Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how notions of dependency and development shape an intervention by the South African state into livelihoods amid mass joblessness. These temporalities collide in practice, enabling the articulation of new meanings and claims for state support by target populations.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how the temporalities of “development” and “dependency” shape livelihoods, aspirations, and claim-making in South Africa’s Community Work Programme (CWP). In recognition of the structural nature of mass unemployment, the post-apartheid state sought to create an “employment safety net” for the poor, offering temporally indefinite cash stipends in return for community development work. Features like work conditionalities and part-time work were intended to prevent beneficiaries’ long-term reliance on state support, orienting them instead towards the continued search for work and economic independence. For participants, these temporalities collide. Caught between an ever-receding horizon of the “proper job”, and highly precarious livelihoods in the present, they articulate a sense of “stuckness” after years in the programme, unable to give shape to aspirations of forward and upward mobility. These collisions animate surprising claims on the state. A newly formed labour union suggests the return of workerist claims, demanding that precarious part-time work be upgraded into “proper employment”. It also articulates distinctly post-apartheid expectations for personal transformation. Appropriating official discourses of skills training and entrepreneurship, union leaders challenge the lack of state support to enable participants’ movement towards economic independence. In doing so, they apparently affirm discursive linkages between work and development, but leverage them to insist on the state’s central responsibility for direct distribution and to facilitate social mobility. These claims do not mark a clear departure from a work-based social and moral order; rather, they show how new visions for state-citizen entanglements emerge as subtle reformulations of established chronotopes.