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Recent studies highlight the emergence of standards, including multi-stakeholder initiatives developed and applied within the global South where supplier firms are usually based. This trend has created a complex ethical terrain whereby transnational standards flow through global production networks and intersect with domestic initiatives at places of production. The paper complements global production network analysis with the concepts of 'space of flows' and 'space of places' and insights from relational economic geography, to examine how some multi-stakeholder initiatives in the global South can shape the broader governance of labour standards in global production networks. The following questions are addressed: How is the governance of labour standards in global production networks shaped by dynamic spatial interactions between actors? What role have diverse Southern multi-stakeholder initiatives played in influencing the governance of South African fruit and wine? We draw on research conducted over seven years into two standards in South Africa, the Wine and Agriculture Ethical Trade Association and Sustainability Initiative of South Africa. Our analysis shows that these two Southern-based multi-stakeholder initiatives contributed to shaping the broader governance of labour standards through dynamic non-linear waves of interaction over time, involving both collaborative and contested exchanges between actors across space of flows and places. We further argue that despite the development of multi-stakeholder initiatives by Southern actors, commercial power asymmetries in global production networks limit their ability to promote significant improvements for producers and workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the housing bubble burst in overheated property markets around the world, South Africa's so-called 'affordable housing market' appeared to be bucking the trend. From 2010, affordable housing prices were rising and selling quickly, especially in Gauteng, Johannesburg's city-region, chronically short of actually affordable housing and with a growing black middle class. Touted as 'SA's best-kept investment secret', the affordable housing market offered a lifeline to the property industry and the potential to democratize segregated property markets. Yet, in practice, the tapping of South Africa's lower-income housing market by capital has been a limited one, narrowly catering to particular subjects and spaces. Drawing on heterodox approaches to 'actually existing markets' and qualitative fieldwork conducted in Johannesburg between 2012 and 2013, this paper traces how the boundaries of the affordable housing and mortgage submarket are produced and shift through the investments of multiple communities with their own theories of housing markets and different interests in 'making the market work'. Despite these investments and contestations, the submarket is narrowly territorialized within developer-driven housing largely in Gauteng for public-sector workers, to optimize the market within mortgage capital's frameworks of risk, return, race and space. The South African mortgaged affordable housing submarket is not so much in need of market information or constitutive of a new frontier of global finance, as a territorial fix for domestic capital vis-à-vis development imperatives. To investigate struggles over this submarket, I draw together socio-institutional approaches to markets with critical political economy of housing markets and put them into conversation with critical development studies scholarship on markets. This combination allows us to make space for multiple projects of 'improvement' and profit in our analyses of market-making, as well as how these are shaped by, and shape, space and conjuncture. I seek to contribute to a growing literature on the geographies of markets from a Global South context where housing is framed as both a market good and constitutional right by examining a case of apparent 'market failure'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy flows are not quantifiable and calculating processes but part of the uneven movement of ideas and experiences that involves power and personalities. Processes of learning and policy circulation have thus proven difficult to study especially as the exchanges taking place between actors and localities rarely lead directly to uptake. This paper outlines a conceptual and methodological framework for conducting policy mobilities research by attending to the plethora of ordinary practices – be it through engagements with fellow practitioners, their toolbox of material solutions, or a particular moment of discovery – that form the assemblages of learning. The paper then unveils a set of procedures for unravelling the assemblage, first by “following the people” and their understandings of mobile policy; second, by “following the materials” to experiment with a Latourian approach to materiality; and finally, by “following the meetings”, that is, the conferences, workshops and seminars where the people and materials mingle. The proposed methodology is sensitive to the ephemeral, ethereal and experiential assemblages that carve and sustain the pathways for the movement of knowledge. This interpretation of the methods for studying mobile knowledge is a critical predecessor to any empirical analysis of policy mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Study tours, a form of 'policy tourism' in which local actors travel elsewhere to see best practice and meet with those in the exporting locality who implemented it, have become a basic tenet for policy exchange. In the pursuit of these lessons, hundreds of South African public transport enthusiasts visited South America, particularly Bogota, to learn of its thriving bus rapid transit (BRT) network. This paper evaluates the influence of these exchanges on BRT circulation and adoption--what takes place while delegates are overseas and how do these learning experiences influence the adoption and implementation of circulated forms of best practice? This paper reconnoiters these 'mobility events' and their outcomes to demonstrate theoretically that they are a necessary informal infrastructure through which best practice circulates: in particular, as a method for developing and strengthening social bonds between delegates and with hosts--relationships integral to policy adoption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the case of the proposed Pondoland National Park in South Africa, which is in the center of policy debates about biodiversity conservation, development, and resource rights in the Wild Coast area of South Africa. It explores whether the making of the case for the conservation of the Wild Coast, which relies on global environmental discourses, has ideologically and practically clarified local poor people's resource rights. It does this by tracing the genealogy of the Pondoland National Park discourse, which originates from scientific research and individual and group lobbying, to help explain the disjuncture between post-apartheid environmental policy discourses and what takes place in practice. The paper concludes that the reliance on global environmental discourses in research done in support for the Pondoland National Park complicates the role of the nation-state in terms of environmental governance, and that this can negatively affect the poor and powerless residents of the area in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empowerment is a standard but ambiguous element of development rhetoric and so, through the socially complex and contested terrain of South Africa, this paper explores its potential to contribute to inclusive development. Investigating microlevel engagements with the national strategy of Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) in the South African wine industry highlights the limitations, but also potential, of this single-domain approach. However, latent paternalism, entrenched interests, and a 'dislocated blackness' maintain a complex racial politics that shapes both power relations and the opportunities for transformation within the industry. Nonetheless, while B-BBEE may not, in reality, be broad-based its manifestations are contributing to challenging racist structures and normalising changing attitudes. This paper concludes that, to be transformative, empowerment needs to be reembedded within South Africa as a multiscalar, multidimensional dialogue and, while recognising the continuation of structural constraints, positions the local as the critical scale at which to initiate broader social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interconnections between crime prevention and local governance practices are increasingly evident through the involvement of local partnerships and local government in crime prevention. The microlocal workings and the political implications of these interconnections have, however, received far less attention. This paper uses a case study from South Africa to understand the microlocal experiences of the interconnections between what is described here as 'crime management' and local governance. It is argued that the extent of interconnection is beyond that captured by the concept of 'partnership', as multiple governance structures, including local political parties, engage in crime management. Furthermore, the paper illustrates how local governance is dominated by crime management and that this domination is explicitly tied to the party political 'ambitions' of the dominant ANC party. The interconnection is theorised as the criminalisation of governance within a context of state-building [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A changing climate seriously challenges our sociopolitical and economic systems. Elaborating on one possible element of a successful human response, this paper looks at how participatory governance is treated in the literatures on social justice and climate change. This paper applies the works of Habermas and Foucault, as well as recent work from the fields of urban and environmental planning, to clarify how the balance between structure, power, and agency influences attempts to address social inequality and climate change. Applying this general framework to a case study of Durban, South Africa, the paper then discusses the effectiveness of participatory structures in practice. This case study provides a productive space to study the intersection of social and environmental concerns. It also allows us to explore how interactions between formal and informal participation expose the limits both of confrontational (Foucauldian) and of consensus-based (Habermassian) approaches to governance. These limitations are instructive as we attempt to create cities that are both socially just and environmentally sustainable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of development studies has produced a number of institutional ethnographies in recent years that evaluate the internal workings of development agencies such as the World Bank or grassroots social organizations. Although within the social sciences research on conservation often emphasizes the power of international conservation institutions, there have been few comparable studies assessing the internal workings of these organizations. In addition, less is known about the specific activities of national and provincial conservation agencies operating in the Global South. Ethnographies of these institutions are also needed in order to examine how conservation is variously understood and executed by organizations within different contexts. This paper presents an institutional ethnography of the Mpumalanga Parks Board, which is the chief conservation agency operating in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. Following the 1994 democratic elections, the Mpumalanga Parks Board pursued a neoliberal commercialized conservation mandate that reflected the position of natural resource management in relation to other national priorities. This paper traces out the construction of the commercialization discourse in order to understand the internal and external factors that produced it while assessing its implications for nature preservation. Although the commercialization drive emulated a general trend towards neoliberal decentralization in the Global South, I argue that its particular manifestations were deeply embedded in South Africa's particular spatial economy and history of racial segregation. In tracing out the commercialization discourse from within the conservation agency itself, this paper assists in an understanding of how neoliberalism shapes natural resource management and can become hegemonic at the expense of other possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adopts a perspective which views all cities as unique combinations of social, political, and economic configurations—which sees all cities as 'ordinary', and which resists attempts to determine hierarchical relations amongst cities as potentially damaging to rich and poor cities alike. While current urban theories tend to draw attention to the dynamism of globalising economic sectors, much urban policy directed at poorer countries is preoccupied with the delivery of basic services. Both urban theory and urban policy need to be reframed to address the diversity of activities and interests in cities, and to support a more inclusive and hopefully redistributive form of urban development. In the process of formulating citywide visions, urban managers in the two cities discussed here, although drawn to compete with other cities in a global arena, have also had to find ways to address diverse economies and unequal societies. This paper draws on the examples of city visioning processes in Johannesburg and Durban in South Africa to illustrate how developmentalist and growth-oriented urban policy agendas have been brought together in the complex political environments of these cities. These case studies suggest that the process of formulating a citywide strategy, and of thinking about the future of the city as a whole, required that policy makers attend to the many different and often competing demands in the locality. For urban theorists, this generates new kinds of research agendas—for example, considering how urban improvements can be spread across the different areas and constituencies of a city without sacrificing economic growth. Here, the benefits of supporting the generalised agglomerations economies of a city as opposed to specialised globalising clusters emerge as important. This paper suggests that urban theory can learn from the process of city visioning, despite the various problems associated with these exercises. In turn, theories which approach all cities as ordinary could reinforce policies which address both economic growth and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using archival sources, this paper examines the uses of law and expert knowledge in conflicts over land among officials and settlers in early colonial Zimbabwe. Land settlement laws, together with European colonists’ relations with Africans resident on their farms, became a focal point of the British South Africa Company’s (BSAC) engagements with settlers leading to conflicts over what constituted proper land utilization and the boundaries of authority. These conflicts emerged out of the Company’s position as private entity and a colonial governing authority. Seeking to meet the profit expectations of its shareholders, the BSAC inserted, in its land settlement laws, a “beneficial occupation clause,” which stipulated that farmers could only retain their land if they continuously occupied it and invested in farming. This conflicted with settler efforts to engage in other economic activities such as mining in order to eke out a living in the new colony. Company imperatives to make profits for its shareholders also led it to formulate policies that favored mining over agriculture, leading to conflicts between colonial mining and agrarian capital. Settler farmers fighting to exclude miners, other settler farmers and Africans from their lands appropriated experts’ arguments over environmental change evidenced by soil erosion and the spread of cattle diseases such as East Coast Fever. Conflicts among settlers and colonial officials not only reveal the contradictions of colonial rule and capitalist development but also contributed to the making of the land question in Zimbabwe. Settlers’ disaffection with the BSAC’s land policies, among other factors, led many of them to question its claims to ownership of the land and to campaign for the end of Company rule. The settler state that emerged out of this campaign was dominated by farming interests and went on to enact policies that favored settler farmers at the expense of Africans, sowing the seeds of discontent, which exploded with the post-2000 farm invasions and the country’s Fast Track Land Reform program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although specified in the South African Bill of Rights, for the majority of South African citizens the right to access housing translates in practice to the experience of waiting. In this paper we reflect on the micropolitics of waiting, practices of quiet encroachment, exploring how and where citizens wait and make do, and their encounters with the state in these processes. We argue that waiting for homes shapes a politics of finding shelter in the meanwhile partially visible yet precarious, the grey spaces of informality and illegality that constitute South African cities. At the same time, waiting generates a politics of encounter between citizen and state, practices immersed in shifting policy approaches and techniques, the contingent and often-opaque practices of governance. In sum, the politics of waiting for housing in South Africa proves paradoxical: citizens are marked as legitimate wards of the state. Yet, to live in the meanwhile and in the long term requires subversion, an agency that is sometimes visible in mobilisation and protest, and at other times out of sight, simultaneously contentious and legitimate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa emerged from a cataclysm two decades ago to experience a stable democratic transition during which the local government system was transformed. The creation of large metropolitan municipahties was intended to accelerate socioeconomic development and urban restructuring in order to overcome the legacy of segregation and exclusion. This paper assesses their achievements, ten years on, using the concept of resilience as the analytical frame. Resilience helps to examine cities as interconnected systems open to external influences but with some capacity for self-organisation and learning. It is useful for exploring the coexistence of urban continuity and change. Evidence shows that the responses of South Africa city authorities to globalisation, urbanisation, and democracy have been circumscribed. Continuity and incremental change have been more evident than transformation and development. Hesitant progress exposes cities to the risk of greater social instability. Insights from resilience theory support the idea that enhanced municipal capabilities could facilitate a more enduring outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bio-economy is characterised by aspirations of replacing the fossil-based economy with biobased energy, resources and processes; biofuels are particularly popular. This new shift comes with multiple risks and uncertainties in both industrialised and developing economies. The uptake of biofuels is inextricably linked to and legitimised by policy processes involving a complicated nexus of vested interests, political aspirations, and technological drivers, and a range of associated factors. In this paper we describe the characteristics of and contours along which two national biofuels policies in India and South Africa have been articulated and developed. In doing so we establish how a biofuels regime has gained legitimacy, becoming embedded into policy processes dictated largely through specific networks and reflective of the rationalising effect of global and local narratives. We analyse how pro-poor 'win-win' narratives gained purchase amongst different actors and in turn how they were used as a basis for biofuels policies. The case studies are, however, complex and differentiated, pointing towards sociopolitical nuances and structural subtleties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the role of the hydrosocial cycle in producing and sustaining uneven geographies of capitalist agriculture in the Ceres Valley, a major center of South Africa's high-value deciduous fruit industry. I explore ways in which the mobilization, appropriation, and transformation of water resources become intertwined with and reinforce the radicalized capitalist relations that have characterized the local political economy of export fruit production since the 19th century. These relations have solidified over time as they have been able to adapt to shifting political-economic and political- ecological dynamics. Focusing on the postapartheid period, I examine how white agrarian capital has been able to maintain and even strengthen its dominance over the regional economy despite the dramatic shuffling of political and economic priorities. I pay particular attention to how the fatal combination of the liberalization of agricultural markets and the financialization of water supply becomes articulated through interconnected sociospatial processes of dispossession, devaluation, and disinvestment. I argue that questions of access to and control over the hydrosocial cycle not only reveal how marginalized and radicalized social actors--farm workers, small-scale farmers, township residents--become differentially articulated with and disarticulated from existing and emerging circuits of capital accumulation. It also opens promising analytical and political avenues through which to illuminate and confront uneven geographies of capitalist development in ways that highlight the linked sociospatial processes of production and social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses trends in the location of commercial, industrial, and different residential land uses in the four largest metropolitan cities of South Africa over the past decade. Recent development patterns show strong decentralisation trends of away from core cities to the metropolitan fringes despite proactive containment policies. Elements of the differential urbanisation model are used to explain heterogeneous migration patterns within a rapidly urbanising South African population. Indications are that strong centrifugal patterns in the cities are linked to both local decentralisation and deflected urbanisation at the regional level. This results in continuing social stratification in all four agglomerations and the continuation of the 'post-apartheid city.' The persistent movement of populations and commercial and industrial land uses to the urban fringe has resulted in the strengthening of the multicentric urban framework of the four metropolitan cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transition studies attempts to explain sociotechnical change over time and to develop policy prescriptions to help guide transitions towards more sustainable outcomes. While this literature has made significant contributions to our understanding of transitions and achieving greater sustainability, most transition theory and practice overlooks the central role of power in shaping the direction and outcomes of transitions. In this paper I apply the transitions framework to electronic waste (e-waste) management in South Africa, and assess the attempts to instigate and guide a transition through the establishment of an industry-led e-waste association. I use a relational-political-ecological approach in which I show how power is built relationally through particular engagements between members of the e-waste association and with others outside the association. I describe the attempts by the association to extend power and the strategies employed by members to resist or reconstruct this relationship. While stakeholders' concerns with the e-waste association are various, I focus on articulating their responses, specifically actions which revise their particular way of relating to the association. I group these into three main responses: (i) establishing a new connection or disengaging from the network; (ii) frustrated participation and/or reformed expectations; and (iii) establishing an alternative network. My analysis of relational power in the process of attempting to guide a transition is intended to show a new way of incorporating conceptualizations of power into transition studies to increase its theoretical rigour and enhance its potential to make positive contributions towards achieving a just sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much research on racial desegregation in South Africa uses residential data to track how richer black South Africans are moving from apartheid spaces to higher income suburbs; how racial privilege is giving way to class privilege. Drawing on geographers' relational conception of space and anthropologist Sherry Ortner's notion of a 'class project', in this paper I show the importance of geographies of schooling to class formation. The study tracks how schools and two groups-township residents and poorer shack residents-affect and navigate access to schools in Durban. Of impor- tance to class formation, the study finds that children of relatively poor, but not the poorest, township dwellers can commute very long distances to attend prestigious schools. Consequently, racial mixing is more evident in South Africa's schools than in its residential areas-the opposite scenario to that found in many other countries. Yet children born to very poor residents of urban informal settlements face considerable barriers when trying to access well-resourced schools: although they are legally entitled to attend prestigious schools located close to informal settlements, they can often live with extended families hundreds of miles away in rural areas. This new geography of schooling leads to the marginalization of some children but the perception of, and potential for, intergenerational class mobility among a quite significant group of black South Africans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postapartheid South Africa has been plagued by an increase in crime across all categories. While a significant amount of criminological research has been undertaken in the country, the spatial analysis of crime and offenders, a basic prerequisite for a functional crime management strategy, has not been adequately addressed at a sufficiently fine scale of aggregation. This paper reports on the geodemographic development of offender risk profiles for neighbourhoods in the City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality in South Africa. Geodemographics is a relatively new geo-analytical technique that is being increasingly used in policing applications to complement law enforcement techniques and provide further insight into offenders and their offences. Findings of the study indicate that neighbourhoods at a high risk for offender development are amongst the most socially and economically deprived in the municipality and are disproportionately occupied by black Africans. The results highlight a need to reassess the current law enforcement approach to crime reduction in the country and return to the crime prevention initiatives that were part of the National Crime Prevention Strategy of the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an investigation of the geographies of justice movements in theory and practice. It mentions that the investigation aims to offer the readers with new theoretical and empirical insights into the social movement spatial constitution and attempts to associate traditional interest in social and spatial justice that is present among geographers. Moreover, Paul Routledge, Andrew Cumbers along with Corinne Navitel discussed the relationality-territoriality in the second paper which aims to provide an analysis of the contours of relationality, communication, and operational logic present in the global justice network.

Newly emerging ethical trade practices in the South African wine industry are examined as a way of engaging with debates about the ability of alternative trade approaches to facilitate meaningful opportunities for socioeconomic development in the global South. The South African wine industry has undergone rapid restructuring since the end of apartheid in order to meet the demands of international markets. However, transforming racially skewed ownership and skill patterns is proving a particular challenge. In this paper we outline some of the initiatives that have been introduced to stimulate socioeconomic change within the industry. By utilising analytical tools such as commodity chains, networks, and cultural approaches we demonstrate that a complex array of forces is driving change on the ground. Such forces include national imperatives derived from the legacy of apartheid and the concerns of consumers in the global North. We conclude by considering the types of local and global constraints that need to be challenged if these initiatives are to be successful in facilitating meaningful socioeconomic transformation within the wine industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]