Abstract
Many South African secondary cities depend on a single economic sector, often mining or manufacturing. This makes them vulnerable to economic change and national decision-making. We describe change in three secondary cities—Emalahleni, Matjhabeng and Newcastle—all at different phases of economic transition due to imminent mine closure. We investigate the way local governance and planning are dealing with the change. We draw on concepts from institutional economics and evolutionary governance theory, material from strategic planning documents, and approximately 50 key informant interviews. We show how difficult it is to steer economic planning during economic transitions, and we demonstrate how both economic change and governance are path-dependent. Path dependency in South Africa’s mining towns has several causes: the colonial influence, which emphasised extraction and neglected beneficiation; the dominance of a single sector; the long-term problems created by mining; and the lack of the skills needed to bring about economic change. The local governments’ continuing reliance on the New Public Management paradigm, which focuses on steering as opposed to building networks, compounds the problem, along with poor governance, inadequate local capacity and inappropriate intergovernmental relations. Of the three towns, only Newcastle has shown signs of taking a new path.
Highlights
Research on secondary cities in the developing world has focused mostly on their economic role and the spa‐ tial distribution of their population
We argue that South Africa’s governance approach is still primarily rooted in New Public Management (NPM), underplaying the relationship between actors and overemphasising steering
We argue further that economic transition is particu‐ larly difficult for mining towns attempting to diversify their economy, because the mines create a false sense of security and interdependency
Summary
Research on secondary cities in the developing world has focused mostly on their economic role and the spa‐ tial distribution of their population. Con‐ cerns remain, among them the inability to achieve an appropriate separation between politics and administra‐ tion, resistance to implementation, inadequate cost sav‐ ings in staff and time, failure to contribute to better decision‐making despite the rhetoric, continued conflict between centralised and decentralised management, lit‐ tle reduction in political interference, and only partial efficiency gains (Dunleavy et al, 2005; Kuhlmann et al, 2008) In their evaluation of the New Steering Model, Kuhlmann et al 41) argues that the state should “steer society in new ways through the development of complex networks” and use “more bottom‐up approaches to decision making.” He says the trend towards using networks in governance means that a wider range of participants will be seen as “legitimate members of the decision‐making process in the context of considerable uncertainty and complex‐ ity.”. Notions of formal‐ ity and informality change frequently, making such a dis‐ tinction difficult and influence other institutions in com‐ plex interactions (Van Assche et al, 2013)
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