ETD Collection

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    Social capital, civil society, and good governance: civic traditions in Johannesburg's shack settlements and Greater Pietermaritzburg's villages under chiefly rule
    (2013-05-15) Hlela, Kenneth Siphelelo
    This thesis explores the relationship between social capital/civil society and good governance/economic development both conceptually and empirically through case studies in the urban, rural, and peri-urban South Africa. As a starting point, this thesis attempts to answer the following six questions: How is social capital identifiable? Is its production exclusively confined to horizontally structured forms of associational life? Can peasant societies generate social capital? Do social capital networks accentuate divisions within communities between those who have access to authority and those without? Can political institutions play a role in producing social capital or does the enlargement of state authority take place at the expense of the associational networks which do produce social capital? And what kind of organisations in rural settings can best bridge sectional concerns and promote wider communities of trust? Can traditional existing political institutions be adapted to modern democratic requirements? I believe that in answering these questions I have gone some way in resolving some of the conceptual dilemmas identified by critics of the concept of social capital. I was then in a position to test and explore two hypotheses. Firstly, I argue that there is a relationship between social capital (a product of civil society) and good governance as well as economic and democratic development. Secondly, I argue that positive social capital will be under-produced in societies in which there is a weak market economy, that is, where members of civil society do not have independent sources of income. I demonstrate that civil society, the state, and markets have a symbiotic relationship and that they all have a role to play in the production of positive social capital. This thesis employed various data collection methods in order to navigate around the case studies chosen for the purposes of this study, viz. individual and group interviews, focus groups, direct observations, research surveys, secondary literature, and local newspapers. Evidence emanating from this thesis suggests that there is a vibrant civil society and, by implication, social capital in poorly resourced areas found in urban, peri-urban, and rural areas of South Africa, which has to some extent contributed to good governance as well as economic and democratic development. However, I conclude by arguing that the informalisation of the economy as well as high levels of unemployment in these areas certainly inhibit civil society from playing its important democratising and governance role since the production of positive social capital is constrained by this new reality.
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    Enterprise development on the margins : Making markets work for the poor?
    (2008-09-23T13:26:03Z) Philip, Teresa Kate
    This thesis is about the quest to build effective strategies to support the development of enterprise on the margins of the economy, to create jobs and reduce poverty. A core part of this challenge includes grappling with the role of markets in development, and of markets as a critical part of the context in which enterprise development in rural and peri-urban areas can either provide a path out of poverty – or instead serve to lock people into poverty. The thesis explores these issues by tracking the experience of the Mineworkers Development Agency (MDA) as it attempted to grapple with this challenge. MDA is the development wing of South Africa’s National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) , and was set up to create jobs and support enterprise development for communities affected by the loss of jobs on the mines. The thesis covers a fourteen-year period in MDA’s history, from its inception in 1988 until 2002. It tracks the learning process across several phases in the development of MDA’s approach. These included the development of worker co-operatives, the establishment of business service centres, value-chain work in the craft sector, and the commercialization of a juice product from the indigenous marula berry. In the process, MDA engaged with an emergent paradigm in the development sector called ‘Making Markets Work for the Poor’. Can markets really be made to work for the poor? Or even just made to work ‘better’ for the poor? Or is the process of inclusion in markets inexorably and inevitably one of making the poor work for markets? The thesis explores these issues in the context of MDA’s experience, locating this within a wider set of theoretical concerns over the role of markets in society, and the ways in which societies have protected themselves from the negative impacts of the development of market economies. It draws on wider political economy approaches to argue that markets are institutions that are socially constructed, and explores what scope there might therefore be to construct them differently. While recognising the importance of social protection, the thesis argues that there is a need to go beyond defensive strategies aimed at protecting society from markets, to identify new terms of engagement within markets to shape markets, and to harness their wealth-creating potential in ways that have different distributional consequences, as part of a long-term agenda of eradicating poverty.
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    The design of a risk assessment model to determine the impact of the herbal medicine trade on the Witwatersrand on resources of indigenous plant species
    (2008-08-08T10:11:27Z) Williams, Vivienne Linda
    Exploitation of botanical resources has resulted in significant decreases in the sizes of some plant populations, especially for species that have a high commercial value and are important to the lives and livelihoods of rural communities. Medicinal plant resources are used and traded commercially in both rural areas and urban centres, and over-exploitation has become a deterministic factor in the extinction risks to certain species. The main aim of the study was to design a risk assessment model to determine the impact of the medicinal plant trade on the Witwatersrand (centred around Johannesburg) on indigenous plant resources. The goal was to incorporate trade variables correlated with harvesting risks together with biological characteristics of the harvested species to predict which species are most threatened by the trade and are thus high on the list for conservation priority. The study required semi-quantitative surveys of the medicinal plants sold by traders in the Witwatersrand to be conducted. In 1994 and 2001, the plants sold in 50 muti shops and by 100 vendors in the Faraday Street market respectively were inventoried. Quantitative trade data were also captured, including volume, pricing structures and plant size (e.g. bark thickness and bulb diameter). A scientific sampling strategy was adhered to throughout the study to add statistical validity to the results. In a novel approach to analysing ethnobotanical data, the frequency of plant occurrences in the markets was analysed using measures (analysed by EstimateS) of species diversity traditionally used in ecology. The measures allowed for sampling strategies and sizes to be compared between data sets and for the number of species likely to be sold in the region to be estimated. Furthermore, data sets could be compared in terms of species richness, diversity, evenness and complimentarity. Another novel approach taken in the thesis was to estimate the number of individual plants harvested annually by gatherers, specifically the number of trees that are debarked and the number of whole bulbs that are removed. In order to estimate the number of trees debarked, a study was conducted to determine the relationship between bark thickness and stem diameter for six species. The results made it possible to estimate the condition of the resource in the wild from market records (i.e. bark thicknesses) and to see how the availability of larger trees has declined for species such as Warburgia salutaris between 1994 and 2001. Results for bulbs showed that there has been a significant decrease in the diameter of Eucomis autumnalis bulbs present in the markets in the same period, suggesting significant levels of resource depletion. The thesis explored the use of a multivariate methodology for assessing the extinction risks of species and assigning species harvested for the medicinal plant trade to various hierarchies of risk and conservation priority. Hierarchical and non-hierarchical cluster analysis (Ward’s and K-means respectively) methods were found to be effective in assigning species to clusters of similar risk and conservation priority. From a combined list of 392 ethnospecies recorded in the muti shops and Faraday market, a short-list of 119 higher risk species was identified using four to five trade variables. This list was further reduced to 87 species to ascertain conservation priorities based on the additional inclusion of seven biological variables in the assessment. From this list, approximately 31 species were identified as having higher conservation priority and would be candidates for further research, management and protection within the ambit of conservation and sustainable utilisation programmes. These species would further benefit from Orange Listing or having their IUCN Red List status re-evaluated. The methods developed in this study are recommended for other ethnobotanical studies. Furthermore, the risk assessment method could be applied to the assessment of species similarly traded in other medicinal plant markets or applied to the assessment of species under threat from other stressors at a regional, provincial and/or national level using the appropriate variables.