The settlement is squeezed between the Clare Estate and the Bisasar Road garbage dump, the largest in Africa. Trucks continually enter the dump, passing Electron Avenue and other similarly named roads from a bygone age of technological innovation under apartheid “development.” Along Kennedy Road, the dump is ringed by a long concrete fence and topped by perfume rods that spray out fumes in an attempt to mask the smell. People walk constantly up and down the hill, to and from their jobs as domestic workers or gardeners in the houses on the Clare Estate, or to pick through the dump. Entry to the noxious and toxic dump is officially prohibited to shack dwellers, but if one walks alongside the fence that abuts the shack settlements one sees that, every few yards, concrete panels have been removed for easy access, and many make a living by sifting through the detritus, collecting cardboard, plastic, or metal to sell to recyclers in the “informal economy.”

Most of the Kennedy Road “informal settlement” is not “on” Kennedy Road, but is accessible through numerous paths that crisscross the hills.² The people there are desperately poor. Forgotten in post-apartheid South Africa, they live without basic services like sanitation, water or electricity, in shacks dug into the side of the hill and built out of advertising boards, corrugated iron, branches and mud; their “temporary” shelter having become more or less permanent. For a long time, there wasn’t even refuse collection.

Kennedy Road itself is on the Clare Estate, a mainly Indian, middle- and upper-middle-class residential area that has experienced skyrocketing real-estate prices. In the interstices of the estate – in the valleys and along riverbanks, and against the municipal dump – there are eight different shack settlements, each with different histories and organizations. One of them is the Kennedy Road settlement, which has a radically democratic political culture that took years to develop. Other shack settlements have different forms of government, some based on political patronage which are often overseen by an induna (chief), some more respected than others, but often governance is along hierarchical and patronage lines.³ Because there are material interests at stake, the creation of democracy is often a continually contested and hard-fought struggle. Each settlement is configured by different material realities, often limited by physical space, size and geography, which determine the feasibility of such things as common meeting spaces. But, despite these constraints, looking down from the hilltops, there is something special about this area of Durban. The real-estate developers understand it, and it is not lost on the shack dwellers either.⁴

On March 19, 2005, despite the local councillor’s promises, the bulldozers moved in. Seeing their “Promised Land” being levelled, the shack dwellers acted, blockading Umgeni Road with burning tires and mattresses, bringing traffic and businesses to a halt. The police, taken by surprise, called for support. They attacked with dogs, punching protestors. Four hours later, fourteen of the 750 people from the Kennedy Road settlement had been arrested, including two teenage students. Two days later, on March 21 – Human Rights Day in South Africa (the anniversary of the day in 1960, when apartheid police fired on pass-law protesters in Sharpeville, and killed 69 people) – 1,200 people demonstrated, demanding that the local police release the fourteen people or arrest the whole community. The people themselves had begun to self-consciously mobilize for their own rights; they were finally beginning to press the state to be accountable. For more than a decade, the people’s anger had been steadily rising. Many people had given up hope of formal employment, or were being forced to use what the World Bank terms their “entrepreneurial” aspirations and “resourcefulness” in the informal economy. But collecting cardboard, plastic or metal from the stinking dump, or even gardening and cleaning for residents on the Clare Estate, doesn’t provide many “opportunities.”

The shack dwellers had understood that change promised by the government would be slow and that they needed to take responsibility for their own welfare; but by 2005, it had become crystal clear that their interests weren’t being considered at all. As one shack dweller put it, they had finally grown “tired of living and walking in shit” (quoted in Kockott 2005).

So, on that March day, the people from the Kennedy Road settlement organ­ized quickly and staged their protest. They revolted because they felt betrayed. Although they might not have initially seen it in these terms, their action proved to be the beginning of a movement. They saw themselves as being on their own against the local government, the police, businesses, the rich, the media and the courts. Characteristically, they did not wait for the media or for professional activists to arrive. What was key to their actions was that they already had a democratic decisionmaking body, the Kennedy Road Development Committee, whose participatory meetings and social demands quickly caught the imagination of adjacent communities.

Indeed, this imagination was captured at the welcome-home party for those who had been arrested, when the chair of the Kennedy Road Development Committee, S’bu Zikode, affirmed the actions of the crowd with a memorable speech: “The first Nelson Mandela was Jesus Christ. The second was Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. The third Nelson Mandela is the poor people of the world” (quoted in Patel and Pithouse 2005). The resonance was clear. The poor weren’t Christ, but Christ was the first Mandela, the first liberator who articulated a new heaven on earth. Mandela is Christ reborn, grounding liberation firmly on South African soil, his long imprisonment during apartheid a metaphor for the nation, just as his release is identified with the birth of a new South Africa.

Yet, the failure of the historical Mandela to really liberate South Africa demanded the birth of a new Mandela: the poor themselves. After many promises, all of them broken, they saw through the empty rhetoric of the local authorities. Enough was enough – sekwanele, sekwanele! – truth emanated from their own experiences: they had become the “new reality of the nation,” declaring the shack dwellers’ movement a university where they “think their own struggles” and “are not poor in mind” (Zikode 2006). Subtly criticising Mandela’s historical leadership, the poor were taking matters into their own hands, seeing themselves as the force and reason for their own liberation; they had become their own Mandelas.

This has been the essential aspiration of all commoners, everywhere – to throw off the chains of alien governance that dispossesses them; to assert their own rules for governing themselves and resources that matter to them; and to become protagonists in their own history. In this sense, the shack dwellers’ movement has been a pioneering struggle of commoning as a way to secure survival and basic dignity.

Origins of the Shack Dwellers’ Movement

Even if they had previously never heard of a “social movement,” by March 2005, the shack dwellers had effectively become such a movement by virtue of their self-organization and by developing their own relationships with other shack dwellers. For it was the universality of the Kennedy Road shack dwellers’ experience and demands that was immediately understood and taken up by neighboring settlements. The development of such horizontal links among shack settlements suggested a new kind of movement in the making. By May 2005, the people from Kennedy Road and five other shack settlements, as well as residents from local municipal flats, had organized a march of over 3,000 people. With banners expressing their collective will (“We want our land”) and homegrown political education (“The University of Kennedy Road”), the marchers presented a memorandum of ten demands that they had drawn up through a series of meetings and community discussions. Written by the shack and flat dwellers after careful discussion, this memorandum, which included the need for housing, jobs, sanitation, medical care, education, and safety from police brutality and environmental toxins, became a people’s charter⁵ – one that sought to represent not only Durban’s 800,000 shack dwellers, but the poor across South Africa, where nearly three million households live in “informal” housing.

Their demands were far from revolutionary; they were the demands of loyal citizens making reasonable requests, borne of their citizenship, for inclusion in the “new South Africa.”

The march ended at the offices of the local ANC councillor, and there the marchers announced that if the councillor did not resign, they, his constituents, would declare Ward 25 without a councillor. They brought along a coffin to represent the councillor’s political death. The point is obvious, but what is also worth noting is the marchers’ self-consciousness, both as a class pitted against the interests of property and as a collective pressing the government to deliver not only on its promises, but also to include those promises in its future deliberations. The marchers, in other words, were self-consciously challenging the elite character of the local government and by implication, the class character of the “elite transition” in South Africa.⁶

Some months later, following a meeting of twelve settlements at Kennedy Road, the shack dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, was launched.⁷ There was no donor funding, no NGO, no civil-society funding nor political-party backing. Consistently ignored by the local council and often treated as criminals, shack dwellers across Durban began to join the movement. “The only language they understand is when we put thousands of people on the street,” proclaimed Zikode (2006:187), and throughout the following year, mass marches and demonstrations brought the plight of the shack dwellers to local, national and even international attention, with stories being featured in The Economist and other international and local media, including a full-page story in The New York Times.

On a quick learning curve and with few resources, the movement was able not only to represent itself but also to respond to misrepresentation in the media. And soon it became clear that the shack dwellers weren’t going away. Daily demonstrations and actions in all of South Africa’s major cities continued to occur alongside Abahlali’s growing reputation and media presence.⁸ Despite President Mbeki’s call for these actions to stop, they continued. “These are the things the youth used to do in the struggle against apartheid,” he complained, but that was exactly why the actions were legitimate.

In early 2006, Abahlali began to organize a boycott of the local-government elections scheduled for March of that year. This was a logical development following the “burial” of the councillor, and the decision to boycott was marked by a march from the Foreman Road settlement into Durban’s city center, under the slogan “No Land, No House, No Vote,” which had earlier been employed by the South African Landless People’s Movement in a national campaign in 2004. Though the march was legal, it was banned by Durban’s city manager, Mike Sutcliffe. Two days later, on February 3, 2006, surrounded by riot police, the 3,000 shack dwellers amassed at the Foreman Road settlement and decided to go ahead with the march. Behind the banners of “University of Abahlali baseMjondolo” and “No Land, No House, No Vote,” they marched out of the settlement. As they entered the paved road, the police immediately attacked. A number of people were seriously injured and forty-five were arrested. Sutcliffe issued another ban, this time on a march planned for February 27. The police again cordoned off the exits to three large settlements, and made a number of arrests. But this time the people were prepared. With the support of progressive lawyers, Abahlali was able to take Sutcliffe to the High Court and won an interdict allowing them to march into the city.

Certainly there are continuities between these struggles and the struggles against apartheid. Many in Abahlali see their challenges as unfinished, and even Mandela had acknowledged the shack dwellers’ movement in 1993, when it was widely believed that the end of apartheid would see the upgrading of “informal settlements” and that these settlement conditions were a direct consequence of apartheid.⁹ In fact, South Africa has always been a country of extremes, of rich and poor, and developments in the South African economy have always been the province of powerful mining and financial interests in the context of global capitalism. The end of apartheid actually strengthened this proprietorship.

While co-opting some of the best brains of the struggle and transforming the formal movements into structures of governance, the ANC promised that the legacies of apartheid would be addressed. Yet, the ANC’s actual policies and practices never matched its rhetorical promises. At first this was put down to the politics of transition, especially at the local-government level, where apartheid functionaries lingered. But after the government’s embrace of neoliberal economic policies, the shift became clear. Though subject to international pressures, the direct authors of the “homegrown” structural adjustment were the new Black and old White elites. Alan Hirsch (2005) suggests that the neoliberal program was instituted by the government to protect South Africa’s sovereignty from the IMF/World Bank’s institution of a neoliberal program.

Today it is clear that the main beneficiaries of post-apartheid economic redistribution have been (and continue to be) South Africa’s banks and multinationals, now even freer than they were under apartheid. This includes the moneyed White elites, as well as the new much smaller Black elites, and the South African economy is more integrated into the global economy than at any time in its history. Moreover, post-apartheid South Africa’s quick move to roll out a neoliberal economic model to encourage global investment shifted priorities and resulted in deep cuts in budgets for social services, below the levels in the first years of the ANC government. Serious discussion of the social and economic consequences of years of colonialism and apartheid in the 1990s has given way to a neoliberal discourse about the poor, who are represented as “undifferentiated, unwilling carriers of social diseases” (Barchiesi 2007:46-7) – in other words, as morally corrupt and behaviorally undisciplined – or, to use the language of apartheid, “surplus population.” Needless to say, the post-apartheid housing program is part of this project, ultimately aimed at moving the poor out of the cities. Built far from the urban centers, one-room closet-sized houses are economically nonviable for many. On the contrary, living close to both economic opportunities and to educational opportunities for their children, is vital. Thus, when the Durban municipality described its plan for a “city without slums,” it was correctly understood by the shack dwellers as the return of the apartheid policy of “influx control” and the removal of “black spots.”¹⁰ Once again, Black people were to be pushed out of the city and dumped in the peripheral ghettoes.

The class character of the situation is plain. This is also evident when it comes to water and electricity supply. Access to “sufficient water” (twenty-five liters per day and person) is guaranteed in the South African Constitution, but this seems to miss the point in the context of the shacks. Reducing general water consumption and controlling it through a metering system are pointless in a situation in which there are few working taps and toilets to serve thousands of people. The same is true for electricity supply.

And it is not simply that those in the shacks can’t afford sufficient water and electricity – some can – but insufficient water and no electricity, along with the fact that fire engines are often not dispatched when fires do start, has resulted in frequent fires and avoidable deaths. As S’bu Zikode put it: “We have seen that when the wild forests and plantations of the rich are on fire, there are often large helicopters with hundreds of tons of water to extinguish the fires. But when our shacks are on fire, the helicopters and ambulances are nowhere to be found…Helicopters only come for us when we march. The state comes for us when we try to say what we think.” (Zikode 2008a)

On April 21, 2006, twelve years after the birth of a new South Africa, generated by the first full and free election, 5,000 South African shack dwellers from the fourteen informal settlements that had joined Abahlali the preceding year came out, not to celebrate freedom, but to mourn “Unfreedom day,” and they have done so ever since. How can “we celebrate freedom when we only hear tales of freedom or see people’s lives changed for the better in other parts of the country, but never in our communities?” asked S’bu Zikode, questioning, in effect, the state of freedom in the whole country.

Zikode, the founding president of the shack dwellers’ movement, Abahlali’s baseMjondolo, is a forty-year-old former petrol-station worker. (Early in 2007 Zikode lost his job at the petrol station because of his political activity.) A father of four who moved to the Kennedy Road settlement in 1997, he is a former Boy Scout from a small rural town who gained distinction at school but had no money for university. A short, slight man with a welcoming manner and warm smile, Zikode is both engaging and articulate, with a reflective and calm demeanor. A radical humanist, not a firebrand, but a teacher and listener, Zikode has become a significant national public figure, appearing on television, on radio, and in the national and local print media, his words frequently reprinted in pop-culture magazines with a combined circulation of five million (Bryant 2008). (For more of his biography, see Zikode 2009.)

While S’bu Zikode might be viewed as Abahlali’s philosopher – indeed he articulates the struggle as “thought on the ground, running” – he has rigorously resisted calls to run for local government or to be the single spokesperson of the movement. He maintains that the problems are systemic, and sees himself only as the people’s servant, elected on their behalf and subject to recall. Zikode has remained remarkably consistent and true to the principles of grassroots democracy, shared leadership, and to critically reflecting on these struggles. In 2008, he decided not to run as president of the movement arguing:

My intention was always to remain strongly committed to the movement but it seemed clear to me that all the positions at all levels of leadership in our movement need to be shared, that the burden of leadership in a movement of volunteers needs to be shared, that I need time for my family and to be able to read and think about what we have achieved with our living politics, a politics that was always based on us thinking carefully about our lives and our struggles. We have to change ourselves before we can change the world and, without time to think, that change becomes difficult (Zikode 2008a).

This is an important articulation of principle. It insists not only on the space for thinking, but also on the centrality of self-reflexive thought to the movement itself. When members called on Zikode to reconsider his decision not to run, he took it seriously, adding that the movement’s “calls for a leader who is willing to learn and who is prepared to be led…[is] very important in our Movement’s work of defining itself and knowing itself before someone else from somewhere else defines our Movement” (2008a).¹¹ This, of course, is an expression of a Fanonian principle: the leader does not lead the people, but rather helps in the work of self-clarification; the philosophic idea of “knowing thyself” is and must be a social and collective process.

Zikode has developed a knack of talking over the head of the government to a larger constituency, and his message is a challenge to the nation. “Government officials, politicians and intellectuals who associate the shack dwellers with the Third Force [a term that alludes to the murderous apartheid-sponsored violence of the early 1990s] have no idea what they are talking about. They are too high to really feel what we feel.” And quite literally, high up in their offices, they cannot see the people down below – physically, conceptually and experientially – and quite possibly, for this reason, the Third Force may not be something the politicians can understand. Zikode continues: “We are driven by the Third Force, the suffering of the poor. Our betrayers are the Second Force. The First Force was our struggle against apartheid. The Third Force will stop when the Fourth Force comes. The Fourth Force is land, housing, water, electricity, health care, education, and work” (Zikode 2006). The implication is clear: The “Second Force,” the ANC in power, had betrayed the struggle and produced not liberation but a “Third Force,” namely the suffering of the poor. In this logic, the as-yet unrealized “Fourth Force” is, of course, a vision of an egalitarian future.¹²

A Struggle of Moral Discourse and Democratic Practice

Boycotting the election was not taken lightly, but for Abahlali, democracy means much more than a periodic vote. The decision to boycott represented a real shift in thinking about the core values of post-apartheid society. For Abahlai members, democracy was not about an election every five years, but about day-to-day life that included reciprocity, caring, and the inclusion of those who had been systematically excluded and told that they were too stupid to understand. Abahlali was simply speaking a different language that emanated from below, and was grounded in the struggle of the everyday. The organization was concerned not with political negotiations but with principles that flowed from an open and egalitarian moral discourse and democratic practice: “Our struggle is for moral questions, as compared to the political questions as such. It is more about justice,” declared Zikode. “Is it good for shack dwellers to live in mud like pigs, as they are living? Why do I live in a cardboard house if there are people who are able to live in a decent house? So it is a moral question” (Zikode quoted in Ngiam 2006).

Just as the struggle against apartheid brought the vote, the shack dwellers’ struggle has challenged the meaning of the vote, and given a voice to the poorest of the poor: “Now the tide has turned,” argued Zikode in 2006, “you are hearing from the horse’s mouth…We have come out to say this is who we are, this is where we are and this is what we want” (interview with Zikode in Beresford 2006; original emphasis). Continuously staying open to new creative impulses and questions and to innovation from below remains a core principle. As self-organized shack dwellers, Abahlali was becoming an author of its own history with everyone able to participate – an example, in Fanonian terms, of the “practice of freedom” taking place in the “structure of the people” (1968:143).

Abahlali has consistently refuted the discourse of “service delivery”; they insist instead that their demands are about “being human.” “It is not only about physical infrastructure,” says Zikode, “we have shifted our thinking”; from the beginning, “the struggle is the human being, the conditions that we live in which translates into demands for housing and land.”¹³ Through Abahlali, he adds, “people are starting to remember that they are human beings” – even the police. Often harassed and criminalized (with trumped-up murder charges and such), with leaders including Zikode imprisoned and beaten up in Sydenham police station, members of Abahlali have suffered at the hands of the police. But after sustained mobilization in late 2007, a shift in police behavior became apparent, and Abahlali was determined to continue this trend and work with the police around issues of safety.¹⁴

A deeply rooted humanism guides “the culture of Abahlalism,” a set of ethical norms in which everyone shares everyday suffering and pain, as well as laughter. Reflected in the democratic openness and respectfulness with which they conduct their meetings, Abahlalism is a culture of sharing that is rooted in the ideas of community and reciprocity found in the long struggle against apartheid. “We fought, died, and voted for this government,” Zikode says, “so that we could be free and have decent lives,” but “this government does not treat us like people who can speak and think for ourselves” (Butler and Ntseng 2007). Thus life is not only about a struggle for decent living conditions, but also about a mental liberation from years of subservience and the lack of self-confidence that so oppressed the poor during the apartheid period, and sadly also during the post-apartheid period. One of the major goals of Abahlali, therefore, is a kind of moral revolution, the creation of a society where the poor will be treated as human beings with minds of their own.

Yet at every turn, Zikode is reminded that poor people in post-apartheid South Africa are not valued as much as others. While Abahlali has successfully forced itself onto the agendas of government institutions and “civil society,” there is a constant struggle not only to keep these spaces open but through their inclusion to transform them. Whatever tactic has been employed, from mass marches to challenges in the courts, from meeting with local government to the No Vote campaign, what remains essential is that no actions take place without ongoing discussion and decisionmaking at the meetings in the shack settlements. Court cases (including appeals to the Constitutional Court), for example, can be long, procedural and expensive affairs that can drain the resources and challenge the integrity of any poor people’s movement. And while it appreciates the pro bono work of lawyers, Abahlali has always been careful to develop and sustain a mode of organizing from the bottom-up, through constant consultation and principled refusal of “biryani money.” Thus, as a movement, it has avoided two pitfalls, namely dependency on donors and professionalization:

All decisions about money are taken collectively, publicly and democratically in the movement’s open weekly meetings and all donations should therefore be channeled through the movement’s official structures so that decisions about how to use the money can be taken in these meetings. Abahlali is a 100 percent volunteer organization and no member is paid for any work undertaken for the organization and no money is allocated to individuals – it all goes for collective expenses such as lawyers, bail, transport, sound hire, etc. as determined by the discussion at the weekly meetings (Abahlali 2006a).

Abahlali’s critique of the discourse of service delivery thus emerges from the conception of being counted as active participants in decisions and actions, rather than being seen as pariahs to be managed and controlled. They have deliberately chosen to force themselves into those spaces where they have not been invited, and make their presence in these spaces a kind of “insurgent citizenship” (Holston 2007), one that contests the elite form of South Africa’s democracy. Their claim to practical and intellectual equity, remarks Cooper-Knock (2009:57), “does not rest on claims to equal, technical knowledge but…in their capacity to reason through their situation.” In other words, the shack dwellers’ knowledge derives from their existentially experienced situation of being in the shacks, and their politics from theorizing their situation.

Thinking in Communities

The shack dwellers’ movement cannot be explained by issues of resource mobilization, or the aid of outside forces, or even the event’s material success. What was expressed through the shack settlement’s initial self-mobilization was its insistence on open meetings where all could speak and hash out issues, coupled with the straightforwardness and moral suasion of their demands. The growth of the movement came about through word-of-mouth and personal communication, which, by the end of the first year, 2005, had engendered a new organization, Abahlali baseMjondolo. And if Abahlali’s commitment to growth is tempered, it is only because it is invested in the principle of discussing things openly and thoroughly in meetings, and making decisions with the commitment of all.

Each shack settlement that joins, each new branch that forms, has to follow the democratic principles of Abahlali.¹⁵ This means that each demonstration or march requires a number of meetings, then meetings of subcommittees, as well as communication among settlements. Press releases are discussed, written and distributed. And each settlement and branch, through its own autonomous committees, sends delegates to Abahlali. The Abahlali meetings rotate among all the affiliated settlements, are usually attended by about thirty to forty elected representatives from the various committees, and are open to all residents from the local settlements (Beresford 2006). It is worth noting that, though the democratic culture of the organization has spread across the settlements, it doesn’t always overcome authoritarianism or conservative ideas. Even where settlements have strong Abahlali activists, it has been difficult, at times, to get beyond the armed authoritarianism of “leaders” who trade votes for private deals with the state.

Governed on such a grassroots democratic basis, with meetings open to all adults (regardless of age, gender,¹⁶ ethnicity, origin, and length of time in residence), each settlement has at least one weekly meeting, and representatives from each of the settlements elected each week meet as Abahlali baseMjondolo every Saturday. Every day there are a number of meetings of various subcommittees. The meetings are very formal, with decisions arrived at by consensus and with an emphasis on the inclusive process of “listening to others’ ideas” and “being together” (Bryant 2008:48).

Through these process the movement has consistently rejected offers of money, proffered mostly by NGOs and parties attempting to buy political credibility. It has remained very suspicious of outsiders who try to speak for it or take control and, over time, it has come to understand who its real friends and enemies are. At its inception, three “outsiders” – activist academics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Fazel Khan, Raj Patel and Richard Pithouse – were directly involved with the movement on a daily basis. Committed to the Fanonian belief that a movement of the poor should speak for itself, these activist academics had put themselves “in the school of the people,” to be educated by the movement. They not only helped put the shack dwellers’ organization in touch with committed lawyers, typed up press releases and developed a website, but took the thinking being done in the communities seriously.

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes, “It is true that if care is taken to use only a language that is understood by graduates in law and economics, you can easily prove that the masses have to be managed from above. But if you speak the language of the everyday…then you will realize that the masses are quick to seize every shade of meaning…Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand…The more people understand, the more watchful they become and the more they come to realize that everything depends on them.” This idea helps explain, as noted by Zkorde (2008a), how the shack dwellers’ conception of politics is not about political office; it is a politics of the poor in the language of the people. Participation is based on shared experience, and their political practice is dependent on democratic meetings in the settlements: “Our politics is a traditional home politics which is understood very well by all the old mamas and gogos [grannies] because it affects their lives and gives them a home.” It is a language which all can speak and understand; it is simple and transparent and thus creates a situation which is consciously collective and inclusive.¹⁷ In Zikode’s words, “We look after each other and think about the situation and plan our fight together” (2008:115). Zikode’s notion is a challenge to the elite politics that has characterized the post-apartheid transition and its corporate and technicist aftermath. It is not a question of empowerment or inclusion in terms of having a seat at the policy table, nor it is not simply a question of being consulted, although that would be an important beginning; it is a challenge to the alienation inherent in the attitudes and proposals of the housing-policy experts, an alienation that arises out of their attitude towards the poor, and the poor’s systemic exclusion from the policy decisions made about them.

Thus, at first, the Kennedy Road movement saw itself as a movement unto itself, local and immediate, utterly divorced from liberal NGO or left anti-globalization discourses. A year later, in his 2006 presentation, Zikode directly linked the self-activity of the shack dwellers, not only to housing politics, but also to national politics:

We believe that the housing policy does not only require housing specialists, rich consultants and government. We believe that housing policy requires most importantly, the people who need the houses. But we also know, as poor communities and as shack dwellers that the broader poor have no choice but to play a role in shaping and reshaping this country into an anti-capitalist system (Zikode 2008: 115; my emphasis).

And this alternative, he added, comes out of “the thinking that we do in communities.” The challenge to academics and intellectuals in the university setting is quite clear; their work requires listening to, and taking seriously, the thinking that is done in the communities. In other words, it requires shifting the geography of reason, and challenging preconceived ideas of who does the thinking and where it is done. This is not simply about territoriality, but about restoring agency to the people who know the situation, who can and should do the thinking so that they can demand, in a Fanonian sense, a more reality-based and a more rational¹⁸ and effective mode of operation that will lead to a self-conscious realization that they are “equal to the problems that confront them” (Fanon 1968:193). In practice, this has meant that Abahlali’s meetings, its finances and its organizational structures are open to all.

Beyond Liberal Ideas of “Freedom” and “Inclusion”

In the early days of the movement, the struggle’s discourse centered on ideas of dignity and self-respect. The declaration that “we are human beings” was echoed in the shack dwellers’ outrage at the politicians who ignored their plight. Thus, from its beginnings the struggle was not over a technical issue about the redistribution of resources (though it includes that) but a most concrete reflection on being human, about the fact that human beings should live in homes fit for human beings. The shack dwellers don’t only demand recognition as human beings. Their demand for recognition has been consistent and goes beyond the liberal tradition of “inclusion” in a political or legal system. They take the freedom won in the struggles against apartheid seriously, and thus reject the equation of freedom with neoliberal ideas as “unfreedom” since for them those ideas only amount to absence of freedom. They want freedom to be truly equal.

Thus, while fighting for what is guaranteed by the South African Constitution is important,¹⁹ what is at stake is the need to address deep-rooted structures of economic inequality that are legacies of apartheid and colonialism, reproduced in contemporary neoliberal South Africa. In that sense, the demand for “redistribution” is a real and urgent one, but it also implies a critique of elite-driven politics (or the anti-politics discourse of “service delivery”), be that right-wing, top-down technocracy, NGO paternalism, vanguardism,²⁰ or left-wing technocratism. The latter describes a situation in which too much attention is paid to technical instruments, and too little to popular participation. In contrast to reforms developed by scholars and NGO staff “while the poor and their grassroots organizations play only a very secondary role in terms of strategy building and intellectual elaboration” (De Souza 2006:337), the shack dwellers seek to be an essential part of decisionmaking and thus agents of refashioning democracy.

When Fanon wrote in The Wretched that intellectuals needed to put themselves in the school of the people, he had in mind the grounding of new concepts in what Zikode calls “thinking that is done in the communities.” This thinking, which emerges from experience, is at once pragmatic and critical. Ideas and formulas repeated at meetings help generate new ways of knowing in the communities and, in the case of Abahlali, the movement’s intellectuals are truly organic to it. They live in the settlements, and this goes a long way towards overcoming the separation of intellectuals from the masses that so preoccupied Fanon.

Over time, some NGOs and other individuals have given practical support, but Abahlali is not dependent on any external funds. It remains particularly concerned about its ability to maintain political autonomy within the democratic structure of the organization. “It’s quite interesting because sometimes we are aware that these organizations have got money but they don’t have constituents, you know, people,” argued Zikode, “Abahlali is the poor struggle – struggle of the poor – therefore money will not tempt us…we cannot therefore be bought” (Zikode quoted in Pithouse 2006). In other words, Abahlali became aware of the potentially disastrous effects of external funding on a poor people’s movement, that it may not only broker a movement but also potentially destroy it.

Again, Zikode (2008:122) reminds us that human beings do not live on bread alone. “We are poor,” he says, “we know that, and we might be poor in life, but we are not poor in mind,” recognizing, as Marx put it, the real wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of real social and intellectual relationships.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

References

Abahlali baseMjondolo. 2006. “Supporting Abahlali.”
http://www.abahlali.org/node/269.

Alexander, Neville. 1993. Some Are More Equal Than Others: Essays on the Transition in South Africa. Cape Town: Buchu Books.

ANC [African National Congress, South Africa]. 1993. “Southern Natal Statement on the Housing Crisis.” November 9.

Aristide, Jean-Bertrand and Christophe Wargny. 1993. Aristide: An Autobiography Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Barchiesi, Franco. 2007. “Wage Labor and Social Citizenship in the Making of Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 42(1):39-72.

Beresford, Alex. 2006. ‘Trapped in Corporatism? Trade Union Linkages to the Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement in Durban’. http://www.abahlali.org/files/Beresford.pdf

Bryant, Jacob. 2008. “Toward Delivery and Dignity.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 43(1):41-62.

Butler, Mark and David Ntseng. 2007. “Minutes of the Abahlali baseMjondolo Meeting to Discuss Legal and Political Strategies to Oppose the Slums Bill.” July, 13. Kennedy Road Hall, Durban. http://abahlali.org/node/1718.

Calland, Richard. 2007. “Resist the Prison of Expertocracy.” Mail and Guardian, January 21.

Cooper-Knock, Sarah. 2009. “The Role of Citizens in Post-Apartheid South Africa: a Case-Study of Citizen Involvement in Informal Settlement Projects,” M.A. Thesis, Oxford University.

De Souza, Marcelo Lopes. 2006. “Together with the State, Despite the State, Against the State: Social Movements as ‘Critical Urban Planning’ Agents.” City10(3):327-42.

Dunayevskaya, Raya. 2002. The Power of Negativity. Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, editors. Lanham, MD. Lexington Books.

Fanon, Frantz. 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. Constance Farrington, translator. New York. Grove Press.

Gibson, Nigel C., editor. 2006. Challenging Hegemony: Social Movements and the Quest for a New Humanism in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1-14.

Hirsch, Alan. 2005. Season of Hope: Economic Reform Under Mandela And Mbeki Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Holston, James. 2007. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Khan, Fazel. 2006. “Outside the ICC again.” Independent Media Centre, September 12. http://www.southafrica.indymedia.org/news/2006/09/11083.php

Kockott, Fred. 2005. “Shack Dwellers’ Fury Erupts.” Tribune. March 20.

Loftus, Alex. 2006. “Reification and the Dictatorship of the Water Meter.” Antipode 38(5):1023-45.

Ngiam, Xin Wei. 2006. “Taking Poverty Seriously: What the Poor Are Saying and Why it Matters.” http://www.abahlali.org.

Patel, Raj and Richard Pithouse. 2005. “The Third Nelson Mandela.” http://www.voiceoftheturtle.org/show_article.php?aid=435.

Pithouse, Richard. 2005. “The Left in the Slum: The Rise of a Shack Dwellers’ Movement in Durban, South Africa” (History and African Studies Seminar, November 23, 2005, University of KwaZulu-Natal).

———. 2006. “Our Struggle is Thought on the Ground Running”: The University of Abahlali baseMjondolo. Centre for Civil Society Research Report, No. 40, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.

———. 2009. “A Progressive Policy without a Progressive Politics: Lessons from the Failure to Implement Breaking New Ground.” Town Planning Journal 54: 1-14.

Platzky, Laurine. 1986. “Relocation in South Africa.” South African Review 3. Johannesburg: Ravan.

Zikode, S’bu. 2006. “We Are the Third Force.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 41(1/2):185-9. Also, http://www.abahlali.org/node/17.

———. 2008. “Sekwanele Sekwanele” (Enough is Enough). Journal of Asian and African Studies 43(1):119-24.

———. 2008a. “Post Annual General Meeting Speech.” December 14. http://abahlali.org/node/4666

———. 2009. “To Resist All Degradations and Divisions.” Interview by Richard Pithouse. http://antieviction.org.za/2009/04/28/to-resist-all-degradations-divisions-an-interview-with-sbu-zikode

This essay is derived from a chapter by Nigel Gibson, “Unfinished Struggles for Freedom: The Birth of a New Shack Dwellers’ Movement,” in Fanonian Practices: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo, Pietermaritzburg: University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Press and New York: Palgrave Press: 2011.

 Nigel C. Gibson (USA) is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College and research associate at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. In addition to Fanonian Practices, he is the author of Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination and the editor of eight books, including Rethinking Fanon and Biko Lives. 

Photo by thatmelgirl

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Bill Tucker: Mankosi is a remote rural community in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. It is home to almost 6,000 people. The nearest city is Mthatha, about 60 kilometres away, as a bird flies.

Most homes are not connected to the electricity grid; residents charge their cellphones at a local shop or shebeen, for which they must pay. Both data and airtime for those phones also cost a lot: a survey shows that people spend up to 22% of their income on telecommunications. This is money that could be spent on food, education, transport and other needs.

They’re not alone. South Africa has some of the highest mobile voice and data costs in the world.

Yet, things are changing in Mankosi. A research team at the University of the Western Cape has worked with residents to develop a solar powered wireless community network.

The Zenzeleni Networks project – Zenzeleni means “do it yourself” in isiXhosa, the Eastern Cape’s most prevalent language – is, as far as we’re aware, South Africa’s first and only Internet Service Provider (ISP) that’s owned and run by a rural cooperative. Just like any ISP, Zenzeleni installs and maintains telecommunications infrastructure and also sells telecommunications services like voice and data.

Yet what’s special about the project is that it involves a registered not-for-profit company which works with cooperatives in the community to deliver affordable voice and data services. Crucially, the project also keeps money in communities like Mankosi, often beset by high rates of unemployment.

The community networks model has proven successful elsewhere in the world: the largest is in Spain – the Guifi.net project. Others that have been developed successfully include projects in Zambia and Mexico.

How it works

The Mankosi project was launched in 2012 and legally registered in 2014. I have done research on information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) in the Mankosi area since 2003. Since then, colleagues and postgraduate students have also worked, even lived, in the area for extensive periods of time.

To establish the Zenzeleni network we approached local leaders to help get the community on board and we provided help and mentorship. Ultimately the residents run the project themselves.

With the local authority’s permission, a cooperative comprising ten local and respected people was formed. This group designed the network layout, and built and installed a dozen solar powered mesh network stations. These are mounted on and inside houses around Mankosi. These are organised in what we call a mesh network and WiFi stations cover an area of 30 square kilometres.

Zenzeleni constitutes a fully fledged Internet Service Provider (ISP), equipped with an Internet and Voice-over Internet Protocol gateway, and a billing system in isiXhosa run by community managers.

The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA), which grants licences to ISPs and collects fees where necessary, granted Zenzeleni a licence exemption; so it costs Zenzeleni nothing in fees to operate infrastructure and sell services. The community only has to pay for the backhaul Internet connectivity, which they can get at wholesale prices from companies like EastTel and OpenServe, and for educational use from TENET.

Any device – even a low to mid-range smart phone – that’s WiFi-enabled can access the network. There are two dedicated wireless connections to “point of presence”, or POP, fibre in Mthatha.

Zenzeleni’s voice calls and data costs are much cheaper than what’s offered by the big mobile operators. For example voice calls can cost 20c a minute rather than the standard R1.50 or more while data costs can be between 20 and 40 times cheaper.

The solar powered stations also charge cell phone batteries less than what’s usually charged by spaza shops or shebeens. Those shops also tend to be some distance from the village, so people save time as well as money.

A true community project

Community is at the heart of Zenzeleni’s model. All revenues stay in the community: each cooperative has a bank account, and all residents get together to decide what to do with the money that’s been paid for Zenzeleni services.

For example, the Mankosi cooperative has provided micro-loans to residents for starting small businesses.

No one is currently earning a salary from the community network. Yet when usage grows, as we expect it will do with super cheap data, revenues are likely to grow so much that the cooperative will want to install more nodes and hire people to actively maintain them making the network more resilient. Since March 2014, the project has earned around R33,600 (about USD$2422.16).

Keeping money at home

On the surface it may appear that Zenzeleni cannibalises the revenues of big telecommunications companies like MTN and Telkom. We believe the opposite is true. Firstly, Zenzeleni purchases backhaul Internet connectivity from areas like Mankosi that Telkom and others have failed to connect – so it’s operating in entirely new areas that have been ignored because they’re considered too remote to generate good revenue.

Secondly, all telecommunications companies earn interconnect fees. Calls to mobile and landline numbers across South Africa incur these fees, which are charged when calling from one network to another. This is also true for Zenzeleni so that’s extra money in the bank for all telecommunications companies.

Lastly, and most importantly, most of the money generated by this project stays in Mankosi. This is perhaps the most crucial aspect of the Zenzeleni model, and one we believe will foster economic growth which will benefit people living in and around the village, and enable them to purchase telecommunications, and other goods and services, that they currently cannot afford.

Zenzeleni Networks’ next goal is to build critical mass to support between 20 and 30 communities surrounding Mankosi. When this happens, about 300,000 people will be able to sustainably connect themselves – and their schools, clinics, hospitals and homes – to cheaper voice, data and phone battery charging. This puts telecommunications into their own hands, by themselves.

Bill Tucker, Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of the Western Cape

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Photo: A Zenzeleni cooperative member carefully aligns some equipment in the village of Mankosi, Eastern Cape /Bill Tucker

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Stephanie Rearick and Leander Bindewald: If it wasn’t crystal clear just weeks ago, it is now: The economy as it stands is currently positioned in direct opposition to social and environmental objectives. For the sake of the wellbeing of our communities, our children, and our planet, it is imperative we change the voracious path of our consumption culture and consider how we might create opportunities for people to find meaningful work.

At the Mutual Aid Network, we have developed a new type of networked cooperative — one that, among other things, lets people find talented collaborators for personal, neighborhood-wide, or even city-wide projects. Here’s how we make it happen:

The first step is to bring people together around a common goal of any size and scope to form an individual “Mutual Aid Network.” The common goal can be anything — a group of friends aiming to redesign each person’s work life, a watershed restoration initiative, a city-wide energy efficiency and renewables program, a decentralized cooperatively-owned manufacturing initiative, a travel and culture exchange, or a meal program to ensure that everyone in a neighborhood has enough to eat. While each network is entirely autonomous, the underlying principles it follows are from drawn from commons governance and cooperative models.

To achieve the common goal, members pool and steward resources by combining any of the following tools — all tried and true in the patches of solidarity economy, big and small, over the course of generations:

• Shared resources or the commons: Participate in tool libraries, makerspaces, shared laundry facilities, and so forth.

• Timebanking and swapping: Exchange time credits — for example, an hour worth for a service, be it babysitting, cooking, cleaning, rides, light carpentry, gardening, art/music/language lessons, in exchange for a service. Contribute frequent flyer miles, meals, plots of land, buildings, equipment all to be acknowledged in community credits that are fair, transparent, and always mutually beneficial.

• Price-based mutual credit currencies, for business and highly professionalized service: Buy a $1,000 piece of equipment from a participating business for 1,000 points of interest-free credit, to be paid back by selling $1,000 worth of goods and services to the network. Taxed according to applicable laws.

• Savings pools and community investment: Contribute to a common pool of money to be allocated to collectively agreed causes or members with one-off financial needs, be they for a home, health care, or even burial expenses. Examples of this abound around the world and include the Mutual Aid Societies in the U.S., the original Building Societies in the U.K.

And then there is the “Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks,” formerly referred to as the Main Mutual Aid Network, which is one big global cooperative owned by all individual Mutual Aid Network sites. The members connect, share resources and best practices, and support new Mutual Aid Network sites all around the world by using the same approach and principles applied in the local sites.

Of course we don’t expect everyone to be solely working in the Mutual Aid Network context, but expect that more opportunities will build over time. Our strategy is to start with a number of pilot sites with different focus areas, strengths, and limitations, and have each one commit to supporting one another and help foster new sites. Eight pilot sites have signed up already, and at least eight more are in the works.

The economy of the 21st century is something we’ve been prototyping throughout human history. Now we can connect those ideas and practices that have proven to be sustainable over time and use technologies to connect, exchange, share, and learn collaboratively and effectively. Networks of networks can quickly connect to create a world where everyone has the opportunity to build the skills needed to make whole, happy communities. We are already doing it, across the world, independently and increasingly interdependently. Please join us. What you can do:

• Join an online orientation

• Join the Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks (formerly Main Mutual Aid Network) global co-op (U.S. based, global membership)

• Join the Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks work groups

• Explore creating a pilot site

• Participate in our Summit in Madison, Wisconsin, from Feb. 17-20

• Sign up for our e-mail list

All of those opportunities, plus more learning resources, can be found at: www.mutualaidnetwork.org

Here are some of our pilot projects:

Madison, Wisconsin

Allied Community Co-op is the first Mutual Aid Network pilot site. It’s where some of the organization’s fundamental ideas were born. Located in a food desert with little infrastructure (no school, grocery store, library, or neighborhood center), the Allied Co-op is working to bring a food buying club and a cooperatively-owned grocery store to the neighborhood.

The Social Justice Center, a multi-stakeholder nonprofit building in Madison’s affluent East Side, is a convening partner in exploring Madison’s second Mutual Aid Network pilot, which will be an inter-city partnership connecting Allied Co-op and many other local stakeholders in a network of resource-sharing and exchange initiative designed to create more equitable distribution of existing resources across the city.

Lansing, Michigan

The Mid-Michigan bioregion is home to a number of both for-profit and nonprofit cooperative enterprises, including the Mid-Michigan Time Bank, the Lansing Maker’s Network, and the Mid-Michigan Renewable Energy Cooperative. By leveraging time, tools, and talents, these groups will form the backbone of the Mid-Michigan Mutual Aid Network to help the region find new ways to build a sustainable new economy.

“Mutual Aid Networks provide a platform for communities to build from the ground up through identifying strengths and resources that are present globally which can be put into action through local location-specific projects,” says Marshall Clabueaux, a renewable energy activist and social entrepreneur.

Providence, Rhode Island

In the Providence Bay Area, the Fertile Underground Natural Cooperative is working to get a catering truck on the road. This truck will take food from farms and supermarkets and offer the raw, natural ingredients for free, while selling the prepared food. The goal of this project is to reach places that have limited access to fresh food and provide cooking demonstrations using seasonal produce.

Waterville, Kansas

Wellness Weaver, a timebank, has collaborated with partners around the US to connect people who want to create a FUNctional Health and Wellness Workers Cooperative — a wellness-oriented Mutual Aid Network.

“The value of the Mutual Aid Network is to bring the wisdom and expertise of those that have used time banking formally as a way to help develop and support the best functioning Wellness Oriented Mutual Aid Network,” says Helen Stucky Weaver, retired nurse and founder of Wellness Weavers.

St. Louis, Missouri

Solidarity Economy St. Louis is currently working to incubate African-American cooperative businesses, co-host a local conference around the theme of “Health, Wealth, and Disrupting Capitalism,” develop a time bank youth court program, engage in community organizing efforts to create a neighborhood food hub in the food desert of North St. Louis, and promote community development of vacant land.

“Being part of the Mutual Aid Network allows us to connect to and co-create a global movement of people who are working to build just and sustainable economies,” says Julia Ho, founder of Solidarity Economy St. Louis. “The only way for us to truly achieve mutual aid in our own communities is by extending mutual aid to others.”

Bergnek, South Africa

Bergnek Community Projects is a community development initiative that was started to empower and uplift women and youth through sustainable business ventures. The program provides access to food, clean water, and reproductive health care for women and girls in school. The long-term aim of the group is to build a community health care center.

Hull, United Kingdom

This Mutual Aid Network aims to create a chain reaction that goes back into communities. It meshes a thriving timebank with 600 members and the Hull Coin initiative, the City of Culture’s 2017 nomination, which is currently mobilizing 4,000 volunteers.

“When I started the TimeBank back in 2010, I saw it as the solution to everything,” says Kate Macdonald. “I realized in time that it is ‘one’ solution and that to have a viable parallel economy, we need different options which have strengths to use in different circumstances. When I heard Stephanie speak about Mutual Aid Networks a couple of years ago, I realized this had been what I had been looking for. What is often missed is a mechanism to join things up.”

Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania

The Mutual Aid Network of the Lehigh Valley addresses the social determinants of health of communities’ most vulnerable members, including formerly incarcerated people, juveniles aging out of the foster care system, homeless populations, individuals recovering from addiction, and newly settled refugees. This project address tackles these issues by tackling social isolation, one of the key factors that contributes to poor life and health outcomes.

These eight initiatives demonstrate that building a solidarity economy that serves every human being on the planet is possible.

A previous version of this article appeared in the July 2016 issue of STIR magazine

Header photo courtesy of the Mutual Aid Network.

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About the Study

Resource and energy demand has increased over the last few decades, with more extraction and land use happening in more countries than ever before. The rising resource demand from the industrialized countries and emerging economies depends on the resources located in the Global South. Many governments in the Global South have opted to advocate for natural resource exploitation as a pathway to greater socio-economic development.

However, this route needs to be challenged by looking at the actual benefits and costs imposed on people and the environment by current practices in the natural resource arena. The perspective of many affected communities is clear: They do not currently stand to gain, and indeed often suffer, from present approaches. Accordingly, they are calling for greater participation in decision-making and protection of their rights in natural resource development and governance.

Opening up lands for resource development projects in the Global South generally goes hand in hand with enshrining participation rights for the public to ensure their input in decision-making. In many places, however, civil society actors who are pushing for a greater say in project implementation or resource governance face increased pressures. When non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community-based organizations, and their individual members make claims about the use of natural resources, they face particular threats to – and restrictions on – their space, generally characterized by a high level of physical intimidation, and even lethal violence.

These pressures may also include the initiation of unfounded criminal investigations, surveillance, defamation, burdensome registration requirements for NGOs, stricter regulation of foreign funding for NGOs, and the restriction on demonstrations. Such pressures on civil society in the natural resource arena are not an isolated development, but part of a larger, seemingly global trend to cut back civic space, as documented by organizations such as CIVICUS in their annual State of Civil Society Report, or by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association.

The concept of “space” moves attention away from single types of pressure, for instance a narrow focus on the freezing of funding. It thus serves to more fully capture the wide range of pressures and restrictions experienced by civil society organizations. In addition, it enables studying the interaction between – and possibly sequences of – different forms of restrictions. Space, then, denotes the possibility and capacity of civil society to function in non-governmental or community-based organizations and to perform its key tasks. Without a real place at the table, civil society space can deteriorate into “fake space.” A study of civil society space should, therefore, not only focus on the pressures faced, but also include an analysis of civil society’s ability to use that space to actually obtain a real voice and induce change.

Country comparison of claims to natural resources

The study at hand was designed to uncover common patterns and dynamics of restrictions on – and coping strategies adopted by – civil society actors in the specific context of natural resource exploitation. It draws on case studies in India, the Philippines, Mexico, and South Africa. These four countries have huge reserves of natural resources, whether in the form of deposits for extraction or vast tracks of land suitable for energy production or industrial agriculture. They are all also home to conflicts about their natural resources, in particular with regard to their exploitation, development, and governance. In addition, the four countries can be considered “partial democracies,” in contrast to strong authoritarian or strong democratic states.[1]

One salient feature of partial democracies is the difference between the de jure space of NGOs, which is the space they should have according to applicable legislation, and the de facto space of NGOs, or the actual existing space in which they operate (Van der Borgh & Terwindt 2014, 15-16). This study relies on qualitative interviews conducted with grassroots organizations and NGOs working in the field of natural resources. In addition, individuals were interviewed who are working on the international level for international NGOs or governmental institutions and whose mandate explicitly includes the support of civil society or the protection of human rights defenders.

Patterns in restrictions

The examples of natural resource governance in Mexico, South Africa, the Philippines, and India show how laws and administrative decisions allow for and foster natural resource extraction without ensuring adequate participation rights. Guarantees for participation, albeit enshrined in national legislation, do not automatically protect those affected. On the contrary, communities, civil society activists, and NGOs often have to actively advocate for being included in decision-making by government or the private sector. If communities and NGOs push to be heard and have their criticisms taken into account, violations of their civil and political rights frequently ensue through, for example, defamation in the media, threats per SMS, arrest warrants, or even killings. The sequence and kinds of pressures on civil society tend to follow the logic of natural resource exploitation and are often traceable to specific stages in a project.

Early on, information is rarely made available to communities, hampering any efforts to make an informed decision or mobilize. As soon as critics start speaking up about a project’s negative impacts and their opposition to it, they face pressure. This pressure can be in the form of targeted intimidation, stigmatization, or the criminalization of individuals or organizations. The stage of a project in which extraction licenses get approved is often marked by high levels of contention. Public protests can lead to mass criminalization, administrative restrictions on the freedom of assembly, or physical encounters, and vice versa. Finally, not only, but in particular, leaders who continue to resist the implementation of extractive projects despite earlier threats and defamation can risk being killed.

Even though killings are certainly the most drastic threat faced by communities and NGOs, already before such killings occur, many communities may have been intimidated to an extent that leads them to the decision to remain silent. Killings really are only the tip of the iceberg, and support for community members and NGOs should thus come long before they face physical harassment. It has also become clear that a number of actors play a role in putting pressure on those speaking out, ranging from government bureaucrats and police forces to private security guards, company managers, and neighbors in communities.

Designing strategies to defend and reclaim space

In response to such threats, civil society, in coordination with governments and international institutions, has developed a wide range of measures and coping strategies to shield and protect community-based organizations, NGOs, and their individual members against such pressures, and to reclaim space for organizing and speaking out. Lessons learned have been collected in a number of manuals and toolkits, which can serve as guidance to other organizations and communities. Some measures focus on protecting physical integrity and security, such as access to emergency grants, security training, provision of secure spaces or relocation, accompaniment, medical assistance and stress management facilities, awards and fellowships, or solidarity campaigns and visits.

Other strategies have been developed specifically to counter administrative restrictions on registration, operation, and funding of NGOs, or for responding to fabricated charges. While some of the strategies thus counter particular types of pressures, guidance has also been developed to explain the availability of support that can be offered by European Union missions, United Nations institutions, or national human rights institutions. Specific attention has also been paid to the particular risks for women who take leadership roles and speak out publicly.

Thus, although a variety of measures and support mechanisms exist, it can be difficult to assess what is most strategic in a particular situation. As one of the most prevalent forms of defensive responses, affected community members and NGOs often opt for emergency response measures. Yet, these ad hoc measures present a number of problems. Security precautions may end up being so time-consuming that those at risk might prefer to focus on their political work instead of meticulous adherence to security protocols. Meanwhile, choosing to fly under the radar may result in unintentionally downplaying or obscuring the extent and nature of the threats and harassment they face. With limited time and resources, organizations have to make choices and may end up getting caught in reactive response loops, leaving fewer capacities to dedicate to longer-term strategies.

In addition to short-term response measures, movements try to develop proactive, longer-term strategies. Through visibility campaigns, they strive to expose restrictions on the space of civil society and the authors of such pressures. Affected communities, civil society activists, and NGOs also engage in human rights advocacy with government actors to guarantee a secure space for the exercising of their political and civil rights. These long-term strategies face a number of challenges. For example, the decision to go public and demand accountability might mean exposing victims of harassment to further threats.

Reliance on human rights entails further dilemmas. Although human rights advocacy is the most prevalent framework to counter pressures on civic space, it has limits when economic interests are at stake or when governments refuse to pledge adherence to human rights. Against this background, it is indispensable to develop further proactive strategies countering the very dynamics that are so characteristic of natural resource projects and that allow for, and result in, killings and other forms of restrictions.

Changing structures – enabling participation

Given that the type and sequence of pressures are closely related to the stages and actors in the natural resource arena, proactive strategies can push for changing those structures that shape natural resource development. This report addresses three such structuring elements: consultations, business, and law.

Consultations: An essential step in resource development legislation, policies, and projects is the inclusion of civil society, and affected communities in particular, in decision-making. Protests and conflicts are often intensified by thwarted attempts at meaningful participation. One tool that has become widespread in law and practice is the “consultation” process, which is at the heart of civil society participation in decision-making about natural resource projects. Increasingly though, consultations have been criticized as hollow exercises to legitimize extractive projects, without taking local concerns into account.

When affected communities and NGOs set out to exercise their rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly against this continued exclusion, destructive dynamics may be set in motion in which community divisions, defamation of leaders and NGOs, and public protests can eventually lead to physical confrontations that sometimes result in violent actions against civil society, including targeted killings. Certain fundamental changes are needed to avoid consultations becoming mere window dressing to push through extractive projects.

For example, civil society participation should not only be guaranteed once a project is planned, but also in the adoption of trade rules in multilateral and bilateral fora, legislative proposals on extractive industry regulations, and national and regional development plans. Consultations must rely on adequate access to information. The imbalance of power between businesses and communities needs to be tackled, and financial institutions should create the right incentives. Benefits should be shared adequately, and it should be recognized that not all projects are viable.

Business: Response strategies that deal with the involvement of business actors are poorly developed. What is expected of corporations in the natural resource arena needs to be made more explicit, and new ways must be found to push business actors to live up to their responsibilities. Business is still all too often viewed as an “outsider” to local dynamics, thus exempting them from actively preventing and countering the pressures faced by civil society members and NGOs critical of particular projects or development policies. Business should be pushed to implement the, at times promising, rhetoric it has adopted, and be reminded of its responsibility through complaints in (quasi) judicial fora. Financial institutions and the money they provide are often the backbone of natural resource projects, and the leverage they have over business behavior should be utilized more effectively to enforce relevant standards on community protection. Companies need regulation and oversight, and home as well as host states should assume a more prominent and effective role in implementing such structures.

Law: Legislation plays a key role in shaping natural resource governance, but it often favors corporate investments over the protection of local communities. Laws are also instrumental in restricting civic space through administrative regulations or practices of criminalization. At the same time, though, social movements can use legal instruments strategically as leverage vis-á-vis more powerful actors. Communities and NGOs therefore need tools to counter legal pressures and develop strategies to use legal procedures to reclaim their space and influence.

• You can download or order the full study here

Photo by diongillard

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