emerging common principles. These include: deliberate formulation of safe spaces, in which to engage, willingness for flexibility around the direction, focus and outputs, and carefully fostering trust and mutual understanding among participants. Urban experimentation, and CityLabs in particular, provide real opportunities for facilitating learning, reframing issues and shifting practices around urban sustainability between government and the academy.
Urban sustainability is a wicked issue unsuited to management through traditional decision-making... more Urban sustainability is a wicked issue unsuited to management through traditional decision-making structures. Co-productive arrangements, spaces and processes are inscribed in new organisational forms to bridge between diverse forms of knowledge and expertise. This article suggests that local interaction platforms (LIPs) are innovative responses to these challenges, developed in two African and two European cities between 2010 and 2014. Through elaborating the design and practice of the LIPs, the article concludes that the value of this approach lies in its context-sensitivity and iterative flexibility to articulate between internationally shared challenges and distinctive local practices. Six necessary conditions for the evolution of LIPs are presented: anchorage, co-constitution, context-sensitivity, alignment, connection and shared functions. In the context of increased uncertainty, complexity and the demand for transdisciplinary knowledge production, the platform concept has wid...
The success of the Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11) depends on the availability and acces... more The success of the Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11) depends on the availability and accessibility of robust data, as well as the reconfiguration of governance systems that can catalyse urban transformation. Given the uneven success of the Millennium Development Goals, and the unprecedented inclusion of the urban in the SDG process, the feasibility of SDG 11 was assessed in advance of its ratification through a series of urban experiments. This paper focusses on Cape Town's participation in piloting SDG 11, in order to explore the role of urban experimentation in highlighting the partnership arrangements necessary to allow cities to meet the data and governance challenges presented by the SDG 11. Specifically, we focus on the relationship between data and governance that lie at the heart of the SDG 11. The urban experiment demonstrates the highly complex and multi-level governance dynamics that shape the way urban experiments are initiated, executed and concluded. The imp...
South African cities have focused on sustainability as a policy and strategic objective. Nonethel... more 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.
Transdisciplinary research has increasingly been emphasised as desirable, particularly for managi... more Transdisciplinary research has increasingly been emphasised as desirable, particularly for managing complex issues that exist within socio-political environmental systems. However, achieving true transdisciplinarity, both in academia and practice, has proved challenging. In the case of natural disasters, the risk of not acknowledging the inherent complexity has the potential to increase the risk of fatalities, damage to property and perpetuate poor disaster management. The example of flooding in Atlasville, Ekurhuleni (South Africa) is used to make a case for the usefulness of transdisciplinary approaches. Understanding and responding to local flooding episodes is explored through comparing two hypothetical methodological frameworksa divided and a united approach. The divided (disciplinary) approach, based on typical disaster response patterns, separated investigations into environmental, government and social factors. In contrast, the united approach, based on a transdisciplinary model, investigated the flooding context along nontraditional lines including: drivers; absorptive and adaptive capacity; and mitigation and preparation. The research highlights that reframing the flooding problem along transdisciplinary lines forces researchers to analyse the context more comprehensively as isolated analyses are unable to determine or consider the cumulative impacts of individual phenomena. The transformative potential of the transdisciplinary findings indicates that means of translating this hypothetical analysis into reality are urgently required because of the important implications transdisciplinary approaches have for disaster risk reduction, and for managing other complex issues.
As a discipline and field of knowledge, South African geography has been defined in and by critic... more As a discipline and field of knowledge, South African geography has been defined in and by critical societal debates, highlighting how, as geographers, we produce knowledge and teach to address societal imperatives. Inspired in our own and others' research practice engaging in collaboration between the university and activist groups and knowledge co-production between universities and local authorities, we reflect on the varied engagements, commitments and movements of scholars and practitioners across South African geography. How do these approaches to research through coproduction and collaboration navigate postionality and expertise, enriching the research process? In reworking the process of generating knowledge, what alternate kinds of knowledge(s) are produced? Through exploring these questions in this paper, we reread the 'turn to development' and our commitment to applied geographical work, not as the degeneration of theory production, but as an opportunity to reflect on what is theoretically and empirically rich in the commitment to relevance in contemporary South African geographical work.
vi 2.4 IMPLICATIONS FOR SOUTH AFRICAN URBAN PLANNING 49 2.4.1 Influence of science on urban plann... more vi 2.4 IMPLICATIONS FOR SOUTH AFRICAN URBAN PLANNING 49 2.4.1 Influence of science on urban planning. 2.4.2 Relevance of Radical Approaches for South Africa 2.5 SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
vi 2.4 IMPLICATIONS FOR SOUTH AFRICAN URBAN PLANNING 49 2.4.1 Influence of science on urban plann... more vi 2.4 IMPLICATIONS FOR SOUTH AFRICAN URBAN PLANNING 49 2.4.1 Influence of science on urban planning. 2.4.2 Relevance of Radical Approaches for South Africa 2.5 SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
The campaign for the inclusion of a specifically urban goal within the United Nations’ Sustainabl... more The campaign for the inclusion of a specifically urban goal within the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was challenging. Numerous divergent interests were involved, while urban areas worldwide are also extremely heterogeneous. It was essential to minimize the number of targets and indicators while still capturing critical urban dimensions relevant to human development. It was also essential to test the targets and indicators. This paper reports the findings of a unique comparative pilot project involving co-production between researchers and local authority officials in five diverse secondary and intermediate cities: Bangalore (Bengaluru), India; Cape Town, South Africa; Gothenburg, Sweden; Greater Manchester, United Kingdom; and Kisumu, Kenya. Each city faced problems in providing all the data required, and each also proposed various changes to maximize the local relevance of particular targets and indicators. This reality check provided invaluable inputs to the...
Environmental Justice In South Africa, D.A. McDonald (Editor) : book review
Extracted from text ... Environmental Justice In South Africa McDonald, D.A. (Editor) UCT Press, ... more Extracted from text ... Environmental Justice In South Africa McDonald, D.A. (Editor) UCT Press, 2002, 341pp. ISBN 1-919713-66-2 (UCT Press) The timing of the publication of Environmental Justice in South Africa, ten years on from the Earth Summit and in the same year South African hosted the World Summit on Sustainable Development, is most appropriate. This book comes at a pivotal moment of international retrospection and reflexivity with respect to progress in striving towards a sustainable development mandate. In reflecting on South Africa's pathway towards fulfilling our international commitments towards sustainable development, and our constitutional rights for access to a 'clean and safe ..
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