When Mice are Away, Cats Will Play: Democratic Transition, Institutional Change, and Inequality in Johannesburg

• In Event: 485 - Section on Sociology of Development Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 05. States, Bureaucracy, and Civil Society

Abstract

There is nothing about a transition to democracy that preordains broader social transformations. In fact, it is just as possible that the specific terms of such transitions may arrest broader changes. Formal changes aimed at transformative outcomes can end up reinforcing previous trajectories. We therefore need an account of the mechanisms by which institutions change after a political transition that shows how key constituencies draw on the reforms implemented in transition to achieve their goals. This paper examines the case of South Africa, which implicates a more general question about transitions to democracy: why and how do institutional reforms to undo social inequalities, become repurposed to reproduce these very same inequalities? I draw on original ethnographic and archival research in Johannesburg to explain why the post-Apartheid local state in Johannesburg has been unable to achieve spatially inclusive development despite a political imperative for both spatial and fiscal redistribution. I do so by drawing a historical institutional account of urban governance in the post-Apartheid period, which suggests a type of path-dependency that is shaped by interests that form through the spatial logic of distribution in the city. Three moments of institutional reform in the past two decades promised to strengthen local government institutions’ capacity to restructure spatial divisions in the city, a primary political mandate of local government in the post-transition period. However, private property developers and property owners, organized around area-based concerns, reformulated efforts to strengthen the powers of local government agencies to instead sustain existing spatial divides.

Author

• Benjamin Bradlow, Brown University