Making work, unmaking policy: the Community Work Programme in South Africa

Thesis

This thesis examines work, value, and state-citizen relations through an ethnographic study of South Africa’s Community Work Programme (CWP). The CWP attains its significance against an enduring preoccupation with labour in South Africa, yet amid dramatically changed circumstances. No longer does labour represent a scarce resource to be extracted by white minority regimes. Today, the post-apartheid state confronts mass unemployment as a question about how to sustain people in the absence of wages, and on what terms. The CWP represents one answer to this question. Offering part-time, community-based work opportunities in return for a small stipend, this public policy seeks to provide a long-term “employment safety net” and draws upon Non-Profit Organisations (NPOs) to deliver the intervention. As a concrete policy, it offers a unique window onto contestations about labour’s worth and the public good in contemporary South Africa.

Through a detailed ethnographic investigation, supported by in-depth interviews and documentary research, this thesis traces the emergence of the CWP policy consensus, its adaptation in programme practice, and its collapse over fifteen years later. I show how the policy proposal for CWP built an ambiguous consensus around work, community participation, and non-state implementation that resonated on a complex ideological landscape. Once adopted, however, this policy consensus fragmented into multiple, divergent narratives. Participants, programme staff and bureaucrats, and a range of other actors within and beyond the state are shown to have engaged with programme discourse in the pursuit of pragmatic and utopian projects, contesting and sharpening policy expectations in the process. These contestations centrally revolved around diverse understandings of value, including notions of the public good introduced by policy, that came to be worked out through, and against, monetary definitions of value. This perspective not only offers a more nuanced understanding of labour’s worth beyond singular logics of extraction or citizenship entitlements. It also shows how divergent narratives about value, and the constituencies that formed around them, prevented the reassembly of fragmented practices into a coherent narrative of policy success.

This thesis contributes to anthropological perspectives on policy as well as scholarship on the governance of economic lives. Focusing on a particular public intervention offers unique insights into what it means to make and value work today. Conversely, detailed attention to how multiple values are defined and made commensurable within one programme offers an improved understanding of how policy is made – and unmade.

Authors: Hoffmann, L

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-9g7r1z5bq
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: anthropology of work; anthropology of policy; post-apartheid South Africa; state-citizen relations; public employment programme; value and labour; unemployment
• Subjects: Public welfare--South Africa; Unemployment--Social aspects; Public works--South Africa; Economic anthropology; Labor policy--South Africa; Political anthropology; Community development--Case studies; Post-apartheid era--South Africa