Natural Resource Management in an Urban Context: Rethinking the Concepts of “Community” and “Participation” with Street Traders in Durban, South Africa

Abstract

Natural resource management has traditionally been conceptualized in rural contexts, yet as processes of urbanization accelerate, it is increasingly important to understand the effects of environmental management efforts underway in urban centers. This chapter examines “participatory” and “community-based” approaches to natural resource management in an urban context. It explores the effects of Durban’s Warwick Junction Urban Renewal Project from a feminist political ecology perspective, based on ethnographic research with street traders carried out in South Africa between 2004 and 2007. The end of apartheid resulted in the decentralization of responsibility for the management of the urban environment and informal economy. Warwick Junction was a pilot project for a new participatory, area-based approach to urban development in the eThekwini (Durban) Municipality and has won international acclaim for engaging community participation and for improving human wellbeing, security, and livelihoods. Ten years later, however, research in Warwick Junction has revealed that multiple forms of control, authority, inclusion, and exclusion exist within the street trading “community”, some preexisting the urban renewal effort, rooted in gender, age, and traditional hierarchies with linkages to rural areas, and others emerging as new forms of power and legitimacy connected to the urban management process itself. This chapter illustrates how differential access to resources (in this case, access to trading space, infrastructure, and services) manifest as a series of political, economic, social, and ideological struggles. The Warwick Junction case study demonstrates how even the most “successful” of community-based urban management efforts can result in an uneven distribution of benefits. The chapter calls for a more nuanced understanding of the heterogeneity of “communities” and a closer examination of how power operates in “participatory” development projects.