On handling urban informality in southern Africa

In this article I reconsider the handling of urban informality by urban planning and management systems in southern Africa. I argue that authorities have a fetish about formality and that this is fuelled by an obsession with urban modernity. I stress that the desired city, largely inspired by Western notions of modernity, has not been and cannot be realized. Using illustrative cases of top–down interventions, I highlight and interrogate three strategies that authorities have deployed to handle informality in an effort to create or defend the modern city. I suggest that the fetish is built upon a desire for an urban modernity based on a concept of formal order that the authorities believe cannot coexist with the “disorder” and spatial “unruliness” of informality. I question the authorities' conviction that informality is an abomination that needs to be “converted”, dislocated or annihilated. I conclude that the very configuration of urban governance and socio-economic systems in the region, like the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, renders informality inevitable and its eradication impossible

How did we do that? Histories and political economies of rapid and just transitions

It is becoming increasingly clear that deep and rapid transitions in technologies, infrastructures and ways of organising the economy are imperative if we are to live safely within planetary boundaries. But what historical precedents are there for such profound shifts within short spaces of time, and what were the enabling conditions? When have transitions in sectors such as energy, food, finance and transport come about before, and how would they be brought about again? Do these episodes shed any analogous light on our current collective predicament? This paper develops an account of the politics and prospects of deeper transitions towards sustainability based on a critical empirical, but theoretically informed, reading of previous socio-technical transitions. The scale and urgency of our current ecological predicament is daunting and can be disempowering in the absence of strategic thinking about when analogous challenges have been encountered before and how societies have sought to overcome them. Providing a combination of concrete empirical examples drawn both from academic literature and a series of public workshops reflecting on these themes, this paper seeks to provide a basis for understanding as well as engaging with the scope for accelerated transitions within and beyond capitalism

Commoning mobility:Towards a new politics of mobility transitions

Scholars have argued that transitions to more sustainable and just mobilities require moving beyond technocentrism to rethink the very meaning of mobility in cities, communities, and societies. This paper demonstrates that such rethinking is inherently political. In particular, we focus on recent theorisations of commoning practices that have gained traction in geographic literatures. Drawing on our global comparative research of low‐carbon mobility transitions, we argue that critical mobilities scholars can rethink and expand the understanding of mobility through engagement with commons–enclosure thinking. We present a new concept, “commoning mobility,” a theorisation that both envisions and shapes practices that develop fairer and greener mobilities and more inclusive, collaboratively governed societies. Our analysis introduces three “logics” of mobility transition projects. First, the paper discusses how a logic of scarcity has been a driver for mobility planning as the scarcity of oil, finance, space, and time are invoked across the world as stimuli for aspiring to greener, “smarter,” and cheaper mobilities. The paper then identifies two responses to the logic of scarcity: the logics of austerity and the logics of commoning. Austere mobilities are examined to problematise the distribution of responsibility for emissions and ensuing injustices and exclusion in low‐carbon transitions. The logics of commoning shows a potential to reassess mobility not only as an individual freedom but also as a collective good, paving the way for fairer mobility transitions and a collaborative tackling of sustainable mobility challenges.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Bantustan State and the South African Transition: Militarisation, Patrimonialism and the Collapse of the Ciskei Regime, 1986-1994

This article examines the Ciskei bantustan and processes of state formation during the transition to democracy. In the Ciskei, the rule of Brigadier Gqozo rested on the continued support of the South African state: identified as the weakest link in the National Party’s conservative alliance, the Ciskei became the first target for the African National Congress’ mass action campaign of 1992. The struggle in the Ciskei thus had some significance for the shape of the transition. While at a constitutional level the National Party eventually conceded to the re-incorporation of the bantustans in late 1992, it continued to stall change and to bolster the bantustans through covert military operations and land transfers to bantustan elites. These dynamics of state formation are critical aspects of the history of the transition and were at the heart of the emerging political conflict in the Ciskei, which by mid-1992 was escalating into civil war. This article examines mass mobilisation, political repression and the consequences of the patrimonial militarisation of the Ciskei state in the Ciskei/ Border region. By focusing on processes of state formation and struggles over the fabric of the state, this article provides a corrective to the prevailing academic focus on the elite negotiations and argues for the value of social histories of the bantustan states for understanding the enduring legacies of these regimes

Multi-scale governance of sustainable natural resource use-Challenges and opportunities for monitoring and institutional development at the national and global level

In a globalized economy, the use of natural resources is determined by the demand of modern production and consumption systems, and by infrastructure development. Sustainable natural resource use will require good governance and management based on sound scientific information, data and indicators. There is a rich literature on natural resource management, yet the national and global scale and macro-economic policy making has been underrepresented. We provide an overview of the scholarly literature on multi-scale governance of natural resources, focusing on the information required by relevant actors from local to global scale. Global natural resource use is largely determined by national, regional, and local policies. We observe that in recent decades, the development of public policies of natural resource use has been fostered by an "inspiration cycle" between the research, policy and statistics community, fostering social learning. Effective natural resource policies require adequate monitoring tools, in particular indicators for the use of materials, energy, land, and water as well as waste andGHGemissions of national economies. We summarize the state-of-the-art of the application of accounting methods and data sources for national material flow accounts and indicators, including territorial and product-life-cycle based approaches. We show how accounts on natural resource use can inform the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and argue that information on natural resource use, and in particular footprint indicators, will be indispensable for a consistent implementation of the SDGs. We recognize that improving the knowledge base for global natural resource use will require further institutional development including at national and international levels, for which we outline options