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This work aims to contribute to the number of urban metabolism case studies using a standardized methodology. An economy-wide material flow analysis (EW-MFA) was conducted on the Metropolitan Municipality of Cape Town (South Africa) for the year 2013, using the Eurostat framework. The study provides insights into the city's metabolism through various indicators including direct material input (DMI), domestic material consumption (DMC), and direct material output (DMO), among others. In order to report on the uncertainty of the data, a set of data quality indicators originating from the life cycle assessment literature was used. The results show that domestic extraction involves significant quantities of non-metallic minerals, and that imports consist primarily of biomass and fossil fuels. The role of the city as a regional hub is also made clear from this study and illustrated by large quantities of food and other materials flowing through the city on their way to or from international markets. The results are compared with indicators from other cities and with previous metabolism work done on Cape Town. To fully grasp the impacts of the city's metabolism, more work needs to be done. It will be necessary to understand the upstream impact of local consumption, and consumption patterns should be differentiated on a more nuanced level (taking into account large differences between household income levels as well as separating the metabolism of industry and commerce from residential consumption). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artisanal, or small-scale mining, is widely recognised as a key, but often controversial, survival strategy adopted by low-income communities in the global South. This paper examines how members of one community in South Africa, that of Indwe, in a desperate effort to create self-employment, have initiated micro-level coal-mining enterprises, which have had the downstream effect of supporting local transportation and brick-making operations. Government concerns over the legality of these activities overlie the recent depletion of the local resource and the involvement of a mining corporate in the region. In terms of the way forward, the paper explores the uneasy compromise which has emerged between the corporate's social responsibility initiatives and the suspicions of the artisanal miners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2000, South Africa has experienced unprecedented migration from Zimbabwe. Surveys have estimated that by the end of 2007, between 1 million and 2 million Zimbabweans had migrated to South Africa as a result of a political and economic crisis that has been bedevilling their country. These migrants are supporting the livelihoods of relatives left at home through remittances. The nature of the remittance flows is not well documented, and the characteristics of the remittance senders and recipients are even less well understood. In this paper, I attempt to fill this research gap by focusing on the remittance behaviour of the senders. Using data from a survey of Zimbabwean migrants living in Johannesburg in South Africa, in this paper I examine the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of the remittance senders. Pertinent findings are that remittance behaviour is seen to be positively correlated with age, the number of dependents supported in the home country, income level and the return migration decision. Furthermore, males and married persons make up a larger proportion of the remitters than females and single persons. There are more remitters among migrants with basic education than among those with tertiary education. I have found remittance behaviour to be independent of legal status and length of stay in the host country. The independence with regard to length of stay raises questions about the validity of the remittance decay hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of research on informal settlements considers the experiences of children, but seldom outlines the daily parenting experiences of adult men and women. At the same time, policy on housing in South Africa points to the ways in which the 'eradication' of informal housing will help provide children with better futures. This article explores the social relation of parenting within an informal settlement in Durban, South Africa, bearing in mind the broader difficulties of parenting in poverty, and points to ways in which the material qualities of informal settlements contribute to feelings of anxiety in parents. It questions how these experiences might differ from or be similar to those of parents who live in generic contexts of poverty (but not necessarily informality). It concludes ultimately that living in an informal settlement does actually contribute to particular parental anxieties, but that there is no guarantee that informal housing eradication will remove these concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the progress in the nation-building efforts in South Africa. The economic development process needs to be accelerated, because poverty breeds impatience, and impatience often results in disorder which can stall the process. C. Villa-Vicencio, author of the book "A Theology of Reconstruction," examined the country's past and the sociopolitical responsibilities of Christian ethics.

KWV has been at the centre of the South African Wine Industry since 1918. In July 2004, KWV agreed that a broadly based Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) consortium would acquire 25.1 per cent of the shares of the KWV Group. The South African Wine Industry Trust, whose trustees are nominated by the Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs and by KWV, facilitated the deal. The agreement has features specific to the wine industry; it is also a milestone and a precedent for black economic empowerment in agriculture. This paper situates the politics of black economic empowerment in the context of the legacies inherited by the wine industry. It examines the complex political processes by which the participants mobilized funds and negotiated decisions to reconcile their objectives and realize their goals. By examining carefully the details of the sequences of events, the paper sheds light on the peculiar features of this case and raises questions about the nature, implications and significance of black economic empowerment in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This article questions some of the key assumptions of post-development and anti-development critics such as Arturo Escobar and Wolfgang Sachs, who tend to prescribe a puritanical and principled rejection of ‘exogenous development’ that does not necessarily reflect the needs and desires of the beneficiaries of development. Drawing on fieldwork research on land claims in Northern Cape and Northern Provinces (South Africa), the author argues that these beneficiaries tend to deploy hybrid and highly selective and situational responses to development interventions. These hybrid responses can be regarded as indigenous modernities. Development packages are resisted, embraced, reshaped or accommodated depending on the specific content and context. The author also questions James Ferguson's conclusion that depoliticizing development discourses inevitably buttresses bureaucratic state power. Rather, the fieldwork findings suggest that state-led development is often an extremely risky business that can undermine the legitimacy and authority of governments. In addition, in many parts of the developing world, it is the retreat of the neo-liberal state, rather than ‘the tyranny of development’, that poses the most serious threat to household livelihood strategies and economic survival. The case studies discussed here suggest that responses to development are usually neither wholesale endorsements nor radical rejections of modernity. Even when resisting and subverting development ideas and practices, people do not generally do so on the basis of either radical populist politics or in defence of pristine and authentic local cultural traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1994 South Africa's macroeconomic strategy has sought to accommodate the forces of globalisation and ensure the country's re-entry into the global economy after two decades (1970-90) of relative international economic isolation. One key component of restructuring for globalisation has been a shift in the burden of responsibility for economic development from national to local government level and of the promotion of local economic development (LED) planning across post-apartheid South Africa. This paper focuses on the issue of LED planning in South Africa as a case study in the local consequences and reactions to globalisation of city regions in the global periphery. The planning of LED in South Africa incorporates international trends towards local promotion of economic growth but also includes a distinct and strong focus on poverty alleviation to deal with the apartheid legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central to the increase in urban poverty in the post-apartheid period is the rise in unemployment. This provides the point of departure for this paper. The first section shows how Johannesburg and its environs, although constituting the industrial and commercial heartland of South Africa, is a city that has not reached its potential economic development. Having outlined the causes and dimensions of this sluggish economic position, next is considered how the poor survive in Johannesburg through both economic and non-economic strategies. With this in mind it is argued that addressing the current situation of growing poverty and inequality (as well as redressing the legacy of past inequities) requires broad municipal response to urban unemployment. Instead of the current tendency to view poverty simply as the product of income and consumption deprivation, a more widely defined response to urban poverty reduction, based on a livelihoods framework, is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the changes in the economic and social geography in post-apartheid South Africa. National change; Rural change; Urban change.

This paper examines the contemporary dynamics of industrial restructuring within Newcastle, a peripheral South African town that was, in many senses, a product of state industrial decentralisation and other apartheid policies. Processes of globalisation, and particularly the shift away from a regime of import substitution in the context of economic crisis, have been key to the form of restructuring that has occurred in Newcastle. But restructuring has also been shaped by local economic and political dynamics, as well as by South Africa's political transition. The paper explores the different ways in which globalisation has occurred in the main sectors: iron and steel, chemicals, and clothing, and their varying effects over time. It shows the limits of hypotheses assuming a recentralisation of production in the context of globalisation and the introduction of new technologies, but demonstrates nevertheless the vulnerability of towns such as Newcastle in the current era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the historical development of apartheid and social relations in Durban, South Africa from the late 1800s to the early 1930s and sheds light on the alliance between Durban's local state council and the white working class. The article aims to examine the historical development of the Apartheid Local State in South Africa, with specific reference to Durban. More specifically, the nature of social relations analysed in the article is through an abstraction of specific moments in the periodization of the local state in Durban from the late 1800s to the early 1930s. The focus is on the nature of power relations at the local level through an examination of the conflicts, contradictions, resistance and repression in the relationship among theocrat state and capital, labor and the white electorate. The article draws attention to the role of the local state in Durban in facilitating the politics of production. The economic vigor of the local state is directly dependent on the health of private enterprise. Durban was always competing with other centers to attract new investments.

This paper develops an analytical framework for the sociological analysis of the clash of economic ideologies. The framework is then used to make sense of the economic debate in South Africa in the 1990s. The argument is that, following Karl Polanyi, we must treat economic life as 'embedded' in social life; that is, economic action is a form of social action. However, the notion of 'embeddedness' must not blind us to the tendency in all economies, especially contemporary market economies, for economic motivations to become differentiated from the rest of our lives. Accordingly, the framework developed through a critique of key assumptions of neoclassical economic theory attends to both the embeddedness and the differentiation of the economic element. Having established a framework of analysis, I apply it to the debate in South Africa about the most relevant frame- work for economic policy in the post-Apartheid economy. The article traces the gradual move of the African National Congress (ANC) away from statist economics to a much more market-oriented policy and shows how this reflects the ANC leaders need to balance the demands of their constituency's (embedded) conception of rationality against the potential investor's more mainstream conception of economic rationality, which is itself embedded in prosperous communities with property and skills. A similar analysis is applied to the development of the economic policy of the ANC's rival, the former ruling National Party (NP). The NP advocates an economic policy framework based on an individual self- reliance and 'free' markets, that is, on an individualistic calculative rationality similar to that of the neoclassical textbooks. However, the NP too has to pursue politics and they, although rather differently from the ANC, have sought to reconcile individual maximizing rationality with the collective rationalities of the oppressed black communities in order to win maximum support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following South Africa's transition from apartheid to majority rule, the country's new government declared its intention to implement a macro-development approach, known as the Reconstruction and Development Programme, which would promote economic growth and, at the same time, raise the standards of living of the country's impoverished majority. This programme was accompanied by the publication of a White Paper on developmental social welfare. Both give expression to social development ideas which had previously been popular in international circles and which were being resurrected by the 1995 United Nations World Summit. This article discusses South Africa's engagement with social development and examines the challenges facing its attempts to implement this approach. The lessons learned from South Africa's experience of formulating and implementing social development policies and programmes can inform similar efforts elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]