Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article presents a nuanced social history of how reclaimers at the Marie Louise landfill in Soweto, South Africa, organized against each other on the basis of nationality instead of uniting to combat the effects of the 2008 global economic crisis. Through this narrative of struggles at one particular dump, the article contributes to debates on informal worker organizing by theorizing the importance of the production of identities, power relations, space, and institutions in understanding how and why informal workers create and maintain power-laden divisions between themselves. The article argues that organizing efforts that seek to overcome divisions between informal workers cannot simply exhort them to unite based on abstract principles, but must actively transform the places and institutions forged by these workers through which they create and crystallize divisive identities and power relations.

This article contributes to debates on the relationship between waste and value by exploring how the revaluation of waste at a dump in Soweto, South Africa, was transformed during the 2008 economic crisis. It critically engages Herod, Pickren, Rainnie & McGrath-Champ's differentiation between 'devalorisation' due to material degradation and 'devaluation' due to prices being too low for recycling to be profitable, in order to develop three arguments. First, it is necessary to recognise how political mobilisation by reclaimers shapes the conditions for devaluation by affecting local prices for recyclables. Second, reclaimers' struggles to monopolise control over waste as they govern their labour process may lead to materials that could be profitably reclaimed remaining wasted. Third, waste is not only revalued through global production networks. Analysing why reclaimers choose to revalue waste through either formal or informal circuits provides insights into how the economy is constituted and affected by crisis in postcolonial contexts.

A large body of literature explores changes in the public sphere relatedto the transfer of services and activities performed by the public intothe private sector. Less attention has been paid, however, to theprivatised expansion of the public sphere. This article explores such aprocess in Metsimaholo, South Africa, where the municipality soughtto bring landfill recycling into the realm of public policy through apublic-private partnership. As informal reclaimers had salvagedrecyclables at the dump for several decades, this contract amounted toan enclosure of the waste commons which dispossessed them of controlover their livelihood and confined them to the informal economy.Countering structuralist accounts of accumulation by dispossessionand top-down approaches to governmentality, the article focuses onhow reclaimers contested these processes. It argues that before thereclaimers could negotiate with the state, they needed to mount an'ontological insurrection' to counter their dismissal as mere 'detritus'and demand that the conception of the public sphere be expanded toinclude them as legitimate actors in the realm of public policy. Whilethis may result in a reconfiguration of the public sphere, it is unclearwhether it would challenge the current privatised nature of itsexpansion.

Neoliberal dictates and structural adjustment policies have denuded African states and attempted to limit their role to enabling the building and functioning of markets. These policies have failed to promote development, exacerbated gender inequities, and deepened Africa's entanglement within exploitative imperialist economic relations. There is, therefore, a pressing need to re-establish a proactive, developmental role for the state in Africa. This article argues that in the current conjuncture such a project must be grounded in a radical reconceptualisation of both development and the state. Previous statist theo- ries of development erred in casting development as a set of outcomes to be delivered by the state to a passive population. Due to their inattentiveness to gender they also reproduced and exacerbated exploitative gender relations. The article argues that in a context where it is difficult to even imagine an alternative to neoliberalism, development should be redefined as building collective capac- ity to envision, create and struggle for a society and economy free of gender, racial and class exploitation. The state must be reconfigured so that it is both strengthened by and helps to build collective capacity through processes of participatory democracy attentive to addressing and overcoming the mutually constituting structural inequalities of gender, race and class.
Amidst the continent-wide retreat of the state from an active role in the development process, the post-apartheid South African policy of 'developmen- tal local government' would seem to be grounded in just such a retheorization of the state and development. The policy establishes that the local government must promote development, redress apartheid inequalities and be participatory and gender sensitive. The article argues however that the South African ap- proach is compromised by three fundamental weaknesses at the level of policy formulation. These pertain to the liberal conceptualisation of participation, the reduction of commitments to gender transformation to a focus on the participa- tion of women, and the endorsement of a contracting vision for the local state which eliminates an active role for either the state or the citizenry in the develop- ment process. The article concludes by exploring more successful attempts at gender transformative, participatory approaches to governance and development in other parts of the world and reflecting on the challenges to pursuing them in the South African context.