Anatomy of a Municipal Meltdown: Revenues, Redistribution, Infrastructure and Post-Apartheid’s Fragile Social Contract

Timothy Gibbs and Nalini Naidoo

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2024, vol. 50, issue 6, 975-995

Abstract: As South Africa’s governing African National Congress unravelled in the late 2010s, a new stream of research emerged on the crisis of urban governance – power cuts, water outages – as municipal budgets faltered and ageing infrastructure cracked. These crises were sharpest in South Africa’s secondary cities, which had faster rates of demographic growth, higher rates of poverty and weaker fiscal bases: hence this study of Pietermaritzburg/Msunduzi. We argue that rather than centrally focusing on clientelism and corruption inside the ruling party – there is already plenty of excellent research in this vein – researchers might gain new insights by looking at the relationships between state and society (‘social contracts’) embedded in fiscal relationships. Crucially, large and mid-sized South African cities fund most of their redistributive reconstruction and development programmes from local taxes and service charges. Hence, Pietermaritzburg/Msunduzi’s financial meltdown may be explained if we focus centrally on the collapse of the social contract.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03057070.2024.2525712 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cjssxx:v:50:y:2024:i:6:p:975-995

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cjss20

DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2024.2525712

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Southern African Studies is currently edited by Ralph Smith

More articles in Journal of Southern African Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().