Effects of the state’s informal practices on organisational capability and social inclusion: Three cases of city governance in Johannesburg

Introduction

South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democratic governance has been inconsistent. The trials of building a capable state were, and still are, myriad and pressing. The state has crafted many new, and revised former, formal practices of governance to reflect democratic ideals of the social inclusion of citizens. However, these practices proved to be ill equipped to meet the challenges of urbanisation and social exclusion. The local-level state, at the street level of state–society interaction, is the target of urban service delivery-related public protests, sometimes violent. In response to these protests, local government actors sometimes use informal practices as urban governance tools, even unknowingly, alongside formal practices. The lack of insight into the effects of informal practices in realising the state’s goals represents a research gap in urban studies. By interrogating real cases, the dynamics of the state’s informal practices can be better understood by academics and practitioners.

What insights does academic literature offer on the potential of informal practices to support or weaken organisational capability to govern effectively and address social inclusion? Considering the South African state’s roles in three cases of everyday city governance in Johannesburg, how did these informal practices, pivotal in changing urban governance, manifest? What pressures drove the local-level state actors to bypass formal practices? Lastly, what were the effects of informal practices on the organisational capability and social inclusion of citizens? The article finds that informal practices are inextricably twinned with state actors’ formal practices, and can shape future city governance in ways that significantly undermine or benefit democratic ideals.

Potential of informal practices to improve state capability and social inclusion

The phrase ‘informal practices’ is often used in the literature to describe the informality of street-based economies, self-built housing or use of public space in the Global South. However, this article considers informal practices as those used by state actors. What are informal practices? Here, state actors, meaning those at all levels of government and its organisations, administrative systems, politicians and officials, use various practices to govern; these formal practices comprise official systems, procedures, legislation and policies, to express the state’s intentions. The state adopts these as the rules its actors use to govern through formal and usually documented political and policy-making processes. ‘Informal practices’ must then be those that fall outside these agreed formal practices. However, ‘informal practices’ remains a contested concept, as ‘informality’ can be defined relative to one’s perspective or politics (Davis, 2018). Indeed, informal practice is so much a part of today’s ‘softer’ governance (Røiseland, 2011) that ‘formality’ has become the ‘exception’ (Pratt, 2018).

Informal practices of the state, building on Bénit-Gbaffou’s (2018b) definition, bridge the ‘grey’ area of contradiction between the state’s intentions and the reality on the ground, which formal practices cannot address. Other scholars argue along similar lines: informal practices highlight the shortcomings and weaknesses of formal practices, ‘unmaking’ them (Menkhaus, 2010; Roy, 2009). Others, though, see informal practices not as substitutes for formal practices but as inevitable and necessary (Polese, 2015). Informal practices take many forms, some of which will seem to state actors quite formal in their own right, such as committees, partnerships and networking (Peters, 2007; Røiseland, 2011). Certainly, informal and formal practices can be interdependent; where one begins and the other finishes is not always clear, with sometimes both operating in tandem. Nonetheless, for purposes of analysis, it is useful to think of state actors as undertaking practices along a spectrum between formal and codified practices at one end and informal ones that are regular or irregular at the other end. Critically, deviating from formal practices by using informal ones, often in moments of uncertainty or crisis in governance, has effects on formal policy intentions and agreed procedures and rules, which is the focus of this article.

These effects of formal and, even more so, informal practices on policy implementation are under-explored (De Sardan, 2009; Røiseland, 2011). Informal practices can also ‘make or break’ public policy and its implementation (Shober, 2010). Even when informal practices have benefits, changes are at best only incremental (De Sardan, 2009). Undoubtedly, a closer look into the effects of informal practices and their possible perpetuation of social exclusion is justified, as informal practices as well as their effects tend to be hidden and not held to account (Young and Diem, 2017), impacting more deeply than formal ones on society in unrecognised ways, both positive and negative (Andrews et al., 2017; De Sardan, 2009). States can also more closely examine the informal and discretionary roles of state actors, best placed to drive a social development agenda and to address the needs of ‘the poor’ (Krumholz and Clavel, 1994).

That social inclusion can be provided by a ‘capable state’ is not a new notion (Andrews et al., 2017; Palmer et al., 2017). As Andrews et al. (2017) show, the state’s organisational capability to direct practices, formal and informal, results in the attainment of social development objectives. Shortfalls in organisational capability can be a matter of life or death (Elliott, 2009), but any organisational learning from such failures might still not translate into improved capability for coping with similar future crises (March, 2003). Although accounting for the effects of informal practices is lacking, some effects have been observed by scholars. For instance, capability is deepened by understanding how practices contribute to institution-building, comprising complex processes of layering culture and values (Peters and Pierre, 2003). Capability is also grown by implementing successful locally specific practices (Andrews et al., 2017). Although informal practices might lack formal clout, they can modify policy and improve outcomes and organisational legitimacy (Peters and Pierre, 2003). Informal practices have other consequences too, such as drawing in a wider range of stakeholders and acting more democratically, but also hampering organisational decision-making processes and contributing to uncoordinated and unintegrated policies (Peters, 2007) and capability (Røiseland, 2011).

On the face of it, informal practices offer promise for the building of state capability. They can signify the positive change processes of a responsive institution willing to experiment and grow new ideas (Peters and Pierre, 2003). State actors’ improvisation of formal practices, when encountering conflict, can improve governance and innovate public policy implementation to help attain democratic ideals (Laws and Forester, 2015). Informal practices can provide opportunities for experimentation to increase organisational capability and learning, so potentially enhancing governance and the scope for constructive organisational change (Young and Diem, 2017). For instance, the OECD (2005) found that the state’s increased use of informal practices made it more responsive and accessible to its citizens, although such practices are often short-lived (Polese, 2015). Informal practices can make the state more flexible in coping with resource shortages and unpractical formal practices (De Sardan, 2009). Together with formal practices, they can address governance’s ‘wicked problems’ (Menkhaus, 2010), facilitate more proactive governance (Carmona, 2017) and reduce the transaction costs of governance (Stone, 2013).

However, the degree of benefits arising from the informal practices noted above is dependent on organisational capability that is itself complex and uneven across an organisation. According to Andrews et al. (2017), the state can build capability, but only extremely slowly, with this capability easily disrupted by over-loading on the systems. Capability needs to be driven by problems that matter, and implementation must be tied to a willingness to experiment and iteratively adapt how one defines the problem being tackled (Andrews et al., 2017). Further, in a high-capability organisation, informal practices and discretion can improve outcomes, as state actors can act in ways to ensure the best results for citizens by moving beyond mere policy compliance. In a low-capability organisation, however, informal practices and discretion can reduce the quality and quantity of outcomes as their impacts are less clear or understood (Andrews et al., 2017).

The state acts informally in many ways, for different reasons, which support (or not) improved organisational capability and social inclusion. Select types of informal practices, amongst those usefully summarised by Bénit-Gbaffou (2018b), are interrogated in the city governance cases presented next. In ‘framing exceptionality’, the state ignores, bends or breaks its own rules, whether on purpose or not (Bénit-Gbaffou, 2018a; Rubin, 2018). In ‘navigating policy contradiction’, the state arranges to accommodate paradoxical organisational and policy rules and priorities (Bénit-Gbaffou, 2018a). In ‘manufacturing uncertainty’, the state exploits gaps and confusions in official norms by simplifying or ignoring problematic aspects (Bénit-Gbaffou, 2018a; Rubin, 2018). In ‘playing on porosity’, the state uses the multiple political-administrative identities of state actors to manage troublesome situations (Rubin, 2018).

Assessing effects of informal practices on organisational capability and social inclusion in Johannesburg

South Africa’s transition to democracy has been challenging (Palmer et al., 2017). Andrews et al. (2017: 24), in their study on state capability, grade post-apartheid South Africa as middle-income with a ‘rapid deterioration in state capability’. Illegal and corrupt practices leading to ‘state capture’ have eroded the capabilities of national and local government (Martin and Solomon, 2016; Oliver, 2017). The three cases of local-level governance in Johannesburg that follow reveal the prospects for informal practices to enhance or erode the state’s capability, namely to govern democratically and pursue goals of social inclusion.

The local-level transition to democratic governance in Johannesburg has been well addressed in scholarship (Beall et al., 2002; Murray, 2008; Tomlinson et al., 2003). What have been less addressed are the substantial difficulties that the city administration faced in providing hard and soft services to a growing population whilst its organisations were evolving (Palmer et al., 2017). Johannesburg’s 2.6 million people in 1996, shortly after the first local government elections, nearly doubled to 4.9 million people by 2016 (StatsSA, 2016), the main period framing the three cases. Unemployment, at a rate of 28.5% of the economically active population in 2018 (StatsSA, 2018), was and still is an enduring challenge. Johannesburg remains deeply divided spatially and economically, clearly seen in the concentrated poverty of its peripheral informal and newly built formal settlements, and the pavement-based informal economy and substandard housing in decaying areas and buildings of its Inner City. In trying to overcome these divides, the state’s role is indispensable in enabling urban governance interventions that tackle exclusion and poverty (Parnell, 2005). The local-level state tried to devise spatial transformation and inclusive sectoral policies in Johannesburg (analysed by Haferburg and Huchzermeyer, 2014; Harrison et al., 2014). However, interventions were not always successful, as seen in the hundreds of service delivery protests staged against the Johannesburg city administration (Pernegger, 2014).

The three cases show examples of the city administration’s informal practices, set against a backdrop of formal practices. The informal practices were responses to discrete state–society conflicts about different issues in different spatial contexts, and led to pivotal shifts in city governance even if not readily apparent at the time of their occurrence. This article echoes research by others on the contribution of informal or discretionary street-level actions by state actors (popularised by Lipsky, 1980) to the construction of the state and urban change (Bénit-Gbaffou, 2018a, 2018b; Charlton, 2018; Rubin, 2018). The state itself identified the need to understand informal practices more deeply in a diagnostic of South African governance (RSA, 2011). The three cases draw on doctoral research by the author in the form of a descriptive-analytical case study of the post-apartheid city administration’s practices in response to service delivery protests in Johannesburg, taking into account over 30 interviews with senior state actors – officials and politicians working within, or closely associated with, the post-apartheid city administration (Pernegger, 2016). The research also included the author’s database of over 450 service delivery protests between 1996 and 2015 in Johannesburg, augmented by textual and thematic analysis of official and technical reports, news articles, press releases and state web sites (Pernegger, 2016). This period corresponds with the African National Congress’s rule of the city since the first democratic local government elections in Johannesburg in 1995 until the Democratic Alliance-led coalition unseated it in 2016.

By 2000, the City of Johannesburg (COJ) Metropolitan Municipality (‘the City’) had consolidated the former post-apartheid transitional administrations into a single set of complex governance arrangements (Beall et al., 2002; COJ, 2001). For instance, the City’s departments carried out strategic planning and daily operations to support urban development and management. The City’s corporatised entities, led by boards of directors, managed specialised functions such as the provision of managed street trading markets and taxi ranks, water and electricity supply and maintenance and Inner City regeneration. The City’s Regional Offices, one for each of its seven administrative regions, managed local stakeholder relations and select local functions, and acted as the local face of the City in its interactions with citizens. Further, Committees comprising Ward and Proportional Representation Councillors led by an Executive Mayor represented different policy areas. Committees made political and policy decisions often within structural and contextual constraints, and provided political oversight of implementation (Beall et al., 2002; COJ, 2001).

Case 1: Conceding minibus-taxi associations’ demands, and ignoring fragmented informal trading management functions, Johannesburg’s Inner City

Since 1996, the City has been responsible for the management of Inner City trading markets and minibus-taxi ranks, both catering to the needs of poor consumers and commuters. The City tackled the difficulties of managing the conflicting policy aims, or absent policy, posed by managing these functions, by using three pivotal informal practices.

The City’s agreed formal practices focused on developing and implementing sectoral plans to regenerate the Inner City, which had been in decline since the 1970s (Beall et al., 2002). Integral to these plans was the City’s management of survivalist informal traders in the Inner City, which had grown from the 200–250 traders of the late 1980s, when the state had deregulated apartheid and economic strictures, to 6815 traders by 2008, the City’s last official count (Pernegger, 2016). The City, aspiring to create order out of the perceived (and real) chaos of unmanaged trading, consulted traders’ associations and Inner City property owners in the 1990s to produce a progressive informal trading policy (Wafer, 2014). This policy was developmental in its emphasis on the creation of managed markets to facilitate the social inclusion of informal traders. The development of traders was, however, overshadowed by reportedly restrictive enforcement of informal trading by-laws (Rogerson, 2016). Because traders located around informal public transport nodes, the City’s plans also emphasised public transport improvements, integrating informal minibus-taxi public transport facilities with informal trading markets. Further, the City promoted ‘social inclusion’ in its citywide Human Development Strategy (COJ, 2005) and its follow-on Growth and Development Strategy 2040 (COJ, 2011). However, these pro-poor policies sat arguably at odds with other cost-recovery and ‘user-pays’ principles of service delivery policy.

The thousands of Inner City traders were ‘ungovernable’ due to the City’s complex, fragmented management arrangements (Bénit-Gbaffou, 2018a). Despite the City’s large investments in formal, managed market-cum-minibus-taxi rank facilities, the Metropolitan Trading Company (MTC), which managed ranks and markets for the City, could not accommodate even a quarter of Johannesburg’s informal traders (Pernegger, 2016). One such facility that the City developed, as part of governing the Inner City, was the Metro Mall, covering two city centre blocks and housing about 600 traders and 3000 minibus-taxis (Wafer, 2014). Metro Mall opened officially in January 2003, some months after the taxi associations and the MTC had signed a management contract and the rank had begun operating.

The Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department (JMPD), established by the City in 2000 to carry out metropolitan policing and traffic management, also ‘managed’ traders who were not working in the markets through its by-law enforcement unit. The JMPD enforced the City’s prohibited trading areas around the markets and other by-laws to control street trading. This enforcement purportedly entrenched divisions between ‘illegal’ non-paying street traders and ‘legal’ paying market traders (Bénit-Gbaffou, 2018a). The JMPD’s reluctant and inconsistent enforcement added to management inconsistency, according to Keith Atkins, the MTC’s CEO between mid-2001 and early 2005 (Atkins, personal communication, 2012). Other departments in the City also impacted informal trading management, such as those responsible for economic and transport policy, strategic planning, area regeneration and urban management. Even private sector property owners and developers, represented by the Central Johannesburg Partnership, managed about a third of Inner City traders in managed precincts.

In Metro Mall, the MTC’s fees for trading spaces and taxi ranks were low and were subsidised by the City. Under the terms of their contract with the City, the taxi associations collected the taxi ranking fees for a 15% cut of the fees. As long as the associations paid these fees to the MTC and the City, the City’s subsidy was sufficient to cover operations. After a change in leadership of the taxi associations, however, they stopped paying fees, and in April 2003 the MTC threatened to evict the taxis from the rank (Atkins, personal communication, 2012). Only then did the taxi associations pay, in cash. However, matters came to a head again a year later, in May 2004. The MTC again threatened to lock the taxis out of Metro Mall if the associations did not pay their arrears within three days. This time the taxi associations, despite having collected the individual taxi drivers’ fees, argued that the City should provide free ranks to them as the state provided to formal public transport operators in South Africa, and refused to pay the MTC. The MTC locked the taxis out of the rank. Taxis then had to operate informally from nearby wasteland. Significant traffic congestion ensued (Atkins, personal communication, 2012).

The taxi associations appealed directly to the Executive Mayor. Atkins explained that such appeals were not unusual; trader and taxi representatives often sidestepped officials when they did not get what they wanted, complaining to Councillors that the City had not consulted with them when in fact it had made many concessions (Atkins, personal communication, 2012). The Mayor convened a meeting in June 2004 between the City representatives and the taxi associations to resolve the taxi lockout impasse. Here, using a type of informal practice known as ‘framing exceptionality’, the Mayor ignored the rules and ‘instructed’ the MTC to reopen the rank at once and, by implication, to overlook the non-payment of fees. From one angle this practice was informal as the legislation did not allow politicians to ‘interfere in the management or administration of any department … or participate in any conduct which would cause or contribute to maladministration in the council’ (RSA, 2000). The Mayor, here dealing with the crisis of traffic congestion and commuter disruption, exercised his considerable political clout and compelled the MTC’s board members to ratify his decision to reopen the rank. However, in effect, the Mayor’s ruling also bypassed the City’s formally approved ‘user pays’ policy by circumventing the City’s standard decision-making structures, thereby also ‘navigating policy contradiction’.

This article later considers the drivers informing the informal practices; however, this particular adopted practice meant that underlying policy debates evident in the crisis were not confronted by the City. Rather, despite numerous politically led meetings, the taxi associations never agreed to pay their outstanding fees. The City’s informal practice of ‘manufacturing uncertainty’, in failing to tackle the obvious fragmentation and dysfunctionality of inter-departmental and inter-agency informal trading and taxi ranking management, also damaged the MTC’s credibility irreparably (Atkins, personal communication, 2012). The City was unable to engage constructively with the strong taxi associations, which were better able to negotiate with the City than the disparate traders’ associations. This inability encouraged Metro Mall’s taxi associations, and also traders, to progressively withhold fees from the MTC, followed by similar resistance in other markets and ranks (Atkins, personal communication, 2012). Starting with the informal practice adopted by the Mayor, the MTC became increasingly unviable and went insolvent, until the Johannesburg Property Company, responsible for managing City-owned properties, absorbed the MTC’s functions in 2012.

Case 2: Placating protestors, Orange Farm, Johannesburg

Mass protests swelled in frequency in Orange Farm in 2008. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of demonstrators protested about service delivery for days and sometimes a week at a time (Pernegger, 2016). Such protests featured frequently in South Africa’s post-apartheid democratic political landscape (Brown, 2015). In Orange Farm, protests were amongst the highest in Johannesburg, accounting for a fifth of service delivery protests (between 1996 and 2012; Pernegger, 2016). Vigorous and sometimes violent public protests rose markedly in Orange Farm in the years leading up to 2008, at times quelled overly forcefully by the state. Here, citizens protested about the lack and high cost of the supply of water and other services, insufficient and poor-quality housing service delivery and land issues (Pernegger, 2014). To resolve these protests, the City applied two linked instances of informal practices.

The City’s formal practices at the time aimed to provide integrated service delivery, ensure more effective citizen relationship management, enhance the state’s and arguably the then ruling party’s political legitimacy, uphold citizens’ constitutional right to free speech and advance empowerment and social inclusion goals. These aims are contained in the City’s Growth and Development Strategy 2040 (COJ, 2011) and other planning documents.

Orange Farm is one of the largest and newest settlements in Johannesburg, located at its southernmost edge. The state laid out Orange Farm in the late 1980s to cope with Johannesburg’s severe apartheid-caused housing shortage amongst the black population, and many people were reportedly ‘dumped’ here from other parts of the city and elsewhere (Murray, 2008). Orange Farm’s population grew a hundred-fold in a little over two decades to over 197,000 people by 2011 living in both formal and makeshift dwellings, but despite the state’s formalisation of Orange Farm’s services and housing, the City still labels the area an ‘informal settlement’ (Pernegger, 2016). The City increasingly prioritised the development of Orange Farm and other similar settlements. For instance, the City allocated Orange Farm ever greater capital budgets year-on-year, with the 2012 allocation 12 times larger than in 2008 (Pernegger, 2016).

Service delivery protests affected not only the City’s overarching planning strategy but also its administrative goals to manage and reduce the number and intensity of protests. To that end, the City’s management team adopted a formal Protocol for Dealing with Community Protests (COJ, 2007). Here, City officials and politicians were to make standardised responses to protest events according to three levels of protest identified. The smallest and most localised protests needed minimal intervention. However, the larger-scale and often violent protests that harmed lives and properties needed local and provincial politicians, not officials, to negotiate with protestors (COJ, 2007).

In 2008, the City’s Regional Office for Region G, including Orange Farm, appointed Thamsanqa Radebe as its Manager of Urban Management and Service Delivery for Region G. Prior to his appointment, Radebe had been a Proportional Representation (PR) councillor for the African National Congress in Johannesburg. Radebe also lived in Orange Farm. Further, he was the chairperson of the Johannesburg arm of the South African National Civic Organisation. This civil society group was allied to the African National Congress and had been a prominent actor in the country’s transition from apartheid to democracy, but it struggled to remain independent of party politics in democratic South Africa (Tomlinson et al., 2003). Revealing a similar interdependence between the administration and the ruling party, Radebe stated that the African National Congress had ‘deployed’ him to the Orange Farm area as an official to handle the three to four protests happening per week, far more than the press had reported (Radebe, personal communication, 2012).

Radebe, a compelling, articulate and politically astute official, commonly acted outside the City’s formal protest management protocol by intervening directly in violent protests in Orange Farm. The City’s executive and management structures sanctioned this informal practice of ‘framing exceptionality’. Exploiting such political-administrative alignment of individual officials and politicians to enhance or reduce organisational effectiveness in South African city administrations is common (SACN, 2019). Radebe believed that his experience and local knowledge of Orange Farm and its citizens, as well as his multiple identities – as politician, resident, activist and official – were instrumental in his ability to defuse protests. Radebe acknowledged the plight of impatient, disgruntled citizens and their real frustrations with the City. He himself highlighted the irony of being an activist whilst serving as an official in the City. For instance, he mentioned his role in organising one of the South African National Civic Organisation’s service delivery protests in 2012, whereas he pacified such protests at other times. He addressed this contradiction by distinguishing formally between these roles at various points in time. On one occasion, he took leave when he led a march against the state (Radebe, personal communication, 2012). Radebe saw his role as an official as important in fostering positive links between the City and Orange Farm citizens. His former roles as a Councillor and activist, he thought, also helped to calm protestors and build positive state–society relations (Radebe, personal communication, 2012).

The City used the type of informal practice in this case which Rubin (2018) identifies as ‘playing on porosity’, by knowingly blurring Radebe’s roles as politician, resident, activist and official. The City took advantage of Radebe’s ability to switch between the roles of an ‘outsider’ (an official) and an ‘insider’ (an activist, resident and party-political figure within a community strongly supportive of the African National Congress). In this way, the City spread the burden of responding to protestors – informally to Radebe and formally to local and provincial politicians. This case shows how the state exercised authority through bending its own rules by using informal practices to support a political agenda, as Roy (2009) identifies. However, these informal practices presented real risks of personal danger to officials, which were not taken into account. Radebe told how even he did not escape the Orange Farm protests unscathed, pointing to a pronounced scar on his cheek. Despite his political kudos, the police mistook him for an uncooperative protestor rather than a state actor and shot him with a rubber bullet as he helped a councillor to leave the scene of a protest (Radebe, personal communication, 2012).

Case 3: Providing ad hoc temporary housing and bypassing operational procedures, and avoiding pro-poor housing policy formulation, Johannesburg’s Inner City

The City used two sorts of linked informal practices to overcome problems encountered with Inner City regeneration. A practical problem was where to house poor occupants temporarily when evicted from buildings about to be revamped. A policy problem was how to include the very poor, living in substandard accommodation, in regeneration plans (COJ, 2016).

The City’s formal practices included facilitating access to housing in line with constitutional rights and legislation, and with housing codes, policies and programmes (Coggin and Pieterse, 2011). However, these practices did not engage with the crisis of the lack of pro-poor publicly funded housing supply and social inclusion in the Inner City (COJ, 2016). Instead, the City focused on a simplistic capitalist-orientated renewal model, which targeted the more affluent income groups (Murray, 2008). Indeed, the City displayed little tolerance for informal activity of any kind in the Inner City (Harrison et al., 2014). Instead, it focused on maintaining financial sustainability by trying to reverse declining property values to maintain the respective rates income of Inner City buildings.

A long-lasting vacuum in the provision of City policy for housing for the poor was clear. Functions and funding for housing dispersed across the spheres of government exacerbated this shortfall. The City tried over many years to give effect to Inner City plans by overcoming areas of decay around ‘bad buildings’. ‘Bad buildings’ are dilapidated, unsafe and unhealthy, often illegally occupied and sometimes abandoned by their owners or ‘hijacked’ by ‘slumlords’. They have high levels of default on rates and services payments. The City tried to facilitate the conversion of ‘bad buildings’ into attractive affordable residential accommodation through its policies. However, it ignored the fact that existing poor occupants would be displaced by regeneration and unable to afford the increased rentals thereafter. The spike in the frequency and violence of citywide protests, especially around issues of housing and land shortages for the poor, and national government censure directed at local government (Pernegger, 2016), pressured the City to be more sensitive to pro-poor housing needs despite policy gaps.

In ‘framing exceptionality’, the City’s Johannesburg Development Agency, set up to tackle the challenge of Inner City regeneration (Beall et al., 2002), decided to provide an ad hoc project-based solution to the systemic challenge of absent city policy for housing the poor. The agency renovated a historic but run-down building and hall that had belonged to the Memorable Order of Tin Hats (MOTH), a support organisation for ex-soldiers, as a temporary housing facility. The agency, with the Johannesburg Property Company, persuaded a commercial property development company to fund the MOTH Hall’s operating costs for a one-year period in part exchange for a complex land development deal elsewhere in the Inner City. The MOTH Hall’s first occupants were relocated in late 2009 from a building called Chestnut Hill in compliance with a 2009 High Court ruling, which bound the City to temporarily accommodate Chestnut Hill evictees. On the moving-in day, however, the 100 would-be MOTH Hall occupants had not agreed or signed leases with the City’s Legal Services department. The occupants were dissatisfied with the dormitory-style temporary accommodation provided, which would have split families. The City’s Legal Services department was unprepared for the standoff and, according to guidance from its outsourced legal experts, allowed the occupants to move in (anonymous, personal communication, 2012). The City in effect bypassed standard procedure using the type of informal practice called ‘framing exceptionality’. The MOTH Hall’s occupants have never signed leases, and nor have they paid the token R25 monthly rental (at that time about £2.00 or US$3.30) intended to partly cover the facility’s operating costs (anonymous, personal communication, 2012). Further, the City did not adequately manage or maintain the MOTH Hall, which eventually returned to ‘slum conditions’ (SERI, 2016).

In the next type of informal practice, ‘manufacturing uncertainty’, politicians and officials of the Housing and other departments stonewalled the need to formulate appropriate policy for pro-poor housing. The City also did not comply with the rules. For example, it did not uphold constitutional rights or the principles of its own Growth and Development Strategy 2040 (COJ, 2011) in ensuring the poor could access affordable housing. It has ‘ignored’ the courts since the first anti-eviction ruling handed down to it in 2006, which tasked it with developing a suitable plan for the building concerned and interdicted it from evicting any of its occupants (Coggin and Pieterse, 2011). The obvious need of the poor for housing and that initial ruling alone meant the City could hardly have overlooked the need for a holistic housing policy for Johannesburg’s Inner City. Indeed, the City demonstrated awareness of its responsibility to provide alternative temporary housing for those rendered homeless by area and building regeneration projects by providing some ad hoc facilities (anonymous, personal communication, 2012). Moving beyond these informal responses seemed impossible, not helped by the fragmented responsibility for this function, contested between national, provincial and local government levels (Charlton, 2018). Further, no national housing framework was in place to cater for renovating ‘bad buildings’ for occupancy by the poor. The City, too, had insufficient resources to accommodate the need for housing for poor families at the scale required, an estimated 16,000 to 30,000 at-risk households (COJ, 2016). This lack of policy was finally addressed comprehensively by the City only in 2016 when it formulated its Inner City Housing Strategy and Implementation Plan (COJ, 2016), though this had not gained much traction at the time of writing in early 2020.

Drivers of informal practices

Despite the state’s emphasis on developmental local government (Pillay et al., 2006), the cases show how six cross-cutting drivers compelled the City to use informal practices. Formal practices were seen by state actors as inadequate to manage the challenges of governance at hand, frequently in situations of conflict, coercion and crisis.

The City needed to tackle immediate and pressing problems. For instance, the Mayor had to manage the taxi lockout’s consequent traffic chaos. The City had to quash violent protestors in Orange Farm to protect people and property. The Johannesburg Development Agency had to provide temporary housing to expedite another project’s implementation in the Inner City.

The City had to manage sets of conflictual state–citizen relationships. In the informal trading and taxi ranking management case, friction arose from the lack of state–society agreement on how to implement previously agreed policy and by-laws, compounded by the City’s difficult relationship with powerful and intimidating taxi associations. The national government’s need to placate the associations in light of upcoming negotiations for the Taxi Recapitalisation Programme of 2004 to formalise the taxi industry, and the City’s own planned public transport investments like the Baragwanath taxi rank facility development, added more tension (COJ, 2004). In Orange Farm, the spike in violent protests in 2008 prompted the City’s appointment of Radebe to help placate protestors. The City’s adversarial engagements with Inner City housing advocates influenced the Legal Services department to bypass its usually required signed lease agreements.

The City had to enhance the legitimacy of the ruling political party and the city administration at different times. The Mayor, aware of party-political concerns about the surge in service delivery protests in advance of the looming 2004 national elections and the lack of traffic order, may have been politically opportunistic in deciding to reopen the taxi rank, or may have simply exercised discretion in the face of service delivery pressure and broad and ambiguous policies. Again, the number of protests in Orange Farm in 2008, and public outcry at the use of undue force to quell them, embarrassed the state and the ruling party in advance of the upcoming 2009 national election. This meant that the City chose to appoint an official whom citizens could readily identify as a politician, activist and resident, to mediate protests. The City’s decision to create an ad hoc temporary housing facility in the Inner City was opportunistic as it allowed other regeneration projects to proceed, thus boosting organisational credibility at the time.

The City responded to the pressure of lobbying citizen groups. These included the militant taxi associations, which protested the taxi lockout after non-payment of user fees. Another group needing the City’s response was the protesting Orange Farm residents. Two Inner City groups pressured the City: the private sector demanding more tangible City-driven regeneration facilitation and housing rights advocates pursuing court rulings favouring the poor.

The need to balance competing priorities across the City’s uncoordinated practices, functions and multiple departments and agencies also drove it to adopt informal practices. In the informal trading and taxi ranking management case, state actors found it difficult to align the contradictory formal practices and competing policy imperatives of the ‘user pays’ versus pro-poor goals of the different departments and agencies involved. Further, the City had to balance strained inter-departmental relations and opposing attitudes internally towards informal traders and taxi associations, ranging from animosity to empathy. Despite the City’s stated developmental intentions for Orange Farm, it had to mitigate negative perceptions of the JMPD’s and police’s unduly forceful treatment of protestors.

Lastly, the City’s resources were limited. The City ignored the scope and scale of Inner City informal trading, citing insufficient resources to properly address the challenge, although Bénit-Gbaffou (2018a) claimed the policy was not adapted to the task even accounting for such limitations. In Orange Farm, the City found a cost-efficient way to placate protestors by exploiting an official’s strong political identity to calm protestors. Reported insufficient resources to address the demand for temporary housing in the Inner City to support regeneration efforts led to the ad hoc aspects of MOTH Hall’s operations. Moreover, the City’s engagements in legal challenges to the evictions of occupants of ‘bad buildings’ were relatively cheaper than funding solutions that dealt with the full extent of the poor’s housing needs.

Reflections on effects of informal practices on organisational capability and social inclusion

Ascertaining the effects of the sometimes supportive, sometimes undermining, informal practices in each case on the City’s organisational capability and citizens’ social inclusion is tricky, especially when the informal practices themselves were contradictory, irrational, ambiguous and too broad to provide much on-the-ground guidance. Other hard-to-separate factors in these cases may have influenced the effects of informal practices. In addition, effects may not have fully materialised, and are hard to trace definitively.

In the informal trading and taxi ranking management case, the Mayor’s decision to reopen the rank ended the taxi lockout and traffic chaos immediately. However, in making concessions to the taxi associations’ demands, the City’s capability was weakened at multiple levels. Overriding the underlying arguably inappropriate ‘user pays’ principle of its policy and circumventing codes governing the actions of state actors meant the Mayor bypassed formal policy and decision-making structures. This informal practice seemed to harm the City’s credibility and integrity to act in the best interests of both the organisation and citizens. The City’s financial sustainability also deteriorated when it was unable to collect fees thereafter, leading to the MTC’s insolvency. The City turned then increasingly to the JMPD’s by-law enforcement to control street trading, becoming more heavy-handed. The Mayor’s actions arguably anticipated a more constructive working relationship between the City and taxi associations, of benefit to the state’s future transport projects. However, the City’s preferential treatment of taxi associations was at the expense of the less-powerful informal traders’ associations whose interests were more easily ignored, intensifying the mistrust between traders and the City, and culminating in the City’s large-scale eviction of traders in its ‘Operation Clean Sweep’ of 2013. The Constitutional Court ordered the City to stop its management and by-law enforcement endeavours in the Inner City even though these measures were patently necessary (Bénit-Gbaffou, 2018a). However, even this defeat failed to encourage the City to address its fragmented and inconsistent management arrangements and unrealistic policy, and neither did it produce a less fractious City–street trader relationship (Pieterse, 2017). The City has yet to reflect suitably on the shortfalls of its street trading policy in terms of the still unrealised objectives of the social inclusion of traders.

In Orange Farm, the City reported that protests had declined and were less violent after Radebe’s appointment, but increased budgets and infrastructure planning must have also contributed to this outcome (Pernegger, 2016). The City’s opportunistic informal practices strengthened the then ruling party’s and the City’s organisational capabilities by extending their reach and legitimacy. However, shortcomings are plain to see. State actors were exposed to unnecessary and uncovered personal safety risks. Blurring an official’s identity with a political one reinforced organisational inflexibility, as the City could then avoid the tougher challenge of growing its capability to manage conflict more systematically. The City’s former opportunistic approach was presumably less effective in the post-2016 Democratic Alliance’s coalition-led City context. Although the City’s informal practices might appear benign, they reduced citizens’ freedom of speech and access to decision-makers, and the City’s building of potentially constructive relationships with citizens.

Once the City had created the Inner City temporary MOTH Hall housing facility, the occupants moved in. However, the MOTH Hall declined steadily and the City inadvertently became the owner of a ‘bad building’, the very situation it sought to resolve. The already slow progress of Inner City regeneration was slowed even further by the City’s deliberate avoidance of the housing policy vacuum. Only in 2016 did the City take more concrete steps to redefine and prioritise the problem of housing provision for the poor in the form of the Inner City Housing Strategy and Implementation Plan (COJ, 2016), which the then new Democratic Alliance-led City finally approved in 2017. By then, though, the original 130 occupants had lived in the MOTH Hall for years longer than the initially planned 12 months (SERI, 2016), and numbers had grown to reportedly 900 occupants (ioL News, 2016). The building’s conditions had deteriorated markedly, compromising the personal safety of occupants. The building was structurally damaged, vandalised, invaded, overcrowded, torched, flooded, crime-ridden, hijacked and beset by electricity and sewerage problems (SERI, 2016). Moreover, the informal practice of creating temporary ad hoc housing arrangements, like the MOTH Hall, arguably gave the City ‘space’ for a few years to sidestep the need to create a holistic, but costly, pro-poor housing solution for the Inner City. Eventually, though, continuing objections by pro-poor housing advocates, amongst other factors, led the City to develop an appropriate policy and provide more resources to address the challenge, pointing to improved future prospects for supporting social inclusion.

Clearly, the identified informal practices changed the course of Johannesburg’s urban governance. However, as a limitation in this study, many other practices likely went undetected, therefore evading scrutiny which might have clarified the effects more accurately. The difficulty in distinguishing between formal and informal practices further complicates this analysis. For instance, the Mayor’s decision to reopen the rank can be seen as an informal practice that both breaks the rules of conduct governing his actions and is the legitimate exercise of his executive powers.

In closing

Governance by the state, here the city administration, without the existence of informal practices seems unimaginable. Not only are informal practices necessary, but they are an inevitable feature of the messiness of real governance. However, informal practices of the state can be hard to pin down with any precision, even those that are pivotal and contribute to a shift in the trajectories of the state’s formal practices. Informal practices can sometimes replace formal ones or fill a vacuum when formal ones are absent. They can sometimes mask the shortcomings of formal practices, allowing the state to avoid confronting underlying challenges of governance. Despite the limitations of this research, making the invisible visible in these three cases provides insights into the contexts, timings and individuals informing the extent and nature of informal practices used by the different parts of the City.

Informal practices by state actors are more prevalent when they must handle urgent problems, strained relations with citizens, political opportunism, lobbyists’ pressure, conflicting priorities and limited resources. This list is not exhaustive, as more study might uncover drivers not apparent in this research. In the cases here, the City used various informal practices to tackle only partially, override, circumvent or stonewall specific challenges. These practices resulted in varied positive and negative effects on organisational capability and social inclusion, although multiple other influences also impacted outcomes.

The City missed opportunities to learn from the experimental attributes of informal practices. It could have purposefully studied the incidents of informal practices to expose the shortcomings and gaps in formal practices, redefining the nature of the problems leading to the need for informal practices and allowing for introspection on the potential effects of choices made (and not made) on organisational capability and social inclusion. The state might have minimised suboptimal aspects of both formal and informal practices to enhance a more coherent governance. Certainly, these cases show that informal practices by state actors, here those in the City of Johannesburg, can shape future city governance and formal practices in ways that significantly undermine or uphold democratic ideals, thus warranting more mindful scrutiny than given so far.