Paper short abstract:

What role does crisis play in forging alternative economic futures? This paper focuses on the policy futures afforded (or foreclosed) by the Covid-19 pandemic in South Africa, by arguing that the temporality of work and welfare is crucial to popular and state visions of just distributory futures.

Paper long abstract:

How does crisis open-up - or foreclose - new possibilities for alternative economic futures? This paper focuses on the policy futures afforded by the Covid-19 pandemic. In particular, we explore possibilities for radical redistributory policies in contexts where access to income via work is increasingly tenuous. To do so, we turn to South Africa, where we examine the unfolding political possibilities and support for more radical and universal forms of social protection and (re)distribution during and after the Covid pandemic. In particular, we analyse visions of alternative redistributory economic futures both from above and from below, via original empirical data on the views of low-income inner-city residents in Johannesburg; interviews with government actors and civil society activists; and a close reading of media and policy discourse around social protection between 2020 and 2022. We argue while framing Covid as a crisis forced the state to embrace less workerist approaches to social protection, the very fact that new policies are rooted in a moment of perceived 'crisis' may have blunted more radical redistributory visions. This argument is underscored by the vacillations and internal contradictions of the South African government's expansion of its social grant system, as well as by the delimited scope of grassroots demands for direct economic support through multiple lockdowns. We make the case that a 'crisis temporality' -- and the temporality of work and redistribution more generally -- is critical to understanding the lack of popular demands for more radical forms of redistribution and economic security beyond work.

Paper short abstract:

Public work programmes were long preferred to cash “handouts” by the state for promoting “dignity through work” for South Africa’s unemployed. But premising material and social incorporation on work engenders contestations about value that underpin the negotiation of state-society relations.

Paper long abstract:

An enduring ideological battle in post-apartheid South Africa concerns the terms upon which the country’s many unemployed should be offered material and social incorporation. Policymakers long preferred public work programmes to unconditional transfers for ensuring reciprocity and promoting “dignity” through work. But premising incorporation upon work engenders contestations about the value of work and the people who complete it.

This paper investigates such contestations within the Community Work Programme (CWP) based on interviews and ethnographic data. Distanced from the local determination and performance of “useful work” in this scheme, bureaucrats struggle to ascertain the work completed and to reckon its value – without output, the programme reduces to an “expensive social grant”. Unionisers counter with a two-fold argument. Insisting on the completion of useful work “every day”, they demand more workdays and payment increases. Threatening to withhold the voting power of participants if demands remain unmet, they cast participants as valuable not merely to the state’s developmental objectives but to the ruling ANC and its ambitions to remain in power. Meanwhile, participants experience both structural and subjective devaluation. Their work – already delinked from pathways into secure livelihoods apparently enjoyed by municipal counterparts – is additionally shaped by a felt lack of respect by local officials and residents.

These contestations illuminate the conflictual negotiation of incorporation through value systems centred on work. Unionisers affirm reciprocity requirements in state-society relations by insisting on the value of CWP work, even as participants contend with its ever-delayed promise: of material and social recognition.

Paper short abstract:

Cet article étudie le processus marchands au Grand marché de Bamako en mettant la focale d'analyse sur comment le processus de bureaucratisation se matérialise sur ce marché et dans quelle mesure cela affecte les activités économiques et sociales.

Paper long abstract:

Le marché, l’un des concepts majeurs en économie, demeure la source originelle de discorde en sciences sociales. Le débat autour de ce concept est controversant et se situe à plusieurs niveaux comme le statut, le rôle de mécanisme d’allocation des ressources et le caractère autonome et modélisateur du marché des autres secteurs de la société, le modèle pur économique du marché. Le modèle pur économique du marché est critiqué pour son abstraction poussée et de son a priori épistémologique, posant ainsi d’énormes difficultés au sein de la discipline économique, qui s’est voulue science des rapports marchands dès le départ. Cependant, dans la conceptualise du marché, la science économique n’examine pas au sérieux le marché comme une infrastructure régie par des normes bureaucratiques. Ainsi, En s’insérant dans ce débat et mobilisant la théorie des marchés multiples et pluralité des places de marché, nous tentons, à travers l’étude de cas du Grand Marché de Bamako, de répondre à la question fondamentale : comment le processus de bureaucratisation se matérialise sur ce marché et dans quelle mesure cela affecte les activités économiques et sociales ? En d’autres termes, il s’agit de remettre en débat la notion du marché comme infrastructure purement économique.

Paper short abstract:

In the absence of formal jobs skills development programs become sites of brokerage. State bureaucrats recruit participants to be upskilled. Participants in turn use the teleology implied by their new ‘papers’ as a moral resource to make claims on the state – with implications for their inclusion.

Paper long abstract:

While commentators warn of employment’s endangered future in Africa, ‘skills development’ is still represented in teleological terms as the key to building a waged, industrial society. But what does the concept of ‘skill’ actually do in shaping thinking and practices on the ground, and with what potential for formal inclusion of the unemployed?

This paper draws on 7 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a state-led skills development program in South Africa. In the absence of formal jobs, ‘skills development’ comprises a set of negotiated meanings and strategies converging on the goal of ‘attaching people to a piece of paper’.

Bureaucratic legitimacy rests on making the unemployed legible. With much effort, bureaucrats recruit participants, provide accredited training, and administer qualifications. Lists of the newly (‘re’/’up’) skilled underpin state assertions to create working populations.

For participants, this process bodes a kind of formal inclusion in a population otherwise ‘surplus’. For some, being registered, attending graduations, and having papers (updated CVs and certificates) means being ‘ready’ for the market, offering a sense of security with uncertain material gain. For others, a more substantive inclusion is brokered through intimate personal relationships with bureaucrats. Here, the teleology inherent in the concept of ‘skills development’ serves as a kind of moral resource to underpin opportunistic claims on bureaucrats’ time, expertise, and office supplies.

In a context normatively oriented around formal jobs, despite their absence, inclusion might be more broadly understood to include brokered dynamics of social obligation between state bureaucrats and the unemployed.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the dynamics of workforce inclusion and exclusion in South Africa's food sector in response to successive crises of Covid-19, food price hikes, local drought and social unrest, and the weakening of state institutions catalysed by these events.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the dynamics of workforce inclusion and exclusion among food system workers in South Africa. In this sector, many kinds of work involve only partial inclusion, from seasonal picking to farm work interrupted by repetitive injuries, to migrant street vendors working under the threat of government reprisal. In the last three years the boundaries of inclusion have been intensified and sometimes violently re-drawn by successive crises: the near collapse of food supply chains and escalating hunger caused by government regulations to control Covid-19; food and fuel price hikes; local drought; energy shortages; and the July 2021 ‘unrest’ – a period of widespread violence and looting of shops, causing the death of over 300 people and damage to thousands of shops and businesses. The unrest signalled the ineffectiveness of government institutions to withstand pressures from two informal economies: the ‘popular’ economy of the precariat, on the one hand, and the elite network of ANC cadres, blamed for igniting the protests in defence of the Zuma-led faction inside an ANC civil war, on the other hand. These multiple emergencies combine with the ANC’s imminent electoral decline to place a stranglehold over government planning towards sustainable and just economic futures. The paper draws on qualitative and ethnographic research among farmers, shop owners, supermarket employees, street vendors and other food system workers in northern KwaZulu-Natal, conducted by a team of community researchers in 2022-3. It explores how livelihoods are being worked out in a context of successive emergencies and weakening governing institutions.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores recent attempts in Kenya to expand formal systems of health insurance and how these intersect with household economies and class identities, forms of solidarity and networks of care, and understandings of citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

The Kenya government has recently sought to widen financial and social protection and access to healthcare for citizens by expanding health insurance under the ‘universal health coverage’ agenda. While the national health insurance fund caters mostly for the formally employed, there are attempts to persuade those outside formal employment, the majority of the population, to voluntarily enroll into health insurance. Many citizens, however, experience their social networks and/or membership of various mutual aid or savings groups as more reliable than the national health insurer. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted with actors involved in the design and implementation of these schemes, as well as with ordinary Kenyans struggling to access healthcare, I explore how attempts to expand or access formal systems of health insurance interact with household economies and class, forms of solidarity and social networks offering support and care, and understandings of citizenship. In doing so I interrogate meanings, relations, frictions and fragmentations in diverse forms of support, protection and care.

Paper short abstract:

In 1994, the RDP house heralded a new future. This paper considers RDP Houses in a place dependent on grants rather than wages. It analyses social (re)production in these houses, and suggests their peripheral locations may render them ruins of the future promised by the post-apartheid government.

Paper long abstract:

In October 2012 the minister of human settlements, Tokyo Sexwale claimed that Reconstruction and Development (RDP) housing was not for the long-term but rather offered ‘emergency shelter’. This seemed to represent an acknowledgement of the limits of state projects and pointed to the ‘near future’ as a more achievable horizon for states in Africa. These RDP houses were imagined by the first Housing Minister Joe Slovo, as central to transforming the country, to producing a new future, with the South African government building at least 3 million since 1994. The paper offers an ethnography of a government housing settlement in the KwaZulu-Natal countryside, reflecting on both state investment in housing and a family’s attempts to socially produce a home they might inhabit for the future. It considers what kinds of welfare and social reproduction such housing might facilitate in the absence of regular wage work or access to larger urban formal and informal economies. Do these houses remain emblems of a transformed future or become representations of the ruins of such futures? Or are they now mere means to the near future?

Paper short abstract:

Changes to formal inheritance gave the South African state new prominence in property transmission. Key to that role in people’s economic futures is a wider field of legal practitioners. It mediates how Johannesburgers encounter the state, stratifying them and their plans for accumulated wealth.

Paper long abstract:

The transition from apartheid fundamentally transformed what it meant for most South Africans to accumulate and transfer wealth, following changes to ownership rights and the privatisation of urban state housing. Changes to formal inheritance extended those changes into further questions about families’ economic futures. Deracialised law and expanded administrative reach gave the state unprecedented prominence in popular plans and struggles over property transmission. Legal bureaucrats make more decisions, arbitrate more disputes, and strive to keep people in the formal system. But what institutional context shapes how the administrative state actually forges economic futures? Understanding a broader legal field is crucial: practitioners with different relationships to the law, who mediate access. The wealthy never even set foot in state institutions, their affairs handled by attorneys in international firms and wealth management companies. Poorer South Africans, by contrast, face long queues, rules that appear counterintuitive, and opaque jargon. Some are lost in the cracks of an overstretched institution: fraud is common; redress is complicated and often unfeasible. Local downtown attorneys pick up bewildered clients. A pro bono helpdesk offers advice and passes matters to a legal NGO, whose paralegals allocate select cases to firms. Other marginalised people, trying to navigate the system and unable to secure lawyerly assistance, turn to community advice officers or still further figures of guidance, from party constituency offices to portacabins behind police stations. The legal field shapes how South Africans encounter the state, stratifying them and their state-administered plans for the futures of their wealth.

Paper short abstract:

The paper reconstructs how development planning and financial auditing shaped political iconographies in 1960s Ghana. It argues that, besides supporting practices of economic management, these tools informed political theologies and constructed alternative versions of postcolonial utopianism.

Paper long abstract:

This paper interrogates the role of development planning and financial auditing in shaping political iconographies and temporalities in 1960s Ghana. I suggest that these tools (and the numbers contained in them) did not simply inform and support practices of economic management. Instead, they contributed to the construction of alternative versions of postcolonial utopianism. The focus is on the last years of Nkrumah’s government, until he was overthrown by a military coup d’état in 1966, and on the National Liberation Council (NLC)’s rule between 1966 and 1969.

The Nkrumaist Seven-Year Plan for National Reconstruction and Development and the financial audits produced by the NLC’s numerous commissions of inquiry embody attempts to build, through numbers, alternative forms of secular eschatology. It is argued that tools like development plans and financial auditing, whose main task is not that of measuring time but are grounded in an idea of linear and homogenous time, created in 1960s Ghana qualitatively different ‘regimes of historicity’. But these become visible only when we reconstruct how these ‘dry’ and technical documents were negotiated, contested, and recast in the public sphere.

This is achieved primarily by following the iconography of economic numbers in the daily press. Drawing on archival evidence gathered in Accra, Cape Coast, Ho and Washington, and informed by ethnographies of planning and social studies of accounting, the paper calls for a more expansive view on what is ‘political’ about economic numbers in the postcolony, and for a recasting of the relationship between quantification and utopianism.

Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork in an Egyptian desert city, the paper examines “the project” as an organizational form where state and popular economy meet. It shows how projects are framed as the path toward improved work, wealth and welfare, and how the viability of megaprojects rests on smaller project dreams

Paper long abstract:

The military-dominated Egyptian state loves to frame improved economic futures through megaprojects. Whether as shiny desert cities, roads, bridges, fish farms, or enormous housing schemes, projects (mashari‘) promise increased employment, better life quality, and growth. Individual Egyptian future making also tends to be project-shaped. Wherever one looks, ordinary citizens launch small business projects (also mashari‘) to carve out economic and social stability in a precarious economy.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Badr City, this paper spotlights “the project” as an organizational form where the state’s megalomanic ambitions and the popular economy meet. Established in the 1980s, in the desert 45 km east of Cairo, Badr was long considered a purpose-built, industrial ghost town. After President el-Sisi’s 2015 decision to build a New Administrative Capital, however, Badr’s location became much more attractive. Today, construction workers, real-estate investors, entrepreneurs and the military all flock to Badr to make their worlds anew through projects.

My material shows that projects are habitually spoken of as the knee-jerk path toward improved work, wealth and welfare in Egypt. Because of its ubiquity and recognizability, the project form entices state actors, capitalists and entrepreneurs alike, rendering dreams of disparate scales structurally similar. I also illustrate how the viability of the state’s megaprojects rests on much smaller project dreams. Badr might constitute an emblematic instantiation of authoritarian planning, but the city’s recent revival only happened when a myriad of individual business projects sprung up in the cracks of a state-led urban development project spinning out of control.

Paper short abstract:

Rural villagers in South Africa complained that the urban elites and government officials “closed the gate” (ukuvala isango) on their cultural and economic lives during the pandemic. This paper explores how the state is under pressure to "open the gate' after lockdown in the former homelands.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to update some of the ethnographic research published in the book, Covid and Custom in Rural South Africa by focusing not only on the social and economic adjustments and consequences of the pandemic for households and communities, but also on the nature of rural statecraft. The research, which is currently underway in the former Transkei (2023), is structured around interviews with families on their strategies and interactions with the state before, during and after the pandemic. Preliminary findings suggest that, amidst the widespread hunger, unemployment and poverty in rural areas today, there is evidence of an sharp rise in average rural household sizes (4 to 6), increased food production and hugely reduced circular migration rates. At the same time, ritual practices are being restructured, women's networks are being rebuilt, and the rural distributive economy reconstituted. The paper explores these changes within the context of wider political, economic and social changes in the society, and the agency of the state which has been heavily criticized during the pandemic for shutting down facilities and support (especially clinics, government departments, and hospitals) in rural areas. Death and fear prevailed in an atmosphere where state support and care vanished . But, at the same time, the state was lauded for the extension of emergency social grants to the youth and unemployed. In the former Transkei villages the youth nevertheless sang: "Ramaphosa uyamthanda umahlalela, uvele amnike iR350", meaning the President “loves unemployed people” because he can only offer them grants, not jobs.

Paper short abstract:

One of the key interventions vis-à-vis Africa in the late 2000s was challenging the idea of Africa as a monolithic space—Africa is not a country. In contrast, one of the central ideas from economists, politicians, and designers remains the opposite: Africa IS a country. This paper asks how?

Paper long abstract:

One of the central activist and academic interventions vis-à-vis Africa in the late 2000s was challenging the idea of Africa as a monolithic space—Africa is not a country. In contrast, one of the central ideas from economists, politicians, and designers remains precisely the opposite: Africa IS a country, and here’s how to make money there. As such, the question of the economic is central. Drawing on fieldwork with relevant parties (politicians, academics, consultants) from East Africa and Indian-Ocean Africa (Uganda and Mauritius), this paper considers and critiques dominant ideas of African urban futures in Africa. In so doing, this paper both interogates the idea of “Africa” as it has emerged within certain national contexts, and it asks what more can be thought.