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Paper Short Abstract

In Johannesburg, the state’s inheritance system promises post-apartheid access to fair and protective regulation. A network of state, civic and for-profit services brings the system ‘to the people’. Yet, as understandings of public commitment diverge, formalisation and its legal protections founder.

Paper Abstract

Under apartheid in South Africa, the state regulation of property inheritance was one among many aspects of governance that excluded the black majority. As administration was deracialised, the legal-administrative system expanded rapidly to serve a new public. Rules and processes specify how property should be passed on, who should benefit, and how parties can seek redress. Today, in Johannesburg, formal inheritance is understood by a range of practitioners as a public infrastructure offering post-apartheid access to protective regulation. A distributed network of institutions extends beyond state officialdom to civic and for-profit services, with the aim of bringing the system ‘to the people’. Its public character implies not only shared rules and processes, but shared values, access and benefit, and a shared public experience of encounter and collective engagement. Yet, while these features capture the aspirations of officials and many providers of non-state assistance, their realisation is far from straightforward. Access, benefit, a shared public experience, a shared professional ethic, and the predictability to orient future plans: all of these are called into question. Increased public access occurs at normative interfaces. In a complicated regulatory system whose navigation requires expertise, one interface is between the law and popular norms. Another is between civic and for-profit notions of service. A shared project of post-apartheid access coexists with different institutional agendas, and variable understandings and degrees of public commitment. The expanding frontier of a public regulatory infrastructure reveals the labour of brokering and bridging, and ultimately how formalisation and its legal protections founder.