Recognising Community Voice and Dissatisfaction: A Civil Society Perspective on Local Governance in South Africa

This 135-page report is the result of a collective process of reflection on the meaning and implications of community protests for local governance by the Good Governance Learning Network (GGLN) in South Africa. The publication includes fifteen contributions broadly organised into three sections: 1) concepts of participation and democracy; 2) state-organised structures of participation ("invited spaces"); and 3) community-created spaces of participation, including protest action ("invented spaces"). The contributions "seek to critically enhance government and civil society's understanding of the importance of recognising community voice and dissatisfaction as a legitimate alternative to pre-defined and state-sanctioned modalities of public participation. The underlying concern is with the technicist, procedural, and instrumentalist approach that has (by and large) come to underpin public participation in South Africa. The plea, therefore, is for more dynamic, more meaningful and more varied modes of participation to be nurtured."

According to the executive summary, the contributions included in the report are diverse, offering different ways to understand the challenges facing local government. However, they all reflect an apprehension that technicist and state-centric approaches to democratic participation have become overly dominant and have served to de-legitimise other expressions of community voice that fail to fit within these narrow modes of public participation, which ultimately subverts democratic participation. Because the institutional framework for public participation limits participation outside structured spaces and processes, citizens are turning more and more to creating their own spaces to express dissatisfaction and dissent. While the government has taken various steps to remedy the serious problems facing local government and poor service delivery, its narrow commitment to institutionalised forms of participation and its rejection of informal (but potentially more inclusive) spaces of democratic expression of voice has resulted in missed opportunities to gain insights into the complex and varied reasons behind community protests.

The contributions in this paper are intended to collectively serve as a call to government and civil society to reinvigorate the system of public participation by reimagining what is meant by this term, and encourage the state, in particular, to recognise that diverse forms of community expression should be welcomed. This recognition would offer the South African government an opportunity to find out what problems they may not be aware of or to develop solutions to problems they are familiar with. It would also contribute to the revival of citizens' waning belief in the commitment of government to hear and respond to their concerns and frustrations.

Based on the fifteen contributions, the publication concludes that current institutional mechanisms to promote inclusivity and representivity are frequently weak and often (and perhaps inadvertently) undermine democratic participation rather than promote it. Weak capacity (both human and financial), weak leadership, mismanagement, and corruption continue to be challenges. In addition, ongoing capacity and resource constraints of ward committees, and partisan politics that polarise these forums and frustrate attempts to take substantive decisions, have also meant that this forum intended to provide a voice for communities has functioned unevenly.

Poor coordination between the different spheres of government means that even where community participation is functioning well, the voice of communities can be ignored or have limited impact when decisions are made elsewhere, beyond the municipal sphere, with little to no communication to, or recourse for, affected communities. The institutionalisation of public participation has resulted in a narrowing of what is considered a legitimate expression of community voice and dissent, with "invited spaces" becoming the primary (if not only) way in which the government is willing to engage with citizens. Within these pre-defined spaces, meaningful engagement is often non-existent.

For example, the most broadly applied form of an "invited space" is the Ward Committee system - there are more than 4,200 wards, of which almost all have set up committees. In their contributions, Afesis-Corplan and Idasa note that they frequently ignore marginalised members of communities despite legislative measures to ensure representivity, while weaknesses in capacity, political conflict, and a lack of community involvement have plagued this forum. This does not mean that ward committees have no value – as the Built Environment Support Group case study reflects, with the right combination of circumstances, including good relationships with community development workers and community based organisations, it is possible for them to become a meaningful part of citizen engagement.

The report states that the reluctance of citizens to continue to be bound to processes and structures that function unevenly and that seem to have a minimal impact on substantive change in the socio-economic circumstances of communities is understandable, and part of the reason for the increased incidents of community protests is an expression of voice and dissatisfaction. There is a need to reach out to marginalised communities in a meaningful, rather than nominal, way. Furthermore, a broader range of participation opportunities need to be made available by the state within "invited spaces", including citizen participation in budgetary and planning processes more widely, for example. Overall, this report highlights the need to fundamentally rethink what is meant by public participation by both government and society, and to move away from narrowly defined interpretations of what justifiably constitutes democratic participation.