Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 6: Down at the dumps“we are citizens of this city. We are expected to pay for services. We usedto pay for services, now it is difficult”.While the reclaimers have knowledge and experience of recycling materials, ofcollectively organising themselves, and of negotiating with buyers of materials, thecouncil has consistently failed to recognise them as recyclers, or even just stakeholders,in recycling decisions. In a focus group one reclaimer offered the explanation thatthe council “just take[s] us for granted. Even if you have a serious problem they don’tlisten. They say you are just people from the dumpsite. You are just scrap.”Under neo-liberal ordersMunicipal waste management has seen a variety of organisational forms emerge since1994 – which in itself reflects the ‘variable geometry’ of networked neo-liberalism.While apartheid discriminated on racist grounds, the neo-liberal city aggressivelyasserts the order of the market. For Cape Town, McDonald and Smith [2004] showthat, as an ideology, neo-liberalism is embraced by all political parties 103 and mostcity managers and planners and is, indeed, represented as the means of addressingapartheid inequalities. In part, they are responding to fiscal constraints imposed bycentral government which slashed financial transfers to local government by 85%between 1991 and 1997, and by a further 55% between 1997 and 2000. This financialsqueeze was accompanied by the expansion of municipal mandates to deliver servicesto all citizens rather than just the white minority.Private-public partnerships, punted by the World Bank and national government,then appeared as an efficient and cost effective means of serving ‘unfunded mandates’while the notion of extending public service delivery was systematically downgraded.Local departments, still responsible for delivering services, are meanwhile corporatised– meaning that they are fenced off from the rest of local government so that theycan be run like businesses. The variability of local opportunities and pressures for,as well as resistance to, corporatisation and public-private partnerships – a sort ofupmarket variation on outsourcing – then accounts for something of the variety oflocal organisational forms.103 The real difference between the Democratic Alliance and the ANC in Cape Town is that the DA says it outloud while the ANC shrouds its neo-liberal affiliation in euphemisms.- 172 - groundWork - Wasting the Nation