Agency and Action: Perceptions of Governance and Service Delivery among the Urban Poor in Cape Town

Abstract

Part of determining the democratic content of relationships between citizens and governance networks revolves around understanding how ordinary citizens are able to access governance networks, either directly, or indirectly though representatives. For citizenship to have any meaningful content for ordinary people, especially those who historically have been denied political and socio-economic rights, the promise of participatory democracy must lead to perceptions of ability to influence. Through the use of a survey instrument constructed to gauge perceptions of efficacy and responsiveness of local governance institutions, this article explores how citizens in Khayelitsha, Langa and Delft experience governance and service delivery in relation to their perceived ability to exercise either a direct or indirect form of agency in relation to decision-making. The article illustrates that in relation to the ordinary person in the street, perceptions of agency are weak, with corresponding levels of dissatisfaction in democracy. This is in contrast to much stronger perceptions of agency amongst community leaders in community organisations.

Participatory Politics: Understanding Civil Society Organisations in Governance Networks in Khayelitsha

“…The Cape Town City Council (the City) structures remain under the leadership of the Democratic Alliance, which holds the majority vote in the Western Cape, a lead that was recently endorsed in the 2014 national elections; and provincial and national structures are led, respectively, by the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the ANC. The political leadership of the DA is seen as problematic to governance structures in Khayelitsha, as the survey data show that the DA is not trusted by the majority of residents (see Thompson 2014 for a discussion of these statistics).…”

“…The levels of collective agency input transmuting between public meetings, street committee leader meetings and local government decision-making are hard to track, and leaders themselves are vague on how governance structures are able to influence formal invited spaces of government (Tsolekile de Wet, Street committee meeting notes, 2012-2013). Over the past two decades, communities have also become more sceptical as to the purported benefits of participation, particularly in terms of the ability to influence decision-making through either participatory or representative democratic channels (Thompson, 2014;Thompson, Africa, and Tsolekile de Wet, 2014). Even from within the ranks of SANCO and KDF membership, there is a sense of a limited ability to influence formal government structures and processes.…”

“…It is unique in the sense that it is culturally and racially relatively homogenous, and most inhabitants are migrants from the apartheid 'bantustan homelands', the Transkei and Ciskei, although many have been in Khayelitsha since it was founded in the mid-1980s. Khayelitsha is characterised by high levels of urban poverty and unemployment, as well as very high levels of crime (see Thompson and Conradie 2011;Thompson 2014).…”

“…In this paper, we attempt to deepen previous explorations on the dynamics of citizen agency at the local level by focusing specifically on the interplay between selfcreated forms of mobilisation and governance (invented spaces) and formal government spaces (invited spaces) in Khayelitsha, a township that is located within the City of Cape Town municipal area in the western Cape (Cornwall and Coelho 2007;Thompson and Conradie 2011;Thompson 2014). In particular, we examine the role of two influential community organisations, the South African National Civics Organisation (SANCO), a national social movement organisation formed during the Apartheid era that retains a strong membership base in Khayelitsha, and the Khayelitsha Development Forum (KDF), a community-based development organisation formed in 1985 that also claims a wide membership.…”

Making Experience Legible: Spaces of Participation and the Construction of Knowledge in Khayelitsha

“…Reactions have included the creation of 'invented' spaces of participation by non-government actors, self-made and autonomous alternatives to the 'invited' spaces of participation that community members may feel will exclude, marginalise, or disempower them (Cornwall 2002;Cornwall and Coelho 2007;Thompson 2014). While the existence of such 'invented' spaces may send a message of a community's dissatisfaction with formal participatory processes, might the internal construction of these autonomous spaces also suggest how the format and processes of formal governance disengage and disempower these communities?…”