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In early 2012, South Africa's Western Cape Province enacted new alcohol control legislation amid mounting concern with the costs of alcohol-related harms. This has focused on urban shebeen closure to control the informal, unlicensed trade and the harms it generates through crime, violence and injury. In contrast to policy discourse, this paper contends that rather than existing outside regulation, the city's shebeeners embrace multiple (self and collective) regulatory strategies to manage the inherent risks of their own informality. Drawing on novel empirical data including a ‘business census’ and interviews with the police and liquor traders across four Cape Town case study sites, the paper adds new depth to contemporary engagements with the appropriate and equitable regulation of the South African informal liquor trade. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This commentary explores how household economic necessity and the public health aspirations set out in the WHO’s global strategy to reduce the harmful use of alcohol might be reconciled in the context of alcohol control in developing countries. The ‘ambiguity’ of alcohol’s role in social and economic development is clear, but, as yet, little progress has been made on how best to integrate alcohol control within development policies in low- and middle-income countries. Without this holistic thinking, alcohol control efforts are likely to be thwarted by liquor’s allure as an accessible micro-enterprise opportunity. Similarly, developmental efforts will be undermined by the severity of alcohol-related harms that now disproportionately affect middle-income countries. Drawing on the example of South Africa, this short commentary explores the complexities of controlling the supply of alcohol when its sale represents a major livelihood strategy amid conditions of high unemployment and constrained access to formal employment markets. The policy preference for closing illegal bars or shebeens in South Africa does not address the ‘causes of the causes’ of why people drink, and therefore why its sale continues to be an attractive livelihood choice. It also does little to provide alternative leisure or employment opportunities, which ultimately threatens the longer term sustainability of policy. We need to better appreciate why selling alcohol is a seductive business opportunity and the potential consequences of this for realising public health aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the past decade, a sense of urgency has started to pervade alcohol regulation in South Africa. The burden of alcohol-related mortality and morbidity is among the highest in the world, and its effects are made worse by persistent socio-economic and structural inequalities. Moreover, alcohol is also a principle risk factor for infectious and chronic diseases, as well as a tenacious barrier to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. Its consumption and negative externalities have therefore become a public health and development crisis. This is despite alcohol's significant contribution to the South African national economy and individual livelihoods signalling an entrenched site of tension in alcohol regulation. However, while liquor has indubitably pernicious consequences, it does also provide a critical vantage point to further geographical engagements with the South African city and contemporary development debates. In so doing, the novel empirical and conceptual agendas set out in the papers also contribute to a broader engagement with the cultural contexts, meanings and settings of drinking practices in rapidly changing urban spaces of the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media coverage of the "problems" associated with alcohol is widespread in countries of the global North and now, increasingly, in those of the global South. However, despite this mounting ubiquity, there have been very few analyses either of newspaper coverage of alcohol or of media coverage of alcohol policy, especially outside Europe and North America. This article argues that given international concern with the long-term health, economic, social, and developmental consequences of risky drinking in the global South, an exploration of newspaper coverage of nascent alcohol policy in such a context is both timely and valuable. Indeed, such analyses bring to the fore the deeply contextual and contingent nature of alcohol's problematization in politics, policy, and public life. To examine these assertions, we explore the "attention allocation" processes of two South African alcohol control policies-the Western Cape Liquor Bill and the city of Cape Town's liquor bylaws-in two regional English-language newspapers between 2007 and 2011. In so doing, the article highlights the particularities of the political valence of alcohol in the South African context. Furthermore, it also draws out the tensions between alcohol as a source of livelihoods in a context of endemic unemployment and chronic poverty and alcohol as a causal factor in poverty, crime, violence, and social disintegration. In contrast to media coverage of alcohol policy in Europe and North America, this analysis of the South African press suggests that liquor consumption is far less likely to be framed as an express health risk, forcing us to question how preventative policy efforts should best proceed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: While attention to the socio-ecological and political economic influences on health grows, there remains a paucity of political ecological analyses of health (King, 2010). At the same time, the growing burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in the Global South demands new conceptual and pragmatic engagements with their modifiable risk factors. Drawing on the example of South Africa, this paper argues that alcohol consumption might usefully be theorised in political ecological lexicon as a “disaster”. To do so, it draws attention to the upstream causes of vulnerability, rather than just the downstream effects of risky drinking. This reorientation is needed for sustainable, publicly acceptable alcohol policies. To realise this, it draws on Blaikie et al.’s (1994, 2003) political ecological approach to risk, vulnerability and coping and, more specifically, applies their Pressure and Release model to explore liquor as a situated “disaster” in South Africa’s Western Cape province. In so doing, it aims to mark out an under-explored research agenda that considers alcohol as a pervasive governance dilemma. In addition, it also reflects on the model’s utility as a means of communicating findings that might reorient policy discussions on alcohol control in both South Africa and countries of the Global South. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]