Development Planning in South Africa

Why do so many people in South Africa live in severe poverty despite the nation being celebrated as a beacon of democracy and reconciliation? The Eastern Cape Provincial Growth and Development Plan (PGDP) was a groundbreaking project that—with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme—attempted to forge a ten-year plan to eliminate poverty, unemployment, and inequality in the province. Coming at a time when social movements in South Africa were at their most vocal and visible, the PGDP was consciously seized on in the Eastern Cape as a chance to mount a radical policy challenge to the status quo. But it was soon undermined and obstructed by the South African state.

Development Planning in South Africa uses John Reynolds’s firsthand engagement working on the PGDP. Drawing on the strategic-relational approach pioneered by Bob Jessop, Reynolds’s empirically rich study explores the ways in which this challenge was negotiated and eventually neutralized. The first of its kind, Development Planning in South Africa provides an essential microlevel study with profound implications for how we understand how state power is organized and expressed in state policy, both in South Africa and beyond.