Re-engaging with spatial economic development: The recent experience of regional and local economic development in South Africa

Abstract

Local and regional development trajectories across the global north and south exhibit both convergent and divergent tendencies (Barca et al., 2012; Nel and Rogerson, 2009; Pike et al., 2014; Reddy and Wallis, 2012; Rogerson and Rogerson, 2010). One of the distinctive features of SouthAfrica’s development pathway in the post-apartheid era has been the reinvigorated embrace of regional and local development policy and interventions. This characteristic exemplifies the broader argument internationally that there has been ‘renewed emphasis upon the region as the locus for economic, social and political action and the roles of institutions in local and regional development’ (Pike et al., 2006: 130). Spatially based economic interventions have had a long and contested history in South Africa where support for marketbased interventions have sat uncomfortably alongside the direct pursuit of political objectives and of attempts to use economic support measures to achieve social and political outcomes. After Second World War and until the democratic transition of the early 1990s, Keynesian state thinking was used to justify the apartheid’s states efforts to divide and separately develop and economically support different parts of the country and different areas within cities on racially segregated lines. Parallel efforts included import-substituting industrialisation and a growth point strategy targeted to both develop the country’s peripheral areas and to offer national economic development opportunities for the racial reserves which had been established (Bell, 1987; Nel, 1999; Tomlinson and Addleson, 1987; Wellings and Black, 1986a, 1986b). After the 1994 political transition, there was an initial reluctance to engage in spatial interventions which were seen as being tainted by associations with apartheid planning (Oranje, 2010). Nevertheless, a number of spatially targeted interventions were applied