The globality of the local? A decolonial perspective on local economic development in South Africa

Introduction

This article seeks to provide a decolonial critical reading of Local Economic Development (LED) strategies. Whereas the last three decades have witnessed the proliferation of academic and policy-oriented literature and policies celebrating LED as a silver bullet for ailing local economies, the pressing economic challenges faced by cities and towns of the Global South compel an onlooker to take a different view of LED strategies. Perhaps the popularity of LED strategies within the development discourse is anchored on its success in cities of the Global North. However, for countries in the Global South that can be said to be stuck in a seemingly perpetual economic stagnation – or coloniality (for the majority of the people at least) – LED strategies cannot be said to have delivered on their promises.

The key objective of this article is to provide a critical appreciation of LED practices in post-apartheid South Africa. This is done through the employment of a decolonial thinking paradigm – a combative critical social theory premised on promoting the intellectual autonomy of the hitherto colonised and marginalised societies. After the introduction, this discussion moves on to expose the dominance of Western-centric knowledge systems particularly in the ex-colonies; particularly in the area of ‘development’. The idea of development is therefore critiqued through emphasising the relevance of knowledge systems from the Global South. This is followed by an outline of the salient tenets defining LED thinking in South Africa. South Africa’s LED-oriented policies and strategies are then analysed with the intention of decolonising LED-oriented knowledge and practices. Prior to concluding, the discussion recommends a situated approach to LED. A situated approach to LED acknowledges and prioritises the uniqueness of local contexts in the imagining and practice of development strategies.

Whose ‘Local’, whose ‘Economy’ and whose ‘Development’?

The failure of LED strategies in most African countries results from the epistemological dominance of the Global North specifically within the economic development milieu. This dominance is not only expressed through Africa’s overreliance of Western-based development consultants and agencies that continue to dictate how LED strategies ought to be formulated and implemented, there is also a clear dominance of Western-centric knowledge in African universities and business schools that define what ‘development’ should entail. From a decolonial perspective, the West’s epistemological dominance within the sphere of development forms part of the colonial matrix of power or coloniality. Viewed as forming part of the darker side of modernity (Mignolo, 2011) therefore, Africa and other counties in the Global South are seen as incapable of being developmental. As Grosfoguel (2007: 214) posits:

We went from the sixteenth century characterization of ‘people without writing’ to the eighteenth and nineteenth century characterization of ‘people without history’, to the twentieth century characterization of ‘people without development’ and more recently, to the early twenty first century of ‘people without democracy’.

The Western-centric models of development have a propensity of posing as ‘universal’. But they are not. The 2008 global economic crisis for example, unmasked the imperfections of Western-centric and capitalist modes of economic governance and development. The 2008 global economic crisis therefore reaffirmed the salience of endogenous, i.e. locally based economic development strategies. The point on the significance of place-based development strategies is discussed later in the article. From a decolonial perspective, the locus of enunciation, i.e. people’s geographical and epistemological positionality and/or place is salient.

Like many other development initiatives, strategies, policies and programmes at national and regional level of governance throughout the world, LED strategies are not neutral panaceas to development challenges that face the world today. Thus, while LED strategies are generally viewed as effective tools for circumventing the harsh realities of globalisation and for tapping-in global economic opportunities, they are also generally spared the negative criticism of being burdened with global coloniality within the local spheres of governance where they are implemented to solve different local development challenges.

This is not surprising because since their advent in late 1970s and early 1980s in North America and Western Europe, the role of LED strategies has rarely been articulated from what scholars such as Mignolo (2000) and Grosfoguel (2007) referred as the ‘locus of enunciation’ of the subalternised subjects within the local spaces where they are implemented. As already mentioned above, this article will attempt to recast the role of LED strategies in the Global South. The case study of South Africa is used as a vantage point for examining how the uncritical implementation of LED strategies can exacerbate economic disparities. Indeed, the article argues conversely that place-based economic development that account for local specificities and address the problems of subaltern subjects within the local spaces are needed to reduce the inequalities.

However, in order to provide a critique of the role and impact of LED strategies from the position of a subaltern subject within which they are implemented, it is vital to first explicate the intricate relationship between the LED strategies and the idea of development in general as well as global coloniality in particular. This is quite important to articulate because LED strategies are a progeny of the dominant idea of development whose origin is firmly rooted in the project of global coloniality. Hence the question posed in this article: whose ‘local’, whose ‘economy’ and what ‘development’?

In one of his ground-breaking books entitled Local Histories Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, Mignolo (2000) explicates how the Western world has managed to present their local development experiences and related narratives as ‘universal’ and/or global. In a way, this myth of local histories projected as global designs has marginalised other knowledges, experiences, voices and narratives. As the title of this article suggests, the social and economic disparities characterising most of the cities of the Global South could as well depict similar disparities at a global level. Put aptly, the local could be viewed as a microcosm of the global. Countries marginalised as inferior from a development point of view are also characterised by equally weak economies that serve the interests of capital at the expense of the majority of citizens. The following section will sketch out some of the key tenets of decolonial thinking. This is done with the intention of highlighting the adverse effects of LED strategies that are not organic and/or informed by local histories and everyday experiences. The following section looks at the linkage between global coloniality and the dominant idea of development.

Global coloniality and the idea of development

That the idea of development and colonial domination is inter-linked in one way or another has been a subject of academic debate for a considerable period. As one African scholar points out ‘what is normally accepted as “development”’ in countries of the Global South, ‘has been essentially an imperial project, derived and financed by dominant Western powers to serve Western needs’ (Cheru, 2009: 277–278). This is so because development cannot be what one group of people located in a very different context can do for other people located in a different geo-specific context.

Thus, with specific reference to ‘development’ programmes, such as the Structural Adjustment Programmes that were imposed on African nation-states, Cheru (2009: 277) argues that ‘policy making, an important aspect of sovereignty, has been wrenched out of the hands of the African state. This is colonisation, not development’. Indeed, this is important to articulate because historically, development was conceived within colonial discourses and meant opening up the Third World for economic exploitation as well as the destruction of indigenous religious beliefs and traditions, among other negative connotations associated with colonial capitalism and the so-called civilising mission. The idea of development within the context of colonialism meant that Europeans were agents of development and the peoples of the Global South were objects of development.

The agents of development, the European settlers in the Global South during the colonial era

did not hesitate to resort to brute force in dealing with natives, to destroy the forms of social organisation that previously existed or even to co-opt these forms in the service of ends other than those to which they had been directed. (Mbembe, 2008: 80)

This therefore meant that, socially, colonial development entailed re-classifying and hierarchising the populations of the colonised places according to race within the spaces where colonial development was taking place. In the process racial classification and hierachisation of the populations of the Global South, the conquered local people therein lost their resources such as land. This accumulation through dispossession turned people of the Global South to proletarians left with nothing but their cheap labour. The twin processes of accumulation through dispossession and proletarianisation ushered in racialised forms of economic, social and spatial inequalities that are evident to this day.

Presently, the idea of development cannot be disassociated with colonial tendencies even though people now live in a world dubbed ‘postcolonial’. This is mainly because even after the demise of juridical administrative colonialism, colonial tendencies and colonial-type of relations remain a present reality. Thus, according to scholars such as Spivak (1990: 166), the whole of the so-called postcolonial world today is simply a ‘post-colonial neo-colonialized world’. Spivak’s position on the myth of the postcolonial world is also supported by scholars such as Grosfoguel (2007: 219) who argues that,

One of the most powerful myths of the twentieth century was the notion that the elimination of colonial administrations amounted to the decolonisation of the world. This led to the myth of a ‘postcolonial’ world. The heterogeneous and multiple global structures put in place over a period of 450 years did not evaporate with the juridical-political decolonization of the periphery over past 50 years. We continue to live under the same ‘colonial power matrix’. With juridical administrative decolonization we moved from a period of ‘global colonialism’ to the current period of ‘global coloniality’. Although ‘colonialism administrations’ have been entirely eradicated and the majority of the periphery is politically organised into independent states, non-European people are still living under crude European exploitation and domination. The old colonial hierarchies of European versus non-Europeans remain in place and are entangled with the ‘international division of labour’ and accumulation of capital at a world-scale.

Coloniality denotes a variety of colonialisms that survive classical, juridical administrative colonialism. Thus, according to scholars such as Maldonado-Torres (2007: 243):

Coloniality is different from colonialism. Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such a nation an empire. Coloniality, instead, refers to a long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labour, intersubjectivity relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and every day.

Coloniality can also be understood in terms of division of the world into what Santos (2007) referred to as the ‘zone of being’ and the ‘zone of non-being’. For Santos (2007) the modern world system that came into being since the beginning of ‘voyages of discovery’ by figures such as Christopher Columbus in 1492 and the subsequent advent of Euro-modernity with its darker and brighter side has since been characterised by a Western abyssal line of thinking that divides those who are privileged to live in the zone of being in the Global North and those who are condemned to the hellish zone of non-being in the Global South with race as an organising principle. While those in the zone of non-being are characterised by a catalogue of deficits and series of lacks, those located in the zone of being systematically reap all the fruits of Western-centred modernity from the 16th century ‘rights of people’ to the 18th century ‘rights of man’ and the late 20th century ‘human rights’ (Grosfoguel, 2007). Thus, in his description of how those in the zone of non-being are treated by those in the zone of being, Grosfoguel (2007: 214) argues that,

We went from the sixteenth century characterization of ‘people without writing’ to the eighteenth and nineteenth century characterization of ‘people without history’, to the twentieth century characterization of ‘people without development’ and more recently, to the early twenty first century of ‘people without democracy’.

What typically defines the relationship between the zone of being and the zone non-being, even within the postcolonial nation-states of the Global South, is not only the vertical social hierarchisation of identities informed by race. The zone of non-being also perpetually produces subjects who are deceived and crushed by the power of those residing in the zone of being. Echoing similar sentiments, Fanon (1961: 29) states that:

The colonial world is a world cut into two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policemen and the soldiers who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression … the policemen and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle-butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native.

By and large, the relationship between the zone of being and the zone of non-being resembles what Fanon (1961) described as a Manichean structure. According to Fanon:

The zone where the natives live is not complimentary to zones inhabited by the white settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in service of a higher unity. … they both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. … The settlers town is strongly-built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly-lit town, all covered with asphalt … The town belonging to the colonized people … the native town … the reservation, is a place of ill-fame … It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of each other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. (1961: 29–30)

Unmasking socio-economic and spatial inequalities in post-apartheid South Africa

In the case of South Africa, it can be deduced that the national and local situation of development is not an exception to the presence of global inequalities in general. Thus, the current inequalities in South Africa that were once decried by the former South African president Thabo Mbeki as ‘two worlds in one country’ cannot be understood outside the nature of the world system that came into being since the advent of Euro-modernity about 450 years ago. Thus, Thabo Mbeki in his speech at the opening of the National Assembly in South Africa in 1998 argued that:

South Africa is a country of two nations, one black and the other white … One of these nations is white, relatively prosperous, regardless of gender or geographic dispersal. It has ready access to a developed economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure. The second and larger nation of South Africa is black and poor … This nation lives under conditions of a grossly underdeveloped economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure.

Within the sphere of urban development, the South African cities resemble an ‘urban geography of privilege and disempowerment’. The origin of this kind of urban geography beyond South Africa can be traced to the advent of the Euro-American modernity that came to cast its darker side on the peoples of the non-Western world and its brighter side on the peoples of the West but within South Africa. It can be traced to apartheid statutes such as Group Areas Act – a master plan for internal urban apartheid whose origins are rooted in the Western abyssal form of thinking. In other words, the Group Areas Act in South Africa did not represent any new thinking about race and racial segregation but was merely a codification of ‘comprehensive segregation’ and to serve as a planning apparatus for urban segregation. This set up of development and coloniality, as inexorably intertwined in the apartheid and indeed, post-apartheid South Africa, is something that can be unmasked and dismantled, from a decolonial epistemic perspective.

Decoloniality is a cluster of liberation projects of critical thought from the ex-colonised epistemic sites. It seek to make sense of the position of ex-colonised people within the current world system which Mignolo (2000) describes as Euro-American-centric, Christian-centric, patriarchal, capitalist, hetero-normative, racially hierarchised, modern world system that came into being in the 15th century. It is a liberatory and combative thought that emerged from the numerous struggles against coloniality. Thus, as Maldonado-Torres (2006: 117) puts it:

By decoloniality it is meant here the dismantling of relations of power and conceptions of knowledge that foment the reproduction of racial, gender, and geo-political hierarchies that came into being or found new and more powerful forms of expression in the modern/colonial world.

While the idea of a ‘locus of enunciation’ is quite a noble one to articulate what development means to anyone depending on the social and epistemic location of the speaker, the problem arises when the subject that speaks and its location is decoupled as in Western philosophy and science. Thus, according to Grosfoguel (2007: 213),

By delinking the ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location from the subject that speaks, Western philosophy and sciences are able to produce a myth about a Truthful universal knowledge that covers up, that is, conceals who is speaking as well as the geopolitical and body-political epistemic location in the structures of colonial power/knowledge from which the subject speaks.

LED strategies are without any doubt important developmental tools but it can be argued that this depends on the context within which they are deployed to address developmental challenges. Thus, this article undertakes to appraise the performance of LED strategies in South Africa from the locus of enunciation of the subaltern subject. This is a de-colonising methodology because the ‘subaltern’ of the development discourse have rarely been given a chance to articulate the impacts of development from their social and epistemic locations even within the context of the much acclaimed discourses of LED strategies.

Given the dominance of abyssal thinking (Santos, 2007) that is, the deliberate division of the world as well as specific countries into zones of being and non-being – LED strategies should be place-sensitive if they are to yield positive and inclusive development outcomes. The following section provides an overview of LED in post-apartheid South Africa. Focus is given to the key policy thrusts as well as the performance of LED strategies across South Africa.

LED and the geographies of inequality in South Africa

South Africa’s political transition from apartheid to democracy was not met with an ‘economic miracle’. In other words, the political transition did not result in a wholesale redistribution of wealth between the white minority and the black majority. The dominance of global capitalism and its complex suite of neoliberal policies and strategies compelled the newly democratised state to conform to the dictates of the market, which itself produces inequalities. The abandonment of the Reconstruction and Development Programme for a macroeconomic policy dubbed the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) – marked the victory of neoliberalism in South Africa. While there are positive changes within South Africa’s development discourse the ‘trickle-down effect’ thinking informing the GEAR policy has seen the growth of inequalities, high levels of unemployment and a snail-paced redistribution of wealth amongst South Africans.

Apart from the GEAR macroeconomic policy and its influence on LED, South Africa has an exhaustive LED-centric legislative framework. These include: The Constitution (Republic of South Africa, 1996), which emphasises the salience of local government in economic development. According to the Constitution, a ‘municipality must structure and manage its administration, and budgeting and planning processes to give priority to the basic needs of the community, and to promote the social and economic development of the community’. There also exists the White Paper on Local Government (Republic of South Africa, 1998) that emphasises the importance of municipalities to be ‘developmental’. At the core of municipalities’, developmental mandate was LED.

Other key policies and legislation informing LED include: the Municipal Systems Act (Republic of South Africa, 2000a); the LED Guidelines (Republic of South Africa, 2000b); Refocusing Development on the Poor: LED Policy Paper (Department of Provincial and Local Government, 2001); the Draft LED Policy (2002); the Policy Guidelines for Implementing LED in South Africa (Department of Provincial and Local Government, 2005); the National Framework for LED in South Africa (Department of Provincial and Local Government, 2006); the Integrated Sustainable Rural Development Strategy and Urban Renewal Strategy, the Revised National LED Framework 2012–2016 and recently, the National Development Plan.

At the core of all the policies, legislation and strategies, is the salience of local authorities in championing local development strategies. Though well-intentioned, these LED-oriented policies operate in a geospatial and political environment that remains divided on racial and class lines. In other words, South Africa’s cities are not only products of the apartheid system, they are also intrinsically shaped by neoliberal policies. These apartheid-neoliberal cities, therefore, have a propensity of reproducing geographies of economic inequalities.

The colonial and apartheid-induced racialised spatial and economic disparities continued to haunt South African cities from 1994 onwards. Like cities of the Global North in the 1980s, South African cities came face-to-face with de-industrialisation of the traditional manufacturing industries, urban decay and rampant unemployment. The city of Johannesburg for example faced a sharp economic downturn as a result of de-industrialisation in the period prior to 1994 (Ndlovu, 2011). Faced with these growing economic challenges, South African cities began to embrace what are have popularly been referred to as entrepreneurial approaches to LED as a ‘turn-around’ strategy for economic growth. According to Maharaj and Ramballi (1998: 131): ‘Since 1990, there has been an increased emphasis on LED strategies as South African cities focus on urban reconstruction and development to try to reduce the inequalities associated with apartheid’.

The question that needs to be answered, therefore, is that of whether LED strategies have so far succeeded in bridging racialised and gendered gaps of socio-economic inequalities between the rich and poor. The implementation of traditional forms of LED strategies borrowed from Europe in a highly racially, socio-spatially and economically divided society such as South Africa was not to be without its challenges.

While the democratic government of South Africa has recognised LED strategies as important tools for ‘post-apartheid economic reconstruction’ (Nel and Rogerson, 1996: 69) since the 1990s, there is ample evidence that the inequalities of the past remain entrenched. The question that needs to be answered about the status quo of inequalities between communities and individuals in South Africa after 20 years of the democracy is that of why are LED strategies failing to bring about rapid socio-economic transformation in South Africa that can lead to flattening of racialised and gendered socio-economic inequalities. In responding to this question, it becomes apparent that the neoliberal-informed LED strategies are often driven by the so-called market forces at the expense of other developmental demands of a social, spatial and environmental nature. Put differently, the entrepreneurial approach to LED is often desensitised of the racial and socio-spatial forces shaping the South African society.

Many of South Africa’s cities have chosen this entrepreneurial approach in their deployment of LED strategies. However, this means that LEDs cannot be vehicles for bridging racialised and gendered socio-economic inequalities. This is mainly because the idea that the entrepreneurial approach, predicated on growth coalitions and public–private partnerships will eventually lead to trickle-down effects such as the availability of jobs, means that LED strategies in South Africa reinforce inequalities since the previously disadvantaged local communities only participate as sources of cheap labour and not as owners of means of production.

Thus, even though the official conception of LED strategies in South Africa accommodates elements of what in the international literature is referred to as market-led and market-critical approaches (Scott and Pawson, 1999), leading to the development of the idea of pro-poor LEDs, it is clear that racial and gender socio-economic inequalities in the post-apartheid South Africa cannot be addressed by an approach that leads to one section of the population constituting the working class while the other remains owning the means of production. In other words, there is no doubt that LED strategies, during their implementation over a number of spaces and years in South Africa, have produced a substantial number of jobs for the previously disadvantaged black population, particularly in the tourism sector but there also no doubt that the owners of means of production still remain predominantly ‘white’.

With the advent of the global financial crisis, it is worth interrogating how the deployment of LED strategies by the South African localities have fared in terms of bridging the gap between the poor and rich across gender and racial categories of the population. This is important because while, in general, sub-Saharan countries are less integrated into the global financial system but nonetheless not immune to the global financial crisis, South Africa has strong links with the global economy and, as such, it is more vulnerable to the volatilities of global financial flows.

One of the sectors whose performance needs to be assessed against global financial crisis is the labour market. This is not because the labour market can possibly bridge gendered and racialised socio-economic inequalities but mainly because one of the primary objectives of LED strategies in South Africa is to prevent job losses and to create more employment – a step with potential to reduce the inequalities. According to Statistics South Africa (2009) and the South Africa Reserve Bank (2009), South Africa has been in a recession since the fourth quarter of 2008 and ‘this severe slump has largely been driven by a decrease in the manufacturing sector, along with a fall in output in the mining, financial, real estate and business services, and wholesale and retail trade sectors’ (Verick, 2010: 1).

This economic contraction has negatively impacted on the South African labour market by leading to massive retrenchments, layoffs, company closures, a freeze on hiring and low salaries, which all contributed to rising unemployment and to the widening of socio-economic gap between the rich and the poor. Thus, even though the South African government has responded to the negative effects of the global financial crisis by loosening the monetary and fiscal policy in order to support the creation of employment and circumvent further job losses, there is yet no evidence that this trend has completely been arrested even though it slowed down.

That the global financial crisis has impacted negatively on the plight of women at varying levels across a variety of nations throughout world is now also an established finding. Thus, according to scholars such as Seguino (2010) and Smith (2009), among others, gendered employment practices means that women and men are affected differently by the global economic recession. In South Africa, the marginalisation of women through pre-colonial, colonial, apartheid and nationalist patriarchal practices have placed them at the bottom end of the hierarchical order of inequalities especially in the sphere of socio-economic development. Thus, while various forms of women empowerment programmes have been developed since the advent of post-apartheid in South Africa, the present global economic and financial recession has impacted negatively on the plight of black women, particularly those involved in empowerment programmes such as Small, Medium and Micro-enterprises whose funding is dependent on the health of micro-finance institutions.

In light of the failure of LED strategies to bridge gendered and racialised socio-economic gaps among the peoples of South Africa after several years of the democratic dispensation, the question that remains unanswered is that of what needs to be done. The answer is that LED strategies like any other Western development strategies and projects that promise to deliver meaningful development in Africa or the Global South cannot address the fundamental problem of inequalities unless they undergo a process of de-colonisation.

Decolonising LED thinking

The first step towards de-colonisation of LED strategies entails acknowledging that the majority of the peoples of the Global South’s population do not have the capacity to fully participate in the global economy. As such, LED strategies must also be directed towards the idea of ‘self-reliance’. However, the development option of ‘self-reliance’ can only be realised when the poor in local communities of Global South nations own and control the means of production which they can use as the basis of imagining another possible future outside free market ideology.

In South Africa, it is common knowledge that one of the primary factors that have contributed to the extreme levels of poverty among the black members of the population is the lack of access to land. It was through such colonial and apartheid legislations and practices as the 1913 Land Act and Group Areas Act, respectively, among other colonial practices that black South Africans lost their land while also experiencing major disruptions and dislocations in their ways of living. Today, the land question is a contested developmental discourse in South Africa but since the processes of land restitutions through democratic means of ‘willing-buyer, willing-seller’ have proven to be ineffective, the majority of the black population have no any other option of survival outside the labour market.

This situation is made worse by the fact that the much vaunted LED strategies that were intended to address the ills of colonial and apartheid practices in South Africa tend to be less vocal on the questions of ownership such as land, by the previously disadvantaged communities such as black and women and are in favour of investment and big-business support. In other words, this bias towards free market ideology by LEDs in South Africa tends to overshadow the significance of de-colonised local approaches to development such as ‘self-reliance’, which can only be feasible when portions of fertile land on which black people were removed from are returned to them.

That a process of land restitution can present black people and women with developmental options outside the global capitalist economy is demonstrated by Binns and Nel’s (1999) case study of LED in the rural Mpofu District in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. In this case study, Binns and Nel (1999) observed that, with a resource such as land, rural people can engage in ‘self-reliance’ projects such as farming with far reaching consequences in addressing socio-economic endeavours and the plight of the black population in general and women in particular. Thus, since colonial and apartheid processes meant that women remained in rural hinterlands while black men became sources of cheap labour in urban settings, the availability of fertile land has the potential of enabling rural women engage in self-help projects where production is not necessarily for the global market. These self-reliance projects can also retain the much needed labour force of able-bodied men who are currently relocating en masse to urban centres in search of jobs. In short, Binns and Nel’s (1999) findings were that innovative rural development strategies and the enhancement of local self-reliance can only be possible when members of local communities own and control land as a resource. This opens the scope for place-based LED strategies.

Place-based LED as an option for the Global South?

Perhaps one of the main reasons for the failure of LED strategies in yielding intended development outcomes in most of South Africa’s localities is the fact that most of them were ‘imposed’ and/or top-down. The transfer of LED strategies from the cities in the Global North to those in the developing countries has resulted in the widening of socio-economic and spatial inequalities between the wealthy and the poor people. For the political, economic and institutional conditions in the developed world are different from those found in the Global South. For this reason, decolonial thinkers have emphasised the significance of the concept of situatedness and/or locus of enunciation.

A situated approach to LED for instance, would take into account the historico-political, geospatial and socio-economic context of a country such as South Africa. This thinking in LED is well expressed by some scholars (Tomaney, 2010), referring to it as a place-based approach. As one scholar aptly outlined,

Although there is a case for learning from elsewhere, [it is argued] that cities and regions must understand and develop their own assets as a necessary element in any development strategy and that this is the key to place-based thinking. There are no shortcuts to local development based on copying strategies from elsewhere. (Tomaney, 2010: 9, emphasis added)

Part of harnessing local specific economic potential includes recognising the capabilities of existing stakeholders in a given area. These include the government, civil society and the private sector. In South Africa for instance, there exist a number of challenges related to the government’s institutional capacity to deliver basic services, and let alone to foster LED. This challenge of lack of institutional thickness, skills and in some instances resources, has been more apparent in local authorities located in hitherto Homelands, i.e. Bantustan areas. Khan (1998: 10) posits that in South Africa:

Policies are made in a hurry, often under intense external pressure, new legislatures are inexperienced, and inundated with massive amounts of new legislation; the executive bureaucracy are hamstrung by weak staff, poor information and logistical support; and inadequate procedures and lack of clarity concerning clear relations between governmental departments.

Writing on place-based LED approach as an emergent paradigm, Tomaney (2010: 7) outlines at least four key tenets of this approach:

Place-based approaches require strengthened local and regional institutions that are able to assess and develop local economic assets in ways that amount to more than ‘tailoring national policies’.

With these four points in mind, the idea of self-reliance in LED becomes important. This is primarily especially so when read from a decolonial perspective as it challenges the misplaced notion that development can be something that a subject located in another contextual setting such as Europe and North America can do for and to another subject in a different existential circumstance, such as that of a developing country. The idea of self-reliance, therefore, not only displaces the false notion of objectivity in development discourse but also returns to subalternised societies what Grosfoguel (2007) referred to as the ‘locus of enunciation’, so that they can imagine and speak of development from their own ‘geo-politics’, ‘ego-politics’, ‘body-politics’ and ‘theo-politics’ of knowledge of what of constitutes development to them.

In Binns and Nel’s (1999) case study of Mpofu District in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa for instance, the authors observe that local initiatives enable communities to tap into their local knowledge(s), skills and resources to achieve their culturally unique aspirations and objectives. This is an important observation because it means that local development cannot simplistically be undertaken to suit alien ideologies and goals, but what needs to be factored in are the developmental needs and aspirations of the local indigenous communities. This is not to advocate another fundamentalist approach to development which calls for total rejection of Western ideas but it is to advocate for a pluriversality of ideas in development where ‘ecologies of knowledges’ (Santos, 2007) co-exist side by side rather than a singular universal approach being imposed across all humanity.

In the case study of Mpofu District by Binns and Nel (1999), it is clear that the local communities that they studied remained with the option of tapping into the global market economy out of their own volition and also to pursue production for their own subsistence. In such an environment, inclusive ‘knowledge sharing’ rather than a one-dimensional ‘knowledge-transfer’ process informs development discourse hence opening the possibility of many other options outside market economy ideologies.

Conclusion

Despite the significance of LED strategies in negotiating the harsh realities of global economy as well as in tapping into global economic opportunities; the present hierarchal world order does not permit the world’s habitants to participate in the global economy on equal terms. As highlighted in the introductory section of this article, the dominance of Western-centric knowledges and ideas on what it means to be ‘developed’ has often led to the marginalisation of knowledges form other parts of the world. The primary argument advanced throughout this article, is that those knowledges that have been marginalised for centuries, must be acknowledged. As some decolonial scholars cited above aver, the appreciation of knowledge from the Global South, particularly with regard to issues of development, is likely to result in the formulation of context-specific development solutions.

This, therefore, means that Western-centric LED strategies cannot be expected to yield similar results in any part of the world at any given moment because of variances in challenges that face different localities across the world. Thus, the major challenge facing the countries of the Global South after the advent of Western-centred modernity is coloniality which has so far replicated global inequalities and injustices within these nation-states. In South Africa, LED strategies are expected to address the challenges of gendered and racialised socio-economic inequalities but so far the gap between the rich and poor has not yet been addressed.

Indeed, Western-centric LED strategies cannot address the challenge of inequalities in South Africa because the spatio-temporalities within which they are implemented have a unique history which can only be addressed by a decolonial approach to the question of local development and inequalities. The decolonial approach advocated by this article is that of self-reliance as well as situatedness which is intended to open up other possible development options outside the global economy without a total rejection of the market ideologies. The quest, therefore, is to pluriversalise development theory in ways that can lead to a co-existence of ecologies of development options. It is refreshing to learn that European scholars such as Tomaney (2010) cited above, are beginning to advocate for a situated or a place-based approach to LED. Such an inclusive approach begins to change the composition of the actors, as well as content of the conversation on what development means.