| dc.description.abstract | “Who dominates whom?” This is a perennial and most contested question in power studies. The researcher conducted a qualitative case study focusing on a housing project in Khutsong. The aim was to develop a deeper understanding of the way in which power relationships amongst actors, evident in their conflicting interpretations, actions and inactions, may have contributed to the outcome of the said project. To this end, in-depth interviews and focus-group discussions were held with community members and leaders, local politicians, contractors and municipality officials, in order to grasp how their power relationships impacted the Khutsong housing project.
A critical scholarly examination was done of Lukes’ political theorising, as well as urban power political and housing discourses in an attempt to understand housing provision in urban South Africa and how power relationships affect housing delivery. Lukes (2005), chosen as the main theoretical anchor of the study, would have proposed that the power relations are dominated by powerful actors through their ability to shape the cognitions, preferences and perceptions of the powerless to such an extent that the latter wilfully consent to being dominated. However, evidence from the case study indicates that in pluralistic and radicalised contexts such as Khutsong, different actors’ interpretations and varying expectations influence their actions and inactions in the praxis of housing policies. This context has engendered power to be fluid, dynamic and multi-directional, which shift power dynamics from conceptions of domination as binary, asymmetric and uni-directional, to an understanding that in local development contexts there can be a plurality of actors. These actors influence policies through active (re)interpretations and reciprocation, which contribute to more volatile and multi-directional power exercises. In this way, the thesis broadens scholarly understandings of hegemony and how it is counter-acted by multiple interest groups’ reinterpretations of the localised processes of development policy.
These mentioned volatile and unsettled relationships in power exercises within policy spaces, are found to be based largely on the internalisation of radicalised democratic ideals and the fact that actors in local development can be identified easier. The rife contestations and over-politicisation of housing provision in South Africa has been characterised by incessant community protests and violence. This has become the normative urban political dynamics for inhabitants perceiving and pursuing their entitlement. Khutsong is a typical example, as a township which is well documented for its aggressive and severe community struggles over varying societal issues.
In the new South African dispensation, Khutsong community members have internalised radical democratic values, and as such they have viewed the housing provision as spaces for struggle through contestations over rights and entitlements. Their active reinterpretations and violent reciprocation in the praxis of the housing project have challenged the initial interpretations of the project to a fluid and more dynamic understanding. This ultimately contributed to unexpected outcomes in the project. In this regard, the thesis reveals that it is through varying interpretations and reciprocations in contexts of radicalised local democracy that domination becomes more fluid, dynamic and multi-directional by various actors | en_US |
