Beyond community participation? Alternative routes to civil engagement and development in South Africa

Although community participation still enjoys a high level of support across various sectors in South Africa, its practice is fraught with conceptual and practical difficulties. This paper starts out by examining some of the problems and limitations associated with community participation, including the heterogeneity and fragmentation of many poor communities, the lack of social and material resources and community members' expectations of receiving a return from their involvement in development projects. Participatory rural appraisal (PRA) or participatory learning and action (PLA) is used as an example to illustrate some of the conceptual and theoretical limitations that characterise most approaches to participatory development. In particular it is argued that approaches such as PRA/PLA lack the theoretical basis for effectively getting to grips with the problems of participatory development. What is needed is a conceptual framework not only to understand the responses of communities, but also to locate such communities within their socio-economic contexts. The second part of the paper therefore examines three developments in social science theory that may be able to contribute to the development of a richer conceptual framework for popular participation. These are the concept of social capital, the asset-based approach to development, and the debate around the role of the state in development.     

Development,research and participation: Towards a critique of participatory rural appraisal methods

This article examines the theory and techniques used in participatory rural appraisal (PRA), describes the emergence of PRA as a response to conventional approaches in developmental research, and offers a critique of PRA from an anthropological perspective. It is argued that PRA is a promising alternative to conventional development research methods but has certain weaknesses which undermine its overall aims. Of central concern are assumptions about social context. The author suggests that a more critical perspective should be incorporated into PRA to overcome its present limitations.     

The contribution of livelihood activities in the Limpopo province: Case study evidence from Makua and Manganeng

This article uses case study evidence from Makua and Manganeng, two rural villages in the Capricorn region, to investigate the effects of private and social costs, such as land degradation, on rural livelihoods in the area. Information is derived from household surveys, key informant interviews, participatory appraisal techniques, and a detailed ecological baseline study of the area. Livelihood activities such as agricultural practices (crop and livestock production), and wood and edible product gathering are included. This article attempts to synthesise the information gathered and lessons learnt from these studies, quantifies the contribution of these livelihood activities in monetary terms, and considers the implications for sustainable livelihood practices. The study finds that non-cash earnings contribute an important component of overall household income - between 40 and 50 per cent before social and opportunity costs are deducted. However, external costs significantly undermine overall earnings from natural resource-based products.     

Rapid reconnaissance for development administration: Mapping and moulding organizational landscapes

Recent discussion of rapid rural appraisal methods suffers from three weaknesses: a lack of attention to the situational sensitivity of indicators used; a lack of attention to the organization and management dimension of rural development; and a lack of attention to the fact that an objective of such exercises should be to enhance local capacity rather than just to inform outsiders. This essay examines the contextual nature of proxies, discusses six methods and two experiences relating to organizational reconnaissance, and suggests that the need for participatory approaches is a strength rather than a weakness of these methods.     

Household spending patterns and flow of ecotourism income into communities around Liwonde National Park,Malawi

Rural Malawi is largely characterised by high levels of poverty, unemployment and high population densities. It is also seen as the ‘warm heart of Africa’, which, together with its abundant natural resources, makes it an excellent destination for international ecotourists. This paper looks at the impact of ecotourism employment on poverty reduction and the flow of ecotourism income into the villages adjacent to Liwonde National Park. Extensive questionnaire surveys were conducted with staff employed in ecotourism as well as with rural households in the villages adjacent to the Park. Comparisons of household income and social welfare highlight the important role of ecotourism employment in lifting people in these rural villages above the poverty line. Household spending patterns illustrate the flow of income from ecotourism into the local economy and the important impact of this on local socio-economic development. Suggestions for increasing local multiplier effects of ecotourism are put forward.     

Rurality as a choice: Towards ruralising rural areas in sub-Saharan African countries

Rural development practices in sub-Saharan Africa are still based on modernisation approaches. This has led to distortion in rural identity in most sub-Saharan communities. This article embeds this issue in the development discourse. It calls for developing rural areas rurally – rather than urbanely. The paper argues that improvements in rural conditions should aim to make rural lives and the environment sustainable, while preserving rural identities. Drawing from literature, it presents a conceptual framework for understanding rurality and shows how planning can serve as a tool for achieving rurality focused development. It provides six suggestions that could lead to integrating rurality-as-a-choice in development policies and practices. The suggested measures include the heritagisation of rural areas, introduction of rurality-focused vision in planning, and organisation of campaigns for the protection of rural heritages, among others. It contributes to emerging literatures on identifying problem-generating issues in rural development in sub-Saharan Africa.     

Public works programme and primary health care in South Africa: Creating jobs for health systems strengthening?

This paper examines employment and skills training for community caregivers within the expanded public works programme in South Africa. The paper argues that, as currently conceptualised, the skills and learnership programmes for community caregivers fail to take full advantage of the prevailing labour market realities. Therefore, the paper argues for strategic reconceptualisation of the programme to include learnerships for community caregivers that impart more mid-level to higher-level skills to meet current and future labour market demands particularly in primary health care. This, it is argued, will address the scarcity of skills in the health sector of the economy. Furthermore, the proposed programme will simultaneously have positive impacts on unemployment, the primary health care system and the socio-economic well-being of community caregivers.     

NEA Presidential Address: Gender Inequality and Human Development in Sub- Saharan Africa

This Presidential Address considers the effects of gender inequality on human development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Parameter estimates from quantile and ordinal categorical latent variable specifications of the relationship between components of the Human Development Index and measures of gender inequality suggests that human development in Sub-Saharan Africa increases with respect to improvements in several measures of gender inequality. The results suggest that inegalitarian laws, norms, traditions and codes of conduct toward women constrain both human and economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa.     

安徽省农村居民生活消费现金支出的区域差异研究

农村居民的生活消费问题是社会基层“民生”的标志和反映,历来受到党中央国务院的极大关注。研究农村居民生活消费支出的区域差异,有利于推动整个社会经济的快速发展与和谐社会的构建。文章采用离散趋势指标和聚类分析相结合,通过对安徽省17个省辖市农村居民家庭人均生活消费现金支出数据从多个角度进行剖析,得出的结论是：横向比较可以看出各地市之间存在差距,且差距较大;纵向来看各地市之间的差距在逐年缩小。基于以上结论提出进一步促进安徽省农村区域消费水平协调发展的思路和建议。     

Cattle numbers,biomass, productivity and land degradation in the commercial farming sector of Namibia, 1915‐95

As part of a natural resource accounting project undertaken in Namibia, livestock accounts have been drawn up and are being used to analyse the relationship between numbers of livestock, rainfall, land degradation, and economic and policy variables. Part of the analysis concerns an investigation into trends in cattle numbers, changes in cattle biomass and the productivity of livestock in commercial areas. Cattle numbers increased from 1914 until 1960, then declined steadily to half that number. This decline was at least partly due to deliberate actions by farmers to improve herd productivity and production efficiency. Although beef production did not decline over this period, productivity is still lower than potential industry standards. Range degradation (bush encroachment) may have contributed to this curtailment. This investigation has implications for an understanding of long‐term carrying capacity, land degradation and rangeland management, and for agricultural development policies in Namibia and similar regions in southern Africa.     

Aid and economic growth in LDCs: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper uses a disaggregated cross-national time-series aid data and a Least Squares Dummy Variables (LSDV) model to investigate the effects of aid on economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. We find that, contrary to what some critics of aid argue, aid has a small but positive and significant effect on economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. A simultaneous equation specification of the model shows that aid affects economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa directly and indirectly through increased domestic savings and investment.     

An economic assessment of the value of cattle to the rural communities in the former Venda region

This article assesses the economic value of livestock to rural communities in quantitative terms. A quantitative valuation of livestock is assessed in terms of milk production, manure use, draught power and offtake/sales criteria. The study is based on a cross-sectional survey of 125 small-scale cattle farmers interviewed in the Venda region of the Limpopo Province of South Africa. The results of the study estimated the average total value of an adult cow to be R1 152. This value should be viewed as an opportunity cost of the cattle. A quantitative valuation of livestock is important in indicating the degree of impact of cattle mortalities on the livelihood of rural households. In addition, it offers important guidelines for farmers' compensation by the government, should a disaster occur.     

Community-Based Wildlife Management (CWM) in Tanzania: Are the Communities Interested?

The fences-and-fines approach (the American National Park model) to wildlife protection is now perceived by many conservationists to have failed in Africa. An alternative approach whereby rural communities are given ownership rights or custodianship and management responsibilities for the resource has been introduced under the name Community-based Wildlife Management (CWM) (also known as Community-Based Conservation or CBC). This new approach is currently under experimentation in many parts of Africa. It is based on a number of assumptions, one being that the communities are interested and willing to conserve wildlife on their lands. Using the Selous Conservation Programme (SCP) in Tanzania and seven other African cases, this paper examines the plausibility of this assumption.     

Political instability and economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Further evidence

After more than three decades of independence, many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have not yet developed stable political systems. Since the 1960s, when African countries began to achieve independence, many of them have encountered significant levels of institutional instability. In recent years, political violence has emerged as the most common method of governmental change. In this study, the effects of political violence on economic and human development in Sub-Saharan Africa are examined. It is seen that political instability is a significant constraint to the improvement of the human condition in the region.     

Tourism and welfare in Sub-Saharan Africa: a theoretical analysis

Using the standard theoretical model of trade, we study thewelfare effects of tourism for developing countries with particularreference to Sub-Saharan Africa. We show that tourism can reducewelfare for trade regimes dominated by export taxes or importsubsidies. In addition, we argue that tourist immiserisationis possible for Sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, we show that directforeign investment in tourism, is for the most part, beneficial.     

Political instability and economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Some recent evidence

Political instability has become endemic to Sub-Saharan Africa. Since the early 1960s, when most of the African countries began to achieve independence, more than fifty coups have taken place in the continent. This rise in political decay has significantly affected economic development. This study examines the relationship between elite political instability and economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa. It concludes that lack of political stability has contributed significantly to economic stagnation in the continent of Africa.     

Food poverty,hunger and household production in rural Eastern Cape households

More than two decades since the advent of democracy in South Africa, the place of small-scale agriculture in rural development, poverty alleviation and food security remains ambiguous and highly contested. However, there is now some new evidence that official income poverty estimates in South Africa may be underestimating the contribution of rural, land-based livelihoods when measuring household well-being. This paper aims to explore this possibility further by identifying how household production activities are associated with improved food security among rural Eastern Cape households in the former homelands. The analysis is based on data from Statistics South Africa’s 2008/9 Living Conditions Survey and its annual General Household Surveys. In adopting a food poverty lens, the findings suggest that hunger levels are lower among farming households in the Eastern Cape even though a higher percentage of these households (relative to non-farming households) live below the national food poverty line. The paper concludes by discussing some implications for policy.     

Co-operation in Risky Environments: Evidence from Southern Ethiopia

The semi-arid and arid rangelands of Sub-Saharan Africa arecharacterised by high variability and by heavy reliance of herderson access to common resources, predominantly pasture and water.In these systems, the capacity of the community to co-operateover resource management is critical and the effectiveness ofmanagement has a direct impact on exploitation rates and landallocation patterns. In this paper, we develop a model to capturethe impact of climatic variability on capacity to co-operateand on resulting land use and allocation patterns, and applythe model to data collected from communities located on theBorana Plateau in southern Ethiopia. Results indicate that rainfallvariability has a negative impact on stock densities, consistentwith risk-averse producer behaviour, but has no statisticallysignificant impact on land allocation patterns in this marginalarea. Furthermore, co-operation has a direct negative impacton stock densities and land allocated to private pastures. Theresults support the hypothesis that individual incentives toovergraze and encroach on common pastures can be mitigated incommunities with high co-operative capacity.     

Environmental Entitlements: Dynamics and Institutions in Community-Based Natural Resource Management

While community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) now attracts widespread international attention, its practical implementation frequently falls short of expectations. This paper contributes to emerging critiques by focusing on the implications of intracommunity dynamics and ecological heterogeneity. It builds a conceptual framework highlighting the central role of institutions — regularized patterns of behavior between individuals and groups in society — in mediating environment-society relationships. Grounded in an extended form of entitlements analysis, the framework explores how differently positioned social actors command environmental goods and services that are instrumental to their well-being. Further insights are drawn from analyses of social difference; “new”, dynamic ecology; new institutional economics; structuration theory, and landscape history. The theoretical argument is illustrated with case material from India, South Africa and Ghana.     

Community development and research: Participatory learning and action ‐a development strategy in itself

For any development facilitator or change agent, a potential paradox can arise when, assisting with self‐reliant participatory development. This paradox occurs when the change agent tries to help and encourage people to develop themselves and, in so doing, undermines their self‐reliance and sustainability, the very aim of development. The theoretical basis for the meaning of development is often at the root of such a paradox: it is argued that theory and the concept of development are in actual fact incompatible within the realm of social reality. It is further argued that Participatory Learning and Action (PLA), which rejects theory as the foundation for development and embraces human consciousness, can offer an appropriate strategy that can avoid such a paradox. This article is inspired by the tenacious efforts of resource‐poor people. It is largely based on PLA initiatives undertaken in the Little Karoo, South Africa and Odibo, Namibia, as well as in various communities in Zambia, and on numerous RDP capacity‐building training initiatives in the Northern Cape Province. South Africa.