City, state and citizenship in South Africa: towards a normative approach

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 2nd September, 1991South African historiography is ripe for change. Since the emergence of revisionism in the 1960s, South African politics has been studied using certain hitherto unquestioned assumptions. The radical paradigm has been responsible for extraordinary insights in South African political and historical analysis; however, also it needs to be transcended in important ways. It is the aim of this paper to subject these assumptions to critical scrutiny, and to develop an alternative approach to the study of political phenomena in South Africa - an approach from the perspective of Apolitical morality'. To some extent, I will have to overstate my case - most notably by underplaying the important dynamics of conflict and coercion. I feel this is legitimate however, because these issues have occupied, unchallenged, the centre stage in political analysis in this country. After a review of the existing literature and some theoretical comments, I will apply the notion of Apolitical morality' to a specific historical context, viz. township administration in South African cities during the 1950s

Is South Africa's Great Karoo region becoming a tourism destination?

Published ArticleDesert tourism has grown steadily in several regions of the world, due to a post-modern fascination with remoteness, barrenness, silence and solitude. This paper evaluates the trend towards tourism development in South Africa's arid Karoo region. It utilises several methodologies e analysis of discourse, demand and supply e to track the changing profile of tourism in the Great Karoo. The paper concludes that the reputation of the Karoo has shifted profoundly from being hostile, dangerous and boring to being attractive, enticing and spiritual. At the same time, tourists are increasingly expressing favourable opinions of the Karoo as a destination, while accommodation facilities are growing apace. The overview also finds that tourism services in some Karoo towns are developing at a much faster rate than others, so the tourism performance is uneven. A survey of tourists in the Karoo found that the arid environment and small-town ambience offer significant attractions, and Karoo guest houses have a positive outlook for the future. These findings suggest that the Great Karoo is indeed in the process of becoming a tourism destination

The economic rationale and modalities for rural infrastructure development: developmental local government in rural service delivery

The Policy Unit of the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) has developed a number of strategic themes embracing many cross-cutting issues. The main thrust of the Unit’s work, however, focuses on the core mandate of the Bank - infrastructure. In order to provide for a coherent whole, rural infrastructure must fit into a broader policy framework. Globally, the goals set for the first two decades of the next millennium are to address poverty and achieve food security. The DBSA can contribute to South Africa’s position on these global themes by addressing the issue of rural infrastructure delivery, taking cognisance of the South African government’s Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) programme. This discussion document will specifically address the local economic development activities of farm production and rural livelihoods in order to achieve food security, address poverty and foster economic growth in the marginalised, infrastructure-deprived rural areas of the country. It is assumed that additional entrepreneurial economic opportunities will arise at village and town level as producers become nett surplus producers, eg in small grain milling, cottage industry, village markets, processing (value adding), etc. In contrast to urban development, where economic activity is assumed by investing in infrastructure, the DBSA will actively have to support the transformation of economic activity in the rural scenario. One of the past successes of the DBSA has been the introduction of the Farmer Support Programme (FSP). The FSP’s provision of services and support, based on the needs of existing smallholders, is embedded in participatory planning and action. Without local initiatives, rural infrastructure cannot be delivered effectively to bolster economic growth, create jobs and redistribute income. Most of the country’s poor live in rural areas, and without rural development there can be no GEAR. Life in these areas needs to be made liveable by encouraging entrepreneurial development, which includes facilitating agriculture, creating jobs and increasing rural income through appropriate government actions for improving the welfare of rural households. One of the ways in which national, provincial and local government could have a broad-based impact is by providing rural economic infrastructure and, to this end, local government, including regional and district councils, has been mandated to develop integrated development plans. These plans have to include economic development plans, and entrepreneurial development has been singled out as important in this regard. From this it follows that district councils and municipalities have a prime responsibility for developing entrepreneurs, including farmers in their rural constituency

Development Studies Working Paper, no. 44

The local government level has historically been the most neglected aspect of government in South Africa, both in research and in conventional political activity. Yet, paradoxically, it has been the level at which several crucial government policies have played themselves out, away from the public eye, but drastic in their effects on the material and political position of all inhabitants of towns and cities in South Africa. This research into local government was begun with two basic questions in mind. Firstly, local-level attempts to alter their own institutional structures needed to be documented and analysed. A consideration of six case studies of white initiatives for change at the local level uncovered numerous political and economic dimensions which interact and set constraints on each other. It is impossible to produce one final interpretation of why these local events happened, what their significance was, and what possibilities they offer for the future. Invariably, each case study is a microcosm of the broader multifaceted conflict in South Africa. This report is an attempt to present as many of these dimensions as possible, even though it cannot ever be complete.Digitised by Rhodes University Library on behalf of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER

People-centred environmental management and municipal commonage in the Nama Karoo

Land reform is a key part of government policy, spurred politically by the claims of the landless, as well as the land reform pressures in countries like Zimbabwe. It is clear to national and provincial governments that land reform should be speeded up. Municipalities are, therefore, being placed under a lot of political and governmental pressure to increasingly make their commonage land available to emergent farmers. The effective management of municipal commonage can contribute to land reform, food security, local economic development and sustainable natural resource use. Commonage land is, in many towns, the only natural resource available to poor communities. The issue of resource utilisation in the Karoo is becoming ever more pressing, to address the question of ‘how the vast and biologically diverse, but unproductive Karoo region should be used in a country with a growing land-hungry population’ (Dean & Milton 1999:xxii). This sets the stage for an urgent inquiry into land-people interactions – particularly with reference to some kind of people-centred development – but as yet, this issue has not been confronted systematically in an interdisciplinary way. This paper makes the following argument: Municipalities need assistance with establishing viable commonage management systems; such systems need to be based on the voluntary and committed participation by the users (that is ‘people-centred’); and this, in turn, requires an understanding of the emergent farmers’ knowledge base of the environment. This paper considers the prospects for commonage use in the arid areas of South Africa, notably the Nama-Karoo, or non-succulent Karoo, characterised by small shrubs and grass species. This geographic area should be differentiated from the Succulent Karoo of the Namaqualand and southern Cape areas, which have different rainfall and vegetative patterns. The Nama Karoo is the northern part of the Karoo, and is the largest biome in South Africa. It is characterised by low and variable rainfall, mainly in the summer months. It stretches up to the southern Free State. This geographical demarcation is also significant because of its land tenure characteristics. The phenomenon of ‘commonage’ in the Nama-Karoo area refers to municipally-owned land, whose overriding purpose has been for the use of urban residents.Center for Applied Social Sciences, University of Zimbabwe Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS

Management of some commons in southern Africa: Implications for policy

Profound transformations in communal land tenure systems are taking place in parts of southern Africa that have resulted from decades of interventions, particularly the shrinking of the commonage through capture of extensive tracts of lands by private interests. Some policies have been into place that envisage improved management of common rangeland resources through privatisation. However, empirical evidence is lacking as to what extent these may have been successful. Traditional management systems in communal areas have been broken down to the extent that many of them are now more characteristic of open access systems. An alternative to meeting the challenge of managing resources in common rangelands is to develop community-based rangeland resource management systems that build on the strengths of traditional management approaches. Therefore a call is made on the use of indigenous knowledge systems and empowering communities to manage their rangeland resources, in order to prevent open access and promoting improved rangeland management and more sustainable livelihoods

Evaluation of a structured preceptorship programme

Preceptorship is a period in which newly qualified staff nurses receive support from an experienced nurse to smooth their transition into the service. District nurses (DNs) from the authors' trust informally expressed the need for a better transition between the completion of district nursing education and entry into the workforce. Hence, a structured preceptorship programme was developed and delivered. This article describes this service initiative and its evaluation by preceptors (n=14) and preceptees (newly qualified DNs; n=13). Both groups valued having a structured preceptorship programme. Preceptees agreed that having a named preceptor was very important, and preceptors felt that the role which they played was rewarding. Both groups felt that the role of the DN was a specialist role and that the preceptorship programme helped to support newly qualified staff make the transition into qualified DNs, clinical team leaders and, ultimately, caseload holders. A large-scale study of DN practice is required to develop a national consensus on the structure and content of preceptorship programmes for district nursing

Mapping annual forest cover by fusing PALSAR/PALSAR-2 and MODIS NDVI during 2007–2016

Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) Phased Arrayed L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) HH and HV polarization data were used previously to produce annual, global 25 m forest maps between 2007 and 2010, and the latest global forest maps of 2015 and 2016 were produced by using the ALOS-2 PALSAR-2 data. However, annual 25 m spatial resolution forest maps during 2011–2014 are missing because of the gap in operation between ALOS and ALOS-2, preventing the construction of a continuous, fine resolution time-series dataset on the world's forests. In contrast, the MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) NDVI images were available globally since 2000. This research developed a novel method to produce annual 25 m forest maps during 2007–2016 by fusing the fine spatial resolution, but asynchronous PALSAR/PALSAR-2 with coarse spatial resolution, but synchronous MODIS NDVI data, thus, filling the four-year gap in the ALOS and ALOS-2 time-series, as well as enhancing the existing mapping activity. The method was developed concentrating on two key objectives: 1) producing more accurate 25 m forest maps by integrating PALSAR/PALSAR-2 and MODIS NDVI data during 2007–2010 and 2015–2016; 2) reconstructing annual 25 m forest maps from time-series MODIS NDVI images during 2011–2014. Specifically, a decision tree classification was developed for forest mapping based on both the PALSAR/PALSAR-2 and MODIS NDVI data, and a new spatial-temporal super-resolution mapping was proposed to reconstruct the 25 m forest maps from time-series MODIS NDVI images. Three study sites including Paraguay, the USA and Russia were chosen, as they represent the world's three main forest types: tropical forest, temperate broadleaf and mixed forest, and boreal conifer forest, respectively. Compared with traditional methods, the proposed approach produced the most accurate continuous time-series of fine spatial resolution forest maps both visually and quantitatively. For the forest maps during 2007–2010 and 2015–2016, the results had greater overall accuracy values (>98%) than those of the original JAXA forest product. For the reconstructed 25 m forest maps during 2011–2014, the increases in classifications accuracy relative to three benchmark methods were statistically significant, and the overall accuracy values of the three study sites were almost universally >92%. The proposed approach, therefore, has great potential to support the production of annual 25 m forest maps by fusing PALSAR/PALSAR-2 and MODIS NDVI during 2007–2016

Tracking small-scale tropical forest disturbances: Fusing the Landsat and Sentinel-2 data record

Information on forest disturbance is crucial for tropical forest management and global carbon cycle analysis. The long-term collection of data from the Landsat missions provides some of the most valuable information for understanding the processes of global tropical forest disturbance. However, there are substantial uncertainties in the estimation of non-mechanized, small-scale (i.e., small area) clearings in tropical forests with Landsat series images. Because the appearance of small-scale openings in a tropical tree canopy are often ephemeral due to fast-growing vegetation, and because clouds are frequent in tropical regions, it is challenging for Landsat images to capture the logging signal. Moreover, the spatial resolution of Landsat images is typically too coarse to represent spatial details about small-scale clearings. In this paper, by fusing all available Landsat and Sentinel-2 images, we proposed a method to improve the tracking of small-scale tropical forest disturbance history with both fine spatial and temporal resolutions. First, yearly composited Landsat and Sentinel-2 self-referenced normalized burn ratio (rNBR) vegetation index images were calculated from all available Landsat-7/8 and Sentinel-2 scenes during 2016–2019. Second, a deep-learning based downscaling method was used to predict fine resolution (10 m) rNBR images from the annual coarse resolution (30 m) Landsat rNBR images. Third, given the baseline Landsat forest map in 2015, the generated fine-resolution Landsat rNBR images and original Sentinel-2 rNBR images were fused to produce the 10 m forest disturbance map for the period 2016–2019. From data comparison and evaluation, it was demonstrated that the deep-learning based downscaling method can produce fine-resolution Landsat rNBR images and forest disturbance maps that contain substantial spatial detail. In addition, by fusing downscaled fine-resolution Landsat rNBR images and original Sentinel-2 rNBR images, it was possible to produce state-of-the-art forest disturbance maps with OA values more than 87% and 96% for the small and large study areas, and detected 11% to 21% more disturbed areas than either the Sentinel-2 or Landsat-7/8 time-series alone. We found that 1.42% of the disturbed areas indentified during 2016–2019 experienced multiple forest disturbances. The method has great potential to enhance work undertaken in relation to major policies such as the reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) programmes