Zarina Patel

• PhD Cantab
• Professor (Associate) at University of Cape Town

The distinctiveness of urban processes and dynamics in Africa are of global significance. Achieving sustainable transitions in African cities must necessarily engage with theory and practice, which are derived out of context, and applied in systems and structures that are not globally understood. As sites of knowledge production, universities on th...

Advancing global sustainable development hinges on strengthening the connections between science, society, and policy, as well as addressing existing science inequalities. Research funding programmes play a pivotal role in this context, but little is known about how they can actively nurture required transformations of the science systems. In this...

This paper provides a distinctive analysis of the value of international intermediation alliances for co-production, based on the way they operate in practice. While much attention is paid to ideal or normative models of co-production, there is less understanding of the complexities that pervade co-production practices in specific contexts or how t...

Questions of inclusivity and transformation are central in higher education. In South Africa, these imperatives have the additional weight of post-apartheid redress. Attempts to address these questions seldom contemplate how transformation will be achieved. Efforts to achieve transformation often don’t attend to the critical question of how to nurt...

Securing sustainable and just transition pathways in cities is recognised as key to addressing global environmental challenges. There is increasing acceptance that transformative change in cities must be shaped by the co-production of knowledge between diverse partners. The creation of spaces of collaboration, referred to in the literature as ‘thir...

Social justice and environmental sustainability are often joint policy objectives, however, achieving the dual goal of just sustainability has proved difficult in both theory and practice. Scholars argue that a key challenge is balancing trade-offs between sustainability and justice objectives. This is evident within government-led housing, where t...

The central role of science and robust data sets as a means for advancing sustainable development has gained traction across science and policy communities globally. Furthermore, strengthening the science-policy interface in ways that link scientific knowledge production and societal problem solving requires both inter-disciplinary collaborations,...

In order to demonstrate the effects of competing constructions of nature by different interest groups, this article describes a dispute in Cape Town, South Africa, through the lens of cultural theory and Foucault’s notion of discourse linked to power. Controversy arose over the felling of a small plantation of non-indigenous pine trees, situated am...

Current research suggests that knowledge co-production processes offer an alternate and enduring approach to addressing urban sustainability challenges. This chapter explores the potential of such alternative approaches to knowledge production for informing urban management and tackling the different sustainability challenges that cities in sub-Sah...

While government housing can raise living standards for the urban poor, it has environmental impacts and contributes to urban resource consumption. In Gauteng Province, South Africa, government housing aims to improve quality of life, reduce poverty and inequality, and transform unsustainable urban forms. This paper draws on survey and interview da...

1. Introduction At the core of EA is a belief that science and expert knowledge can be relied upon to predict and measure the impacts of a policy, plan or proposal as an aid to decision-making. However, times have changed since the inception of EA and future development can no longer “be anticipated and planned for, under relatively static conditio...

Applied research has evolved to play an important role in understanding and reorienting relationships between different knowledge partnerships in urban sustainability. This paper reflects on experiences from the global South on knowledge co-production experiments through ‘CityLabs’, which are forums for bringing together different knowledge brokers...

Urban sustainability is a wicked issue unsuited to management through traditional decision-making structures. Co-productive arrangements, spaces and processes are inscribed in new organisational forms to bridge between diverse forms of knowledge and expertise. This paper suggests that local interaction platforms (LIPs) are innovative responses to t...

The increasing recognition globally of the difficulties faced by local governments in their attempts to address the complex nature of urban policy has led to engaged scholarship and knowledge co-production increasingly being invoked. To better understand how knowledge partnerships are formed, sustained and the (perceived) benefits of such knowledge...

The success of the Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11) depends on the availability and accessibility of robust data, as well as the reconfiguration of governance systems that can catalyse urban transformation. Given the uneven success of the Millennium Development Goals, and the unprecedented inclusion of the urban in the SDG process, the feas...

South African cities have focused on sustainability as a policy and strategic objective. Nonetheless, realising the transformative potential of fostering sustainable transition pathways is challenging. Our entry point for understanding this impasse is that the ability of cities to transform lies in the opaque spaces between policy rhetoric and impl...

As a discipline and field of knowledge, South African geography has been defined in and by critical societal debates, highlighting how, as geographers, we produce knowledge and teach to address societal imperatives. Inspired in our own and others’ research practice engaging in collaboration between the university and activist groups and knowledge c...

Transdisciplinary research has increasingly been emphasised as desirable, particularly for managing complex issues that exist within socio-political environmental systems. However, achieving true transdisciplinarity, both in academia and practice, has proved challenging. In the case of natural disasters, the risk of not acknowledging the inherent c...

The campaign for the inclusion of a specifically urban goal within the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was challenging. Numerous divergent interests were involved, while urban areas worldwide are also extremely heterogeneous. It was essential to minimize the number of targets and indicators while still capturing critical urban...

This paper offers a reflection on 15 years of policy change in the City of Cape Town aimed at fostering sustainability from the perspective of a City practitioner. The persistent continuation of unsustainable outcomes, despite ongoing policy reforms, is understood as a combination of the emergence of wicked problems, within a changing local governm...

Media representations of environmental issues can provide insight into decision-making in complex contexts. Analysing different framings of an environmental problem can reveal the underlying biases and values that determine environmental decisions. This paper presents a case study of the conflict around proposed changes to the urban edge and its im...

As an alternative to 'best practice', a City-University partnership in Cape Town has been influencing the development trajectory of the city through the co-production of knowledge by practitioners and academics. The partnership allows for sharing and a deepening of substantive knowledge about Cape Town and also acquisition of tactical knowledge abo...

Three distinct but overlapping policy objectives have influenced environmental policy, structures and processes in contemporary large South African cities: sustainable development, environmental justice and adapting and mitigating for climate change. These goals have been characterized here as three waves of urban environmental policy. This paper r...

The local was institutionalised as a key scale for environmental action at the Earth Summit, and remains salient in discourse, policy, and action. However, given both real changes and geographical insights into the politics of scale in the past twenty years, we suggest it is time to (re)consider this focus. We assess local sustainability through th...

In recent years, floods caused by heavy rain have caused major disasters in urban centres around the world. A lack of disaster preparedness in the global South has resulted in much damage in urban environments. These damages will have long-term repercussions for governance, communities and the natural environment. Heavy rainfall events are projecte...

This paper examines the changing role of chieftaincy in relation to democratic institutions of local governance in QwaQwa in the Eastern Free State and in particular the implications for the management of natural resources. Referring to a case study of grass usage, the paper identifies the shift from chieftaincy to democratic local governance as on...

South Africa has historically enjoyed an ability to generate energy cheaply through the use of abundant coal reserves, which has been a key component in the promotion of economic growth. This paper assesses whether it is possible to reconcile economic goals and environmental protection within the nuclear energy sector, whilst meeting the needs of s...

Despite constitutional commitments to environmental justice in South Africa, evidence indicates that the poor and the natural environment continue to be marginalised in decision making. This paper examines the role of environmental assessment procedures, specifically Environmental Impact Assessments, in shaping outcomes at the local level to unders...

In the international system, there has been a power shift towards regional powers, which can be illustrated by recent developments in climate governance. I argue that some of these regional powers are also climate powers, which benefit from an issue-specific power shift. The behavior and strategies of those climate powers are central for global cli...

Climate change is a multi-dimensional issue and in terms of adaptation numerous state and non-state actors are involved from global to national and local scales. The aim of this paper is first to analyse specific institutional networks involved in climate change predominantly at the national level in South Africa and second to determine how differe...

The reshaping of South African cities is being guided by policies aiming to build socially and environmentally just communities. Despite widespread commitment to this goal, there is little consensus on what it means and how it should and could translate into practice. The paper shows that despite the emphasis on environmental justice and building s...

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24 Zarina Patel TRANSFORMATION 57 (2005) ISSN 0258-7696 24 Article Understanding environmental change in South African cities: a landscape approach1 Zarina Patel ��the making, remaking and making again of places and environments are an essential part of what human beings do�. (Campbell 2002:273) �have faith in human creativity and change: movement...

At the World Summit on Sustainable Development in late August, leaders must try to reconcile the differences between sustainable development priorities of people in developed countries and those of more marginalized people in developing countries, including the poor in southern Africa.

This paper aims to initiate a debate through which the gap between rhetoric and the local-level implementation of sustainable development might be addressed. It seeks to contribute towards a conceptual as well as a practical basis for the understanding of what contribution sustainable development can make in the context of the post-apartheid recons...

The current planning and restructuring of South Africa cities is being guided and regulated by a complex ‘net’ of integrated, parallel and divergent strands of planning, environment and development policy and legislation. Although sustainable development is not explicitly the hegemonic driver within current policy and legislation, the re-vamping of...

�9 Economic growth based on a reintegration into the world economy which essentially involves a change in the trade regime to shift the composition of, and the relationship between, imports and exports; radically lowering protection of local industries and accelerating exports from a restructured manufacturing sector; attracting a major inflow of f...

Are women closer to nature? In exploring the link between women and nature, ZARINA PATEL examines the role of women in environmental management in urban and rural systems