Policy responses to informality in urban Africa: the example of Maputo,Mozambique

In the global South informality constitutes one of the leading issues for urban policy makers. The planning challenges around informality are particularly relevant in urban Africa as most Africans make their livelihoods in the informal economy. This paper examines issues of state policy responses to informality through the lens of street traders. Under scrutiny are policy responses towards street trading in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, a city that has experienced the advance of informalization. It is argued that the dominant approach towards informal trading across urban Africa is of a ‘sanitising’ policy response by the local state which is rooted upon traditions of modernist urban planning in search of ‘ordered development’. The research discloses that in Maputo national and municipal authorities have adopted a more tolerant approach to the informal economy, mainly because it provides a livelihood to so many of the city’s poor and because of potential social unrest likely to be triggered by a repressive approach. In Maputo the core narrative is of an urban informal economy viewed by officials as an important livelihood for the city’s poor, albeit one which is subject both to periodic harassment and encouragement to ‘formalize’. The analysis represents a contribution to the expanding corpus of writings on Africa’s informalising cities and specifically concerning policy responses towards street trading.     

The struggles for survival of street traders in Umtata,Transkei, 1980–89

Within the broad theoretical context provided by debates on the subordination of the informal sector to capital, the paper investigates the struggles between communities of street traders and the municipal authorities of Umtata, capital city of Transkei. The study spans the period 1980–89. Themes of concern in the paper are objections to street traders and the adoption of repressive policies towards them, the resistance of street traders and the changing attitudes of the Transkei government and Umtata local authorities towards the operations of hawkers.     

Dislocating modernity: Identity, space and representations of street trade in Durban, South Africa

South Africa’s cities have experienced dramatic changes over the past decade. Cities are now home to a multiracial population, and have been transformed by new forms of economic and social interaction. For some, these changes have become a significant source of fear and anxiety. In this paper, we examine reactions to urban spatial change in the city of Durban, as expressed in local newspapers and interviews with suburban residents. We describe how the discourses of urban change in Durban have centred on the increased presence of street traders within the city’s public spaces, and the various ways in which the activity of street trade has disrupted long-established modernist norms governing the occupation and use of the urban space. Specifically, we offer a detailed reading of three prominent narratives within the discussion of street traders in Durban--chaos, congestion and pollution. We argue that street traders have come to embody a wide range of more deeply seated cultural anxieties, which have been brought to the fore in the context of South Africa’s transition. These anxieties arise from the ways in which modern understandings of order, agency and subjectivity have been called into question by material changes in the city, and have implications for the nature of citizenship and civic engagement in post-apartheid South Africa.     

Transforming identity discourses to promote local interests during municipal amalgamations

This paper discusses the different ways in which local identities are used in two Dutch municipalities. Like all local administrations these Dutch municipalities have to deal with external forces by plotting their own course between closing-off and opening-up. Local identities are used not only for resisting external threats like municipal amalgamations, but also to attract external resources. It proved useful to distinguish between primary identity discourses based on the widely recognised dominant characteristics of the local community, and secondary identity discourses based on how communities within a municipality have over time learned to deal with these different primary local identities. During an amalgamation this secondary identity discourse disappears with the old municipality. The disappearance of the protective shield of a secondary identity discourse can threaten the underlying primary local identities, and can bring local identities into the centre of the local political debate. A perceived external threat frequently changes the character of these local identities. They can become more inward oriented, focus more on their historical roots and their differences with others; they ‘thicken’ into resistance identity discourses. In other cases the secondary identity discourse of a municipality is too weak and indistinct to support the primary local identities of its communities. Municipal amalgamation can then help to promote a new more attractive secondary, ‘thin’ regional identity discourse based on a selection of characteristics used in established primary local identity discourses.     

When local power meets hydropower: Reconceptualizing resettlement along the Nam Gnouang River in Laos

In Laos, hydropower development is occurring at rapid, though controversial pace. While hydropower development could in principle contribute to the country’s development objectives to promote economic growth and reduce poverty, it also impacts people’s livelihoods especially local communities living along the river. Focusing on the transition of Nam Gnouang River into a reservoir, this article looks at the process of resettlement of four neighboring villages in Bolikhamxai Province, Laos into one resettlement site, Ban Keosengkham. Conceptualizing hydropower development as a ‘technology’ of power, it illustrates how power relations between villagers, local government authorities, and dam developers determine resettlement processes and outcomes.     

“Differentiated citizenship” and the persistence of informal rural credit systems in Amazonia

In the Brazilian Amazon, the long-distance river trading system known as aviamento has linked commodity producers in remote areas to markets in urban centers since the colonial period. Based on a case study from the rural municipality of Lábrea, this article explores continuities and changes in river trading from the point view of riverine residents and river traders. Geographic isolation and seasonal productive needs continued people’s dependence on river traders in 2008–2009, but they had greater choices due to increased access to information, mobility, and alternate markets. Expanded citizenship rights provided access to the vote and to education and other government services, but in a “differentiated” manner that still excluded many rural Amazonians. Given that agroindustry is currently the economic focus for Amazonian development, instead of forest product extraction, these rural producers continued to be forced to rely on informal river traders to meet their needs.     

Commodity conservation: The restructuring of community conservation in South Africa and the Philippines

The world over, neoliberal modes of conservation are hybridising with, or even replacing, other forms of conservation. Under the banner of ‘win–win’ policies, planners actively work to commoditize natural resources and the social relations that determine the use and conservation of these resources. While these general processes seem to hold sway globally, it is crucial not to lose sight of the context specific ways in which neo-liberalism influences conservation practice and local outcomes. The paper examines how neo-liberalism’s global pervasiveness becomes manifest across different levels and scales in South Africa and the Philippines. The conclusion suggests that as a result of these neoliberal pressures, emphasis is shifting from local constructions of ‘nature’ by communities to what the environment should mean for communities in terms of commodified resources and growing capitalist markets.     

Europeanizing Timisoara: neoliberal reforms, continuity with the past, and unexpected side effects

This paper analyzes how processes of Europeanization opened up opportunities and generated ideals, which in turn changed the articulation between political and economic powers in the city and county of Timisoara, Western Romania. It builds on case studies of local government agencies and foreign investors from Italy. In doing so, it discusses the circular relationship between the European and the local levels of governance: European governance affected the interactions between firms and institutions in the city, while at the same time city authorities used different understandings of ‘Europe’ to pursue their own agenda. It also shows some of the unexpected side-effects of Europeanization, due to the political activism of Italian investors. Beck and Grande’s concept of ‘reflexive modernization’ and the literature on regional economies frame the discussion.     

Evacuees’ information sources and reentry decision making in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike

In the aftermath of a hurricane, local emergency managers need to communicate reentry plans to households that might be scattered over multiple counties or states. To better understand evacuees’ households’ reliance on different information sources at the time they decided to return home, this study collected data on reentry after Hurricane Ike. The results from a survey of 340 evacuating households indicated that there was low compliance with official reentry plans and that none of the information sources produced greater compliance with official reentry plans. Nonetheless, there were significant changes in the utilization of different sources of emergency information over the course of an evacuation but local news media remained the most common sources throughout the event. There also were significant differences in the relative importance of different sources of reentry information, with people relying most on information from peers. In summary, local authorities need to identify more effective ways to communicate with evacuees that have relocated to distant communities and to motivate them to comply with official reentry plans.     

“The vice of distant knowledge”: Licensing and the geography of jurisdiction on the Scottish wartime Home Front

This article considers how licensing law conceives and practices jurisdiction. It examines the limits of attempts to define and exploit jurisdiction in the regulation of social problems connected to alcohol. Using the case study of a prohibition on the sale of spirits in the Scottish town of Motherwell during the First World War, it analyses how ‘vertical’ legal appeals through higher courts intersected with everyday ‘horizontal’ challenges to the jurisdiction of the local licensing magistrates as the ban pushed drinkers and the problems of drunkenness onto neighbouring authorities. Those higher court challenges importantly confirmed the localness of licensing, but they could not guarantee the effectiveness of the magistrates’ policy. By showing the potentially disruptive daily habits of ordinary citizens and urban infrastructure, the article promotes a social and material legal geography of licensing. In conclusion, it calls for a critical examination of the ‘local’ in local government, and the political geographies that result from appeals to space and scale in the division of governance functions.     

Optimal pricing of the Taiwan carbon trading market based on a demand–supply model

This study establishes theoretical models of supply and demand for carbon trading and proposes conditions for optimal trading prices and periods. Taiwan’s carbon market is used to verify the validity of the models. Simulations and empirical analysis position firms that emit greenhouse gases as the market buyers, and landowners that convert agricultural lands into plantation forests as the market sellers. The study compares four trading scenarios to determine optimal trading prices and time periods. There were four key conclusions. First, the higher the buyer’s cost to reduce carbon emissions, the higher the demand price is in the carbon trading market. The longer the trading period, the higher the carbon offsets, and the higher the demand price is for emissions trading. Second, the higher the emission trading price, the longer the optimal forest rotation period is for landowners. If emission costs do not exist at the time of logging, landowners are encouraged to log early, reducing the length of rotation periods. Furthermore, as the extension period in the trading scenarios increases, landowners’ costs increase, raising the market equilibrium price. Third, when landowners participate in forest carbon trading mechanisms or carbon subsidy policies, they may not always lengthen forest rotation periods. Therefore, if and when the government implements these mechanisms or policies, it should consider the factors affecting the length of forest rotation period. Finally, to respond to international interest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the government should design separate carbon programs and trading mechanisms for different types of private landowners. This would strengthen incentives for participating in the afforestation program.     

Optimal pricing of the Taiwan carbon trading market based on a demand–supply model

This study establishes theoretical models of supply and demand for carbon trading and proposes conditions for optimal trading prices and periods. Taiwan’s carbon market is used to verify the validity of the models. Simulations and empirical analysis position firms that emit greenhouse gases as the market buyers, and landowners that convert agricultural lands into plantation forests as the market sellers. The study compares four trading scenarios to determine optimal trading prices and time periods. There were four key conclusions. First, the higher the buyer’s cost to reduce carbon emissions, the higher the demand price is in the carbon trading market. The longer the trading period, the higher the carbon offsets, and the higher the demand price is for emissions trading. Second, the higher the emission trading price, the longer the optimal forest rotation period is for landowners. If emission costs do not exist at the time of logging, landowners are encouraged to log early, reducing the length of rotation periods. Furthermore, as the extension period in the trading scenarios increases, landowners’ costs increase, raising the market equilibrium price. Third, when landowners participate in forest carbon trading mechanisms or carbon subsidy policies, they may not always lengthen forest rotation periods. Therefore, if and when the government implements these mechanisms or policies, it should consider the factors affecting the length of forest rotation period. Finally, to respond to international interest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the government should design separate carbon programs and trading mechanisms for different types of private landowners. This would strengthen incentives for participating in the afforestation program.

     

The paradox of gender discrimination in land ownership and women’s contribution to poverty reduction in Anglophone Cameroon

Land is the core of the predominantly agrarian economy of Cameroon. It is therefore an important factor of production to both men and women particularly in rural areas. While the legal framework in Cameroon advocate for equal rights and opportunities to resources, the majority of rural women who are mostly peasant farmers can neither inherit nor own land due to gender discriminatory customary practices. This study examines some of the arguments for sustaining these customary practices that violate women’s rights over the years and the role of these ‘landless’ women in poverty alleviation. The study is based on a field survey which was conducted among some 2,205 respondents in 2009 using questionnaires, interviews and focus group discussions in Anglophone Cameroon. The findings revealed that although women are the livewire of rural households and key players in the struggle against poverty who depend solely on land, they still do not have security of tenure over the land they cultivate. The paper argues that even though women are assuming increasing roles in the education of the children, provision of food and paying for medical services for the homes, there are still some traditional belief systems that work against their rights to land. These belief systems have a strong grip on the attitudes and perception of both men and women on women’s rights to land in that even when men and women are unanimous on the need for women to own land, they both disagree on how they should own the land. The logical outcome of this dilemma is that men own the land while women work on it. The latter have very little possibilities to carry out any long term investment on land without the blessing of the former. We thus, advocate for gender mainstreaming in land reforms and gender consciousness among traditional authorities, men and even among the women as some of the ways of redressing gender discrimination in land ownership rights and poverty particularly in rural areas.     

Regenerating rural economies: The case of Limehill, South Africa

The issue of the quality of life of rural South Africans has become a key focus of attention of the national and provincial governments in postapartheid South Africa. This focus stems from legislation that enshrines concurrent responsibility for rural development to both these spheres of government. However, post-1995 legislation including the introduction of wall-to-wall municipal authorities and the subsequent initiatives by municipalities to assume responsibility for service delivery in their areas have infused considerable complexity into the development landscape at the local level. Within this context and against the background of different perspectives and strategies for rural development, this paper examines, in a case study of the Limehill Complex within the Ndaka Municipality in KwaZulu-Natal, the specific development problems that the `deep' rural communities experience. The paper then discusses strategic interventions that the Ndaka Municipality, in conjunction with other role players and the different spheres of government, needs to consider for implementation in order to regenerate the rural economy of the Limehill Complex and assist in the alleviation of widespread poverty in the area. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Refugees’ expectations of durable solutions to their problems: deliberations from the Buduburam camp in Ghana

From the year 1990 to date, refugees living in Ghana encounter various socio-economic challenges in their toils to survive, leading to tensions over limited resources between them and members of the host communities. Voluntary repatriation, local integration, and resettlement programmes have been introduced as permanent solutions to their plights, but the given packages do not correspond with their expectations; resulting in their indefinite stay in camps. Despite this, not much information is available on their specific expectations about the durable solutions. Employing ‘When Displacement Ends’ framework, this article examines refugees’ expectations about the durable solutions. Questionnaires and interview guide were used to gather data from the refugees living in the Buduburam camp. Regardless of their preferred durable solutions, demand for employment, quality education/scholarships, skills training, and affordable health care services were common expectations. Quest for more financial incentives and security were eminent expectations of voluntary repatriation while they called for nondiscrimination against them, if they integrate into Ghana. However, there were variations in these expectations considering their background characteristics. For instance: those with no formal education mostly hoped-for skills training, the aged were eagerly concerned about health services while those in the assumed ‘school age’ predominantly requested for quality education with scholarships.     

Geospatial extreme event establishing using social network’s text analytics

Information generated and transmitted over social networks, can help with understanding the development of events that are taking place in reality. With the great increase in usage of smart mobile devices, it is expected to have more data related also to location. Identifying the location of events is of great significance especially in case of disaster or other emergency. Unfortunately, social networks such as ‘Twitter’, ‘Facebook’, and ‘Instagram’, do not always support accessibility to information related to the exact location of neither the user nor the device. For example, in ‘Twitter’, <4 % of the messages carry the precise GPS position. This is due to privacy reasons, device settings and social network regulations. In this study, we use the content of the textual messages to detect the user’s location or, better, the location of the event. Predefined keywords and a set of filters were used to extract and analyze data acquired from the social networks. The analyses of these data focused, in this step, on geographical locations. Findings show that names of places as communicated over the networks corresponded, in many instances, to the actual locations of the events. In the case of major events (in terms of National impact), the volume of messages with location names increase dramatically relative to ‘normal’ periods when there are no ‘extreme’ events. It was also found that 14 % of the messages included the name of the city or even the street name, related to the event.     

Defining the forest,defending the forest: Political ecology,territoriality, and resistance to a protected area in the Dominican Republic

Political ecologists have considered the social and economic impacts that nature reserves, national parks and other forms of protected area can have on neighbouring communities, and how this can generate conflicts between them. This paper analyses such conflicts through the lens of territoriality, considering how the way protected area territories are created, delineated, and defined is linked to the social impacts experienced by local people. Conflicts between locals and conservation authorities over protected areas are about rival attempts to define the boundaries of protected areas, who the land should belong to, what it should be used for, and what its purpose is. Yet the ability of local people or conservation authorities to impose their meaning is unequal. It illustrates these processes with the example of a scientific reserve in the Dominican Republic, and a decades-long conflict to define what the reserve should mean, what it should look like, and who it should belong to.     

Zoning in: The contributions of buyam–sellams to constructing Cameroon’s wild food zone

Studies of forests in Africa employ the term zone to denote a particular type of forested area. This limited usage speaks to a need for human geographers to pay more attention to elaborating and engaging with the concept of the zone. This article shows why human geography should pay the ‘zone’ more attention. Using Cameroon’s humid forest zone (HFZ) as a case study, the article focuses on how conceptual elaboration of the ‘zone’ can inform analyses of the food product trade in Cameroon. This trade is organized around various types of buyers and sellers (or buyam–sellam in pidgin), and offers a wide variety of wild products to Cameroon’s urban food consumers, including fruits and vegetables, game meat, condiments, medicinal plants, and fibers. Drawing on fieldwork surveys, interviews and focus groups in twenty-four markets of 203 buyam–sellams and 197 of their customers during the wet and dry seasons, this article analyzes narratives about Cameroon’s wild food zone. It ultimately shows what scholarly attention to the ‘zone’ offers in this case that other spatial concepts do not.     

(Re-)negotiating access: The politics of researching skills and knowledge for ‘sustainable communities’

The last decade has witnessed a surge of interest in ‘sustainable communities’ within the UK. This has stimulated a plethora of research aimed at acquiring a better understanding of what ‘sustainable communities’ might look like and how they can be achieved. However, this has not been accompanied by a reflection and interrogation of the actual processes, challenges and politics of doing ‘sustainable communities’ research. This paper addresses this gap by highlighting the importance of paying attention to the on-going process of negotiating access when carrying out sustainability research at the community level. We draw on a recent study of skills and knowledge for ‘sustainable communities’ in Stroud Gloucestershire, UK, to illustrate the importance of sensitivity to social relationships throughout and beyond the research trajectory within sustainability research. Our experience raises important questions about the politics of research practices when doing sustainability research ‘with’ communities and the challenges associated with participatory approaches as a means to demonstrate research impact. We argue that in developing a fuller understanding of why and how different types of community level initiatives can contribute to the ‘sustainable communities’ agenda, greater consideration needs to be given to how these community practices can be better supported through the process of doing academic research.     

Johannesburg's Indian flower sellers: class and circumstance

Over the past sixty years the circumstances governing flower selling on the streets of Johannesburg have altered considerably in response to changing regulations and controls imposed by local authorities. One of the effects has been to set in motion the dissolution of the petty production form of flower selling. The nature of the changing flower selling scene is presented and factors that have contributed to and hindered the process of petit-embourgeoisement and proletarianization are examined.