Masters Degrees (Sociology and Social Anthropology)

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Browsing Masters Degrees (Sociology and Social Anthropology) by Author "Beukes, Anni Rosalen"

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    Social capital for whom? a case study of the implementation and practices of community-led enumerations in Stellenbosch Municipality 2011-2013
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-12) Beukes, Anni Rosalen; Robins, Steven; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology & Social Anthropology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The 2010 Human Sciences Research Council Review, Robert Mongwe had a two-page entry on Race, Class and Housing in post-apartheid Cape Town (Mongwe 2010: 18-19). Mongwe explores the question of whether housing policy in South Africa since the end of apartheid, may have been “paying disproportionate attention to recent migrants living in informal settlements” at the expense of addressing the needs of “coloureds and Africans who were born and bred in apartheid-era townships” (Mongwe, 2010:18). Informal settlements have become the most spectacular and visible material manifestation of poverty in South African. They hold appeal for politicians, activists and tourists. The ‘environmentally degraded informal settlement in a rapidly growing city” (Parnell and Mosdell 2003:1), one may argue, has thus also become the site for some of the most desired and most spectacular confrontations between political parties, residents and local government to contest the battle to defeat poverty. There is, I argue, a sort of ‘fetishisation’ of informal settlements in the contemporary South African urban space. It has homogenised urban poverty and biased development focus to informal settlements, with potentially detrimental effects in how local governments may approach poverty alleviation and sustainable development in their jurisdictions. Drawing on field work within the Stellenbosch Municipality and survey data from the Municipality’s collaboration with Slum Dwellers International (SDI) affiliated SA SDI Alliance between 2011-2013, I look at their efforts to make poverty legible and act on it through importing SDI data methodologies and practices for organising communities in relation to the Municipality. As a consequence of partly being blinded by sight, and accepting almost a default position of where poverty resided in the Stellenbosch Municipality, they may have perpetuated the trend Mongwe describes and, as a consequence, lost an opportunity to sustainably grow politically relevant social capital for the poor and the institutionalisation of SDI’s community organisation practices within the Municipality. In November 2011, upon request from the Manager of the Stellenbosch Municipality’s newly created Informal Settlements Department, Slum Dwellers International (SDI), the global network of the urban poor, through its local affiliate network, the SA SDI Alliance formally partnered with the Municipality in November 2011. I focus on the activities and processes of the formal MoU signed between the parties to generate better and more accurate data and knowledge for planning and development interventions for poor communities within the Municipality. Through a case study approach, and drawing on participant observation field work research within the Municipality and GIS and survey data analysis, I describe and analyse these efforts. SDI, sees the data collection processes, which it has been honing across the Global South since the late 1970s, as a process through which urban poor communities may take a lead in development planning as a means to gain social and political capital – a means, as it were, to emancipation and participation for the poor in the democratic processes of their cities. I cast my research against/within the themes of social capital development drawing on, among other, the conceptualisations of Elinor Ostrom, James Coleman and Anirudh Krishna, as well as, Elisabeth Povinelli’s concept of social belonging.