INTRODUCTION
This paper seeks to explain why some diverse communities in sub-Saharan Africa are better able to provide local public goods than others. In some heterogeneous communities across the continent, residents cooperate to raise funds for local schools or implement night patrols, working together to improve their own communities. In other multi-ethnic villages, neighbours struggle to repair roads or maintain community wells that provide safe drinking water to the community. What explains why diverse communities differ in their capacity to govern their own commons?
In recent years empirical scholarship has found a robust negative relationship between diversity and the provision of public goods (e.g. Easterly & Levine Reference Easterly and Levine1997). In the USA, Alesina et al. (Reference Alesina, Baqir and Easterly1999) found that shares of public spending on education, roads, and rubbish collection are lower in multi-ethnic localities than in more homogeneous ones, while Miguel & Gugerty (Reference Miguel and Gugerty2005) observed ethnically heterogeneous communities in Kenya struggling to raise money in school fundraisers and manage shared irrigation channels. Providing public goods, beyond those afforded by the state, requires cooperation on the part of individuals in communities, but the obstacles to collective action are often too great to overcome in a community of people unlike one another, leaving these areas in a kind of trap. And where the state is weak and lacks the capacity to provide services, communal provision becomes even more essential to the well-being of residents and the impediments to collective action brought on by ethnic heterogeneity are even more troubling.
But behind this trap lies a puzzle. Recent empirical studies illustrate that the relationship between diversity and public goods provision is far from axiomatic. In some diverse communities of the developing world, the hindrances to collective action are fewer (Vedeld Reference Vedeld2000). For instance, in Miguel's (Reference Miguel2004) comparative analysis of public goods provision in rural Kenya and Tanzania, diversity appeared to have little effect on school fundraising efforts in the Tanzanian village he studied. Such a study suggests that, in some settings, inter-ethnic cooperation at the community level can be sustained. But what accounts for this cooperative capacity?
This paper suggests that variations in environments of inter-ethnic trust may help to explain why some multi-ethnic communities across sub-Saharan Africa are able to provide public goods locally and others are not. In diverse societies, the resolution of collective action problems requires foundations of inter-group trust that bind non-co-ethnics into reciprocal relationships and help them converge on mutually beneficial outcomes. But whether or not inter-group trust materialises in diverse communities often depends upon the saliency of ethnic identity therein. I argue that inter-group trust will be more likely to develop in communities where cross-cutting cleavages have tempered the saliency of identity points, allowing relationships of outgroup trust to germinate. In such environments, communities may be more apt to confront their shared problems.
I explore these themes through a comparative analysis of two multi-ethnic Cape Town suburbs – Delft and Zonnebloem – that have experienced divergent outcomes with respect to participation in local goods provision. Using original data, I investigate the role that ethnic, and in particular racial, identities play in shaping trust patterns in these neighbourhoods and how such dynamics impact community policing institutions there.
REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
Public goods are essential to functioning societies. One can conceptualise a public good as a type of resource that is non-rivalrous and non-excludable (Samuelson Reference Samuelson1954). While they produce positive externalities for the public at large, their provision is not remunerated. As such, they become subject to pervasive free-rider problems and are often underprovided. Therefore, eliciting participation in public goods provision embodies a standard collective action problem (Olson Reference Olson1965).
However, the frequency of cooperative behaviour in social environments cries out for explanation. Some political scientists have used institutional frameworks to explore how collective action problems can be resolved (Ostrom Reference Ostrom1991). Others have cast doubt on these efficient explanations, and have, instead, explored the cultural and social basis of collective action (Bates Reference Bates1988). They argue that ‘vehicles of culture’ – norms, values, and identities – provide the ‘cement of society’ that facilitates collective action (Elster Reference Elster1989: 248).
Trust is one such ‘vehicle of culture’ that has gained attention as an explanation for collective action. Trust encompasses an expectation that others will fulfil their promises and is grounded in one's expectations about the future behaviour of others (Hardin Reference Hardin2002). In many settings, the transaction costs of cooperating with another person is prohibitively high. But if potential partners view each other as trustworthy – that is, someone who will refrain from acting exploitatively and engage in reciprocity – cooperation often manifests (Coleman Reference Coleman1990).
But even as scholars have examined the solutions to collective action problems, others have questioned whether these solutions fall short in ethnically heterogeneous communities. Using different theoretical frameworks, scholars have attempted to explain why intractable collective dilemmas often plague diverse communities. Some scholars focus on the prevalence of in-group favouritism in social environments (e.g. Tajfel et al. Reference Tajfel, Billig, Bundy and Flament1971), arguing that individuals tend to care more about the welfare of their own ethnic group members (Horowitz Reference Horowitz1985). Because individuals predominantly value benefits that are accrued to members of their own ethnic groups, they may not be willing to bear the costs of providing goods that will be shared with other groups. Another group of scholarship places emphasis on a divergence of preferences between groups in society. For historical or institutional reasons, ethnic groups may have dissimilar preferences with respect to the allocation of public goods (Bates Reference Bates1973). In the absence of similar preferences, collective action is more difficult to achieve.
Others have explained collective action failures in diverse communities by exploring how heterogeneity affects human behaviour in a strategic environment. Habyarimana et al. (Reference Habyarimana, Humphreys, Posner and Weinstein2009) argue that co-ethnics may have an advantage in accomplishing collective tasks because, given common cultural material, they are better able to communicate and, thus, are able to function more efficiently with one another. Still others place emphasis on networks in explaining why ethnic homogeneity favours local public goods provision (Miguel & Gugerty Reference Miguel and Gugerty2005). In-group members are often bound together in dense social networks (Fafchamps Reference Fafchamps2003) that provide a mechanism for sanctioning members who fail to contribute. Because sanctions appear to be applied more effectively within groups than between them, diverse communities will face more extensive free-riding problems due to the absence or ineffectiveness of such sanctions.
Finally, some scholars argue that heterogeneous communities lack environments of trust, attributing failures of collective action to this missing ingredient of social life. Scholars have found that it is more difficult for individuals to trust outgroup members and easier to place one's faith in a co-ethnic, a finding that has been corroborated in both experimental studies and survey data across a wide range of settings (Barr Reference Barr2003; Kasara Reference Kasara2013).
That one is more likely to trust an in-group member may be due to the fact that ethnic identity serves as an important source of information that increases trust between individuals. Ethnicity, like class or gender, is a type of identity in which ‘membership is determined by attributes associated with, or believed to be associated with, descent’ (Chandra Reference Chandra2006: 398). Because identities help individuals define their social role in relation to others, we can think of ethnic – and in many contexts, racial – identity as a type of ‘social radar’ (Hale Reference Hale2004). The empirical markers of ethnicity or race provide individuals with low-cost information about others, which they, in turn, use to generate expectations about their behaviour (Habyarimana et al. Reference Habyarimana, Humphreys, Posner and Weinstein2009). Because shared group membership reduces uncertainty in social exchange, it serves as a powerful source of trust.
While these relationships of trust that result from shared identity facilitate cooperative behaviour among co-ethnics, they could spell disaster for multi-ethnic communities. Ethnically heterogeneous localities are often fragmented, with ethnic groups socially or spatially partitioned from one another; group boundaries are often actively maintained in political, economic and social arenas. Subsequently, relationships of trust fall within and not across these boundaries. These types of communities create fruitful environments for the development of ‘bonding’ or ‘particularised’ trust, in which individuals place their faith only in members of their in-group (Putnam Reference Putnam2002; Uslaner Reference Uslaner2002) and attribute negative characteristics to out-group members.
We would expect that an environment of strong ties and bonding trust would hinder the local provision of public goods across Africa's diverse communities. But across the continent, we have witnessed many heterogeneous communities finding solutions to their shared challenges. How then are we able to explain why some communities are able to overcome social dilemmas? In the next section I lay out a theoretical framework that accounts for variation in local goods provision by placing emphasis on identity, context and the conditions that favour the development of inter-group trust.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
While the factors that facilitate collective action in diverse communities are many, inter-group trust is an essential ingredient. At the foundation of inter-group trust are individuals who maintain broad and inclusive identities, defining the groups to which they belong widely. They are individuals who are able to place their faith in out-group members because they do not view such individuals as fundamentally different from them (Uslaner Reference Uslaner2002). As such, they tend to believe that out-group members will refrain from acting exploitatively. Elster elaborates, ‘If an individual thinks of himself as somehow representative or typical of a certain group, he will tend to argue that if I act in a certain way, others like me are likely to behave similarly' (Elster Reference Elster1985: 366). Given this, we can surmise that in communities where inter-group trust is present, individuals may be more likely to participate in collective efforts in their neighbourhoods because they believe that they will not be exploited by out-group members in cooperating first. In this way, broad circles of trust ameliorate fears that outgroup members will abscond on their civic duties or exploit their own valued time and labour, lowering the barriers to collective action.
But if we are to explain the puzzle I first presented, one must account for why some communities are endowed with inter-group trust while others are not. I argue that the presence of inter-group trust across racially and ethnically diverse communities will vary with the saliency of the identities therein. In communities where identity cleavages run deep, group identity is more likely to structure trust attitudes and suppress the development of inter-group trust, potentially leaving these communities in an unyielding development trap. However, in communities where the intensity of cleavages has been tempered by the presence of cross-cutting cleavages, group identity will be less prominent in navigating social relationships, encouraging the formation of trust among non-co-ethnics and helping these communities avoid such traps.
In many communities across Africa, ethnic identities are central components of social arenas. The politics of post-colonial resource distribution has solidified ethnopolitical identities across the region (Mozaffar Reference Mozaffar and Glickman1995), encouraging individuals to invest in intra-ethnic networks that facilitate patronage transactions (Chandra Reference Chandra2004). These networks, in turn, provide forms of social capital that help to mitigate risk in the context of Africa's poorly developed and ill-functioning markets. In this way, ethnic identity structures resource distribution, networks and other features of everyday life. As such, it becomes the basis of achieving one's political, economic and social goals.
But in other communities, ethnic or racial identities are less consequential for individuals in everyday social interactions. In some communities, for example, complex ethnic, racial or sectarian demographies tend to temper the saliency of identity points in political and social life. Many sub-Saharan countries are characterised by an ethnic demography that is complex. As Mozaffar et al. (Reference Mozaffar, Scarritt and Galaich2003: 382) explain, in some regions of the continent, we find an ethnic morphology marked by ‘salient inter-group differences’ but also ‘intra-group heterogeneity’. And in some countries, we find considerable sub-ethnic fractionalisation present (see Selway Reference Selway2011). Many ethnic groups are internally divided by other markers of identity – for example, tribal differences cut across sub-groups, religious communities are separated by sectarian differences, dialects divide linguistic groups.
In some cases, intra-group heterogeneity and sub-group fractionalisation produce cross-cutting cleavages (Lipset & Rokkan Reference Lipset and Rokkan1967) that inhibit the social bisection of communities. Societies characterised by cross-cutting cleavages are such that members of one identity group – such as an ethnic group – can also be members of other identity groups, for example religious denominations, races or social classes. Such structures tend to moderate the intensity of cleavages and, subsequently, the saliency of any one identity point, as one's ‘competing interests on the second dimension may undercut their primary allegiance to interests arising on the first dimension’ (Dunning & Harrison Reference Dunning and Harrison2010: 21). This social structure creates an ‘interdependence’ among social groups that serves to ‘sew the social system together’ (Coser Reference Coser1956: 72). Political scientists argue that the degree to which cleavages are cross-cutting has important implications for politics in divided societies in that it can affect coalition building (Rogowski Reference Rogowski1989), party structures (Roemer et al. Reference Roemer, Elizabeth, Lee, Yi and van der Straeten2007) and even vote choice.
Cross-cutting cleavages can also impact the micro-dynamics of inter-group cooperation in local communities as well. When they are present they tend to temper the saliency, and thus expression, of any one identity point. In such settings, one's commitment to a group identity will be considerably weaker. When social actors are less dependent on the expression of identity to realise their goals, they are less likely to activate these identities in the course of daily interactions. And when one's social environment is not encapsulated by their identity, they will be more likely to form ties with ethnically or racially diverse others. These ties may only be casual (see Granovetter (Reference Granovetter1973) on the ‘strength’ of ‘weak ties’); nonetheless, they are consequential in that they lay the foundation of inter-group trust.
Such an idea rests on the notion that identities are neither fixed nor immutable but, rather, are contingently expressed. Such an assertion has been put to the test by decades of scholarship – theoretical, observational and experimental – in the social sciences. Scholars have observed that the activation of certain identities in political and social life is context dependent (e.g. Brass Reference Brass1997), in that it varies across time and space. We know that individuals use identities to navigate interactions and understand the contours of social exchange. Ethnicity or race, scholars argue, may factor into this process, but it does not have to (Barth Reference Barth1969). Ethnicity or race is little more than data, the meaning of which is endowed subjectively. It can act as a ‘rule of thumb’ for generating expectations about another's behaviour or intentions, but alternative characteristics may serve this purpose as effectively (Hale Reference Hale2004).
The extent to which any identity point serves as a ‘rule of thumb’ depends on the ‘interpretive frameworks of the observer’ (Chandra Reference Chandra2004: 63) and the context of the interaction. Innovative empirical research has corroborated these claims. For instance, Kurzban et al. (Reference Kurzban, Tooby and Cosmides2001) found that while research subjects used race to categorise groups of individuals, they immediately eschewed a racial scheme when they were presented with alternative, even arbitrary, markers. Interestingly, Eifert et al. (Reference Eifert, Miguel and Posner2010) found that explicitly political variables – such as exposure to heightened political competition – condition the degree to which people identify with their ethnicity. These and other empirical studies suggest that the presence of an identity marker, like ethnicity, does not axiomatically indicate its internalisation or expression. In fact, individuals often use alternative schemes of social categorisation (e.g. class, gender, sub-tribe) in social interaction, in place of ethnic indices.
From this research, we can presume that the presence of multiple race or ethnic groups within a community may mean that corresponding identities are salient in shaping interpersonal interactions therein – or they may not be. It is the salience of identity that helps to shape the environment of trust in communities, which in turn may impact the prospects for mutually beneficial collective action.
In sum, I argue that where collective action succeeds in Africa's diverse communities, inter-group trust is often present, helping to build relationships and generate commitments to reciprocity. I suspect that inter-group trust is more likely to develop where the salience of identity points has been tempered by contextual variables – such as cross-cutting cleavages. In the next section, I present details of a research design and comparative analysis of two Cape Town neighbourhoods, which allow me to evaluate this proposition.
WHY CAPE TOWN?
I chose to evaluate my theory by examining local goods provision in Cape Town, South Africa. South Africa provides an ideal environment to explore the dynamics of political behaviour in heterogeneous societies, as it is a quintessential multi-ethnic society that is fractionalised racially, ethnically and linguistically. Within South Africa, Cape Town is considered one of the country's most culturally diverse cities, with a rich history of interaction between different races and ethnicities both prior to and after the fall of the Apartheid system (Western & Coles Reference Western and Coles1996). More importantly, race and ethnicity matter in South African society, and so constitute a hard test of the role of trust in facilitating inter-group cooperation. In South Africa, race and ethnicity have been structured by the institutional legacies of an Apartheid system that sought to consolidate the political and economic power of White South Africans by means of segregation policies. During Apartheid, individuals were defined by their race, as the regime attempted to ‘legislate membership in racial categories’ and marginalise all people who were non-White (Jung Reference Jung2000: 12). For Blacks, one was further defined by an ethnicity, as the regime created ethnically delineated homelands (Bantustans) as a means to remove Blacks from ‘White South Africa’ and strip them of accompanying rights of citizenship. Apartheid's entrenched system of institutional prejudice produced deep-rooted, structural imbalances in socio-economic conditions between Whites and non-Whites as well as racial and ethnic groups within these broad categories. These legacies continue to uphold the relevance of race and ethnicity in the social and political landscape of present-day South Africa (see Ferree Reference Ferree2011).
Even though race and ethnicity are highly salient in South Africa, it is the rainbow nation's complex demographic topography that provides an opportunity to assess how variation in the saliency of identity shapes the development of inter-group trust in diverse communities within the country. Although racial and ethnic identities continue to prevail in the modern South African consciousness, there is considerable variation in the salience of these identities across contexts. For instance, Indian ethnicity continues to be a politically relevant and socially salient identity point for individuals in the Kwazulu-Natal city of Durban. In the last decade, the Democratic Alliance has spent substantial amounts of political capital courting the Indian vote. They have appealed to particular ‘Indian concerns’ about the allocation of resources and possible ANC bias towards African communities (Ferree Reference Ferree2011). In Cape Town, however, Indian ethnicity has assumed less significance in public arenas as a distinct, ethnically based identity around which people mobilise. During the implementation of Apartheid-era spatial policies, Capetonians of Indian descent were permitted to live anywhere within the perimeters of the ‘Coloured Group Areas’. Because Indians were too few in number, no attempt was made to allocate a separate living space within the city limits. By contrast, Indians comprise a sizable portion of the populace in Durban; because they were successful shopkeepers, they were considered an economic threat to Whites. Consequently, they were confined to a separate Indian group area (Western & Coles Reference Western and Coles1996). Because of a combination of demographic patterns and Apartheid institutions, the salience of Indian identity differs between these cities. Indian ethnic markers are likely to mean one thing in Durban and another in Cape Town. A similar variation in identity expression exists between working-class, Christian and socially conservative Coloureds and their young, urban and educated counterparts in the Western Cape, according to Courtney Jung's research on identity politics in South Africa (Jung Reference Jung2000). For Coloureds in Cape Town, ethnic identity is overlaid with religious, ideological and, most noticeably, class identities; contextual variables condition which identity an individual will embrace.
These examples suggest that identities in South Africa are heterogeneous, indefinite and ‘unevenly politicised’ (Jung Reference Jung2000) – an artefact of Apartheid engineering and the country's complex demographic patterns. As my theory suggests, variations in the salience of ethno-racial identities throughout South Africa have implications for the intensity of group cleavages in local communities across the country. If the intensity of societal cleavages varies according to context, so will patterns of inter-group trust. We can speculate, then, that collective action problems may be more intractable in some of Cape Town's diverse neighbourhoods, but quite solvable in others.
OPERATIONALISATION, DATA AND EVIDENCE
In evaluating my claims, I use a ‘most similar systems’ design (Sartori Reference Sartori1970), in which two cases with similar characteristics and opposing outcomes are analysed. The outcome variable that is assessed in this paper is participation in local goods provision. In the case of Cape Town, I focus on the issue of public safety, operationalising the outcome variable as participation in the city's Community Policing Forums. In Cape Town, service delivery failures have been particularly apparent in the domain of public safety. With murder rates as high as 34 per 100,000 people for 2017, South Africa is plagued by violent crime; murder rates in Cape Town are nearly twice the national level (South African Cities Network, 2017). The city of Cape Town has struggled to provide adequate security for its residents and has attempted to involve the public in fighting crime in order to improve law enforcement capacities. This includes implementing neighbourhood watches and establishing municipal-level consultative bodies known as Community Policing Forums (CPFs). The municipality of Cape Town – in conjunction with the Western Cape Province – has placed community policing structures in almost every district. In order to collect data on participation rates in community policing, I visited municipal police stations as well as community improvement district headquarters in my selected sample of neighbourhoods, conducting semi-structured interviews with local police officers, chairpersons of CPFs, and members of neighbourhood watches. The interviews concentrated on identifying rates of participation among residents in community policing efforts, describing the functions and objectives of these bodies, and ascertaining challenges that these organisations confront. In addition, a variety of primary documents were collected in my sample communities, including CPF newsletters and meeting minutes.
The success of any one CPF in garnering public participation is often a result of many factors, such as resources, district crime rates, management techniques, and the history of police relations with the community. However, the explanatory variable I highlight in this paper is inter-group trust. Many scholars in sociology and criminology have explored the role of trust – in general – in community policing. Because the challenges of 21st century security have exceeded the fiscal and administrative capacity of some governments to provide it, states across the world have ‘relinquished’ the control of policing not just ‘downwards’ to citizens, in the form of CPFs and other institutions, but also ‘outwards’ to various private and commercial actors (Loader & Walker Reference Loader and Walker2001: 10). What has resulted is a policing model that encompasses a complex web of partnerships between the public, private and voluntary sectors called ‘networked governance’ (Fleming & Wood Reference Fleming and Wood2006). According to scholars, success in managing these networks requires trust and reciprocity between actors and organisations. Trust is essential for effective plural policing – or ‘collaborative innovation’ (see Sorensen & Torfing, Reference Sørensen and Torfing2011) – because it helps manage conflicts between groups with different interests and ‘maintain relationships even when agreement proves elusive’ (Rhodes, Reference Rhodes, Fleming and Wood2006: 19). This paper augments this work, by suggesting that ethnic and racial identity is an important element that shapes the relationships of trust on which community policing structures rely.
While inter-group trust is typically operationalised using survey data that gauges the extent to which respondents think that out-group members can be trusted, the availability of such data was inconsistent across my sample communities. As such, I operationalise inter-group trust using a range of indicators that attempt to capture facets of the related concept of bridging social capital, which Robert Putnam defined in his seminal work on American communities (Putnam Reference Putnam2000). These facets not only include trust between members of racially and ethnically diverse groups, but also the extent to which norms of reciprocity and social networks bridge between communal groups. To gather data on such indicators, I conducted semi-structured interviews with active members of community groups, directors of local community improvement districts, community leaders, and ordinary non-active citizens. I was able to assess community attributes from these interviews, including levels of inter-personal trust between neighbours of different ethnic and racial groups, perceptions of the diversity of social networks, and perceptions of community cohesion – a concept related to social capital that refers to social solidarity and a sense of belonging or ‘place attachment’ (Forrest & Kearns Reference Forrest and Kearns2001: 2128). In addition, I utilised secondary sources – such as anthropological studies of these areas – and collected primary sources, including the written minutes of neighbourhood watch meetings and electronic correspondence among neighbouring residents, to which I was granted access. Finally, where they were available, I utilised public opinion surveys of the greater Cape Town metropolis to gather descriptive data on indicators of bridging social capital, such as the 2005 Cape Area Study.
In order to choose research sites within Cape Town, I relied on the most updated data from the South African Census Bureau's 2011 count, which provided insight into which areas of Cape Town are veritably ‘multi-ethnic’. With these figures, I estimated racial and linguistic fractionalisation indices for each Cape Town suburb, using my indices to select research sites.Footnote 1 I focused my analysis on suburbs that registered as ‘high’ or ‘medium’ multi-ethnic, then chose the suburbs of Zonnebloem and Delft.
Zonnebloem is a residential and commercial area that borders Cape Town's central business district and is situated between the lower slopes of Devil's Peak and the docks of Table Bay. Zonnebloem is the former District Six, a mixed-race neighbourhood that garnered international attention when, in the 1970s, the Apartheid regime forcibly removed over 60,000 of its residents and declared the district a ‘Whites only’ area. Today, the residents of Zonnebloem are heterogeneous, comprised of Coloured (31%), White (19%), Black African (39%) and Indian/Asian (2%) residents and linguistically plural, with English, Afrikaans and Xhosa speakers distributed throughout the area (Statistics South Africa, 2011 Community Profile Database).Footnote 2 Zonnebloem can be considered a ‘low’ to ‘middle’ income community, with a mix of ‘white-collar’ property owners and government housing beneficiaries. The occupation profile of Zonnebloem's labour force is also considerably diverse; residents include managers, professionals, technicians, clerks, service workers, and craft and trades people, as well as unemployed persons.
Outside of the city bowl lies Delft, a large, low-income, township located on the Cape Flats, east of Cape Town International Airport. It is one of the most racially heterogeneous suburbs in the area. The 2011 census reports that approximately 58% of Delft's residents are Coloured, 39% are Black African, 0.4% are Indian/Asian and 0.1% are White. In addition to being mixed-race, Delft is linguistically heterogeneous, as English, Afrikaans, Xhosa and other African languages are spoken throughout the community. While Delft is poorer than Zonnebloem, its occupation profile is as diverse. Residents of Delft include clerks, service workers, craft and trade workers as well as plant and machine operators.
These communities provide ideal cases for hypothesis testing using a most-similar systems design because they are similarly composed with respect to a number of essential characteristics. Each of these communities is among Cape Town's most racially and ethnically heterogeneous districts. Both communities have high numbers of tenants, who are either renting units or occupying houses rent-free in these areas. And both Delft and Zonnebloem have a large number of residents who are new to the area. Large numbers of African families have relocated to Delft's newly built state-subsidised housing developments, while Zonnebloem's population has enlarged in the last decade because of an expansion in residential building. In addition to their new populations, both communities have similar percentages of ‘low income’ and ‘middle income’ residents, even as Zonnebloem maintains higher aggregate household income (Statistics South Africa, 2011 Community Profile Database).
Community policing in Delft and Zonnebloem
Yet, even as Delft and Zonnebloem share a number of structural similarities, these areas have experienced vastly different outcomes with respect to community involvement in policing. Delft residents are considerably active and participatory in community policing efforts. There are over 14 active neighbourhood watches in the six sectors of Delft. These groups work in conjunction with the South African Police Services (SAPS) on various security initiatives, such as search and seizure operations. Patrolling the neighbourhoods is their principal activity; community members active in the neighbourhood watches volunteer to conduct foot patrols during the day and, especially, during the weekends when crimes are more likely to be committed.Footnote 3
Community policing efforts in Delft extend beyond neighbourhood watch organisations. CPF members organise other community initiatives such as youth days or anti-truancy programmes and events called ‘Walk-abouts’, in which community members gather together to confront suspected gang members or drug dealers and persuade them to cease their activities.Footnote 4 Moreover, the CPF has been involved in helping to organise recent marches against taxi violence, violence against children and the killing of police officers in Delft. Finally, in order to involve more residents in public safety efforts, the CPF holds monthly community meetings called Imbizos where community members come together to raise particular safety concerns with local law enforcement and the CPF chapter. Residents of Delft attend these Imbizos in large numbers, regardless of whether the issues being discussed are relevant to their own households.Footnote 5 And interestingly, some community members who are not officially registered as members of the neighbourhood watch still contribute to policing. Men in Delft South sometimes join together to confront shebeen owners that continue to operate after hours.Footnote 6 Local sheebeens are often the focal point of crime in early morning hours, so by regulating the behaviour of shebeen owners, Delft residents are contributing to security provision in the neighbourhoods.
Interestingly, because of Delft's high rates of participation in public safety initiatives, the Provincial Community Policing Forum administration in the Western Cape looks to Delft as a model of community policing amidst diversity, calling the community ‘very responsive’.Footnote 7 Delft residents seem to pride themselves on their commitment to active involvement in public safety, especially community leaders, church leaders, and school administrators.
By contrast, the neighbourhood of Zonnebloem has not enjoyed the same level of success in community policing efforts as Delft, as few residents contribute to keeping Zonnebloem safe. While a neighbourhood watch has been formed in Zonnebloem, it is small and largely ineffectual. Currently, there is no chairperson of the Zonnebloem Neighbourhood Watch (hereafter, ZNW) and one of the most populous streets in the area is ‘really uninvolved’.Footnote 8 The residents of Justice Walk have spearheaded the effort to form a neighbourhood watch, but of the 40 households in Justice Walk, only three are actively involved in the organisation.Footnote 9
Unlike in Delft, ZNW members do not patrol the streets, preferring to leave this work to local law enforcement because they do not want to ‘risk their lives’.Footnote 10 However, the ZNW members have avoided working in close conjunction with SAPS to assist in local crime-fighting, nor do they attend the monthly meetings of the local CPF chapter. A majority of their activities include occasional phone calls and emails to city departments to lodge complaints about issues related to security in Zonnebloem, the most common of which involve vagrants, a derelict Zimbabwean embassy in the neighbourhood taken over by squatters and concerns about public safety in the De Waal Drive council flats, a government housing project on the perimeter of the Justice Walk area. A number of members have expressed frustration with the neighbourhood watch's disorganisation, suggesting it is ineffective for members to contact city officials individually regarding public safety in Zonnebloem; organising as a common voice, they presumed, would be more productive and consequential.Footnote 11 But the organisation has, as of yet, not been able to do so.
In addition to their organisational problems, ZNW has also struggled to elicit participation among residents. Members expressed disappointment with the community's general disinterest in the neighbourhood watch or CPF meetings and bewilderment that property owners could show little interest in the safety of their own properties. In addition, several members expressed frustration that so few tenants of the De Waal flats communicate with the Zonnebloem Neighbourhood Watch about matters of public safety. The neighbourhood watch has been in frequent correspondence with the council flats building manager to extend invitations to the area CPF meetings or ZNW meetings, but those invitations have not yet been accepted.
With little community involvement to support their efforts, members of the ZNW have been left to fend for themselves. Participation levels are too low to organise street patrols or neighbourhood clean-ups, so members are forced to take up these efforts on their own.Footnote 12 The extent of the organisation's activities are infrequent meetings, individual correspondence with city officials concerning particular problems and email correspondence with each other. For Zonnebloem, community policing is mired by collective action problems.
Explaining divergent outcomes
What explains why these communities differ in their efforts to police their own neighbourhoods? As mentioned earlier, differing crime rates and historical experiences with policing have contributed to these outcomes, but the contrasting endowments of inter-group trust in these two communities – which originates in their differing racial and class-based cleavage structures – stand out as an important explanation. Delft is marked by a complex demographic configuration that includes overlapping racial, religious and income cleavages as well as internally fragmented identity groups, as Africans in Delft are divided by ethnic group (as well as country of origin). Coloureds are divided by language (English and Afrikaans) and religion (Christianity and Islam). Moreover, Delft's cleavage structure is cross-cutting. Among the very poor in government housing facilities across Delft South and Blikkiesdorp, one will find both Africans and Coloureds, Muslims and Christians. And each identity group is represented among the more stably employed residents of the Hague and Rosendaal. Recent census statistics illustrate this cleavage pattern. According to 2011 data, of those residents occupying the low-income bracket (R1601–3200/month) 53% are Africans and 45% are Coloureds (Statistics South Africa, 2011).Footnote 13 Of those residents occupying a middle-income bracket (R3200–6400), 41% are Africans and 56% Coloureds. As the data reveal, Delft is characterised by a relatively equal distribution of income among race groups.
By contrast, Zonnebloem is strongly divided by race and class. Many property owners in Upper Zonnebloem are White, middle-class professionals. The tenants of the council flats are mostly low-income Africans and Coloureds. Unlike Delft's cross-cutting social pressures, Zonnebloem is characterised by a reinforcing cleavage structure. Recent census data illustrate this pattern. According to 2011 data from Zonnebloem and its adjacent districts, of the households that occupy a high-income bracket (R25,601–51,200/month), 16% are African, 19% are Coloured, and 58% are White. Of the households that occupy a low-income bracket (R1–R1600/month), 40% are African and 30% are Coloured while only 22% are White. Clearly, Whites in this area are more prosperous than Coloureds and Africans.
Such structures have shaped inter-group interactions in these communities and, subsequently, patterns of trust. Through interview, survey and secondary anthropological evidence, I found there to be embedded relationships of trust in Delft, especially in comparison with other suburbs in Cape Town. Beginning with survey evidence, it appears that over 40% of Delft-area respondents from the 2005 Cape Area Study stated that they agreed with the statement that ‘generally speaking, most people can be trusted’. This is a substantively significant percentage, as the median response rate across the 32 suburbs surveyed was 26.5%. Delft ranked as the 10th highest suburb in levels of ‘generalised’ trust (Hardin Reference Hardin2002) in the Cape Area Survey.
Are these patterns of trust merely indicative of bonding trust among co-ethnics? To some degree, they are. Survey responses indicate that Delft residents are more willing to place their confidence in co-ethnics than non-co-ethnics, as is consistent with most literature on group-based trust. And in her study of community organising in the Cape Flats, Oldfield (Reference Oldfield2004) found that racially segregated networks continue to persist in Delft, shaping economic and social relations throughout the suburb. Nonetheless, to a measurable degree, inter-personal trust does reach across racial and ethnic lines in this community: 40% of respondents stated that ‘some’ or ‘most’ members of other racial groups can be trusted, while only 20% of respondents stated that ‘none’ or ‘very few’ can be trusted. The largest percentage of respondents stated that they ‘don't know enough’ about members of other racial groups to say whether or not they could be trusted. This seems to reflect unfamiliarity, as opposed to distrust. These data stand in contrast to other multi-ethnic suburbs of Cape Town, which reported lower levels of inter-ethnic trust. In addition to this survey evidence, Muyeba & Seekings (Reference Muyeba and Seekings2011) found that many residents in Delft feel comfortable placing their confidence in non-co-ethnics and often rely on members of different races for childcare – a high trust behaviour. Moreover, these authors found that many Delft residents maintain friendships with people of other races, which suggests that, in Delft, non-co-ethnics are embedded in relationships of trust.
Perceptions of community cohesion may be another bellwether of inter-group trust, since they gauge the strength of the related concept of social capital, defined as the ‘networks and norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness’ (Putnam Reference Putnam2000: 23) within a community. Survey and interview data reveal that community cohesion is perceived to be high in Delft. Over 50% of those surveyed believe that ‘feeling or sense of togetherness’ in Delft is ‘strong’ – 4 percentage points higher than the median response percentage in the sampled suburbs. Local leaders have identified a kind of communal bond that permeates this diverse suburb.Footnote 14 While poverty, hardship and crime afflict the residents of Delft, there is a civic spirit and a committed network of active, visible leaders that shoulder the community. Church leaders are particularly active in nurturing inter-group trust in Delft through various inter-faith activities organised through the community's religious forum.Footnote 15
The Cape Area Survey captures a third indicator of trust in this diverse community: general helpfulness among residents. Ninety per cent of those surveyed in Delft stated that they could rely on a neighbour to help them by ‘holding a ladder or moving furniture’. Among the 32 suburbs that were surveyed, Delft reported the third highest percentage of affirmative responses, with 75% of respondents stating that they could rely on a neighbour to ‘lend you R20 if you needed it’.
Finally, norms of reciprocity have been observed throughout Delft, extending beyond delineated racial and ethnic groups. Non-co-ethnic neighbours often engage in reciprocal behaviour, such as sharing children's clothing and food (Muyeba & Seekings Reference Muyeba and Seekings2011). In fact, some residents in Delft believe that reciprocity between community members of all races is the most positive aspect of life in Delft, an area that is defined by harsh economic marginalisation.Footnote 16 Oldfield (Reference Oldfield2004) also observed norms of reciprocity between non-co-ethnics, while conducting research on racial integration in Delft. For example, she found that it is common for a Coloured family to look after an African neighbour's home, when the latter travel to see family in the Eastern Cape. The families often then return the favour, a behaviour that stands in contrast to practices in more wealthier neighbourhoods in the city bowl.
These data, gathered from interviews, secondary sources and surveys, attest to the presence of inter-group trust in Delft. It does not suggest that bonding trust is weak in Delft or that racial tensions are non-existent. As several community leaders reported, Delft is continually arbitrating the challenges of a diverse population. Delft's identity groups are characterised by different histories, behaviours, and social traditions, and after two decades of freedom, residents of Delft continue to play out their racialised experiences of Apartheid. Nonetheless, evidence indicates that inter-group trust is present within the confines of this melting pot.
In fact, Oldfield's (Reference Oldfield2004) historical account allows us to trace the development of inter-ethnic trust in Delft. In 1998, the previously cold relations between Africans and Coloureds began to warm in Delft, due, in part, to the activities of one local group. The ‘Door Kickers’ refers to a local group of residents who organised illegal home invasions in poor areas of Delft South, after having grown exasperated by the slow pace of municipal housing allocation. As Oldfield recounts, a Door Kicker family would find, claim, watch and protect a self-allocated property, defending the space from its legal recipient. During this process, Kicker families formed supportive relationships with one another. Ultimately, the Kicker network built a foundation for the establishment of neighbourhood-level organisations, such as night watches, and planted the seeds of inter-group trust throughout the community of Delft. She explains:
The struggle to keep the houses that families invaded created a high degree of trust between Coloured and African families. Families spoke about the significance of their relationships with their neighbours, despite their different backgrounds … their experiences as Kickers forced them to work together. In the process, new relationships and a network were formed that linked families in their immediate areas and across a number of sections of Delft South. (Oldfield Reference Oldfield2004: 197)
Oldfield notes that the campaign – and the cooperative, inter-group relationships it fostered – did not act to dissolve racial identities in Delft South. Rather, new identities were created that were spatial and political, revolving around common understandings of economic marginalisation on the Cape Flats. These new identities began to overlay existing racial and ethnic identities. And individuals began to express these identities in social arenas, which, in turn, helped forge bridging ties throughout the community. In other words, while racial identities are very much present in Delft, over time, the saliency of these identities has been tempered by the shared experiences of adversity in Delft. Hardship has acted as a ‘social leveller’ between Delft Africans and Coloureds, as both groups see that their ‘their neighbours share their own economic difficulties’ (Muyeba & Seekings Reference Muyeba and Seekings2011: 667).
In sum, evidence suggests that cross-cutting identities and intra-group divisions have moderated the intensity of cleavages in Delft. Social cleavages crisscross in Delft – class identities and race identities complement each other, rather than conflict. These features have tempered the saliency of racial identities in Delft, reducing conflict. In Delft, Muyeba & Seekings (Reference Muyeba and Seekings2011) explain, ‘Racialised identities still matter … But the persistence of racialised identities does not seem to be associated with enduring racial division … race seems much less important than we expected in shaping everyday interactions and attitudes' (Muyeba & Seekings Reference Muyeba and Seekings2011: 666). As a result of the reduced social and political relevance of racial identity in Delft, inter-racial interactions have become more frequent in the community and manifestations of racial toleration have become more common. In this community, inter-group trust has been given space to germinate, which has helped overcome the hurdles that prevent mutually beneficial collective action. People of all races participate in community policing in Delft, on a regular basis. Many participate out of a genuine concern for public safety in Delft, a high crime area. But they also participate because they are not hindered by a belief that non-co-ethnics will renege on their civic duties or fail to contribute to local initiatives, thereby exploiting their own efforts.
In contrast to Delft, an environment of inter-group trust has failed to materialise in Zonnebloem, which has affected its capacity to garner neighbourhood participation in community policing efforts. I found little evidence of general social capital in Zonnebloem and few indicators of inter-group trust, specifically, among residents. Many local residents were hesitant to suggest that the residents of Zonnebloem were trusting of their neighbours. In general, many residents feel that neighbours are distant towards one another and that their relations tend to stop at neighbourly greetings. Moreover, residents admitted that they would be unlikely to ask neighbours for assistance if it were needed, highlighting Zonnebloem's lack of reciprocity norms, an important component of social capital (see Putnam Reference Putnam2000).Footnote 17
In addition to the lack of reciprocity norms, many residents discern a weak sense of community cohesion in Zonnebloem. In a letter to the District Six Redevelopment Committee, residents expressed their frustration with a developer's plans to build new homes on open space in Zonnebloem. In this particular area, Fawley Park, children are often seeing playing soccer or cricket and residents are seen walking their dogs. They noted that Fawley Park was the ‘only aspect of community that still exists in this strip’.Footnote 18
A number of factors have contributed to low levels of trust in Zonnebloem. One factor is the geography of private space in the neighbourhood. Like Delft, homes in Zonnebloem are in close proximity, but high walls separate homes in Justice Walk, obstructing the formation of ties among neighbours in Zonnebloem. In addition, the De Waal flats are an enclosed space in and of itself, which prevents social mingling between residents of the flats and the property owners of Justice Walk. Without integrative ties, trusting relationships have failed to materialise.
In addition, plans for the redevelopment of District Six have left residents in the area disgruntled, which has weakened community cohesion in Zonnebloem. Property speculators interested in gentrifying the area have drafted plans to build commercial and residential properties throughout Zonnebloem. In addition, a campaign (spearheaded by the 1994 Restitution of Land Rights Act) to recognise the claims of expelled residents and resettle them in newly built housing developments across lower Zonnebloem has begun to move forward. Such plans have angered residents of Justice Walk, who feel that they have been excluded from the redevelopment process. Residents have expressed frustration that key stakeholders have failed to address their concerns about development plans, including how newly built complexes will affect their property values. Residents also expressed unease about how conditions in their neighbourhoods might change once restitution claimants have moved back into Zonnebloem. In particular, they questioned whether claimants will be allowed to rent out their properties to tenants and expressed concern about the ‘economic, social and aesthetic impact this arrangement could have on the neighbourhood’ because, they were told, claimants would not be required to pay taxes on their properties for a number of years.Footnote 19 These questions and concerns suggest that the residents of Justice Walk feel some trepidation about their new neighbours. They are also indicative of the communal rift that redevelopment has sparked.
Finally, trust and community cohesion in Zonnebloem have been most gravely weakened by the deep rift between residents of Justice Walk and tenants in the government housing project on De Waal Drive. Property owners have expressed their frustration with the condition and appearance of the council flats, suggesting ‘Its (sic) like living in a rubbish dump.’Footnote 20 Moreover, they fear that the council flats have become a hotbed of criminal activity, including drug trafficking, drug abuse and gang affiliation. Some expressed concern that criminal background checks have not performed on all residents of the council flats, fuelling a fear that their homes will inevitably be broken into.Footnote 21 Because of the conditions of the council flats, many residents fear that the property value of their homes will be devalued. Residents have put pressure on the management of the council flats, demanding that rubbish be cleared and ‘codes of conduct’ enforced, but the flats’ property managers have been largely unresponsive.
While the geography of private space and the politics of redevelopment have indeed contributed to low trust in Zonnebloem, the contentious relationship between Justice Walk property owners and the tenants of the council flats highlights the role that identities play in shaping environments of trust. And in particular, it illustrates a lack of inter-group trust in Zonnebloem. As I outlined earlier, many of the council flats’ tenants are Coloured and there are a considerable number of Africans living in these units as well. Recently, government-subsidised housing has been earmarked for families living in informal settlements. Since Africans comprise most of Cape Town's informal settlements, newer residents in social housing tend to be African (Muyeba & Seekings Reference Muyeba and Seekings2011). By contrast, many of the property owners in Justice Walk are White South Africans. Evidence suggests that there are few ‘bridging’ ties between these groups, as contact is mostly avoided.Footnote 22 In fact, there is open animosity between these groups.
Inter-group trust is lacking in Zonnebloem, in part, because class divisions overlay race divisions, reinforcing and strengthening them. Each group sees the other as ‘different’ from them, belonging to another social class and rooted in entirely different traditions and cultural practices. In this type of environment, ethnic and racial identities become more salient. They begin to structure patterns of everyday engagement within communities. In Zonnebloem, social boundaries have been sharply drawn between groups, which has manifested in tension and resentment.
The distrust between the mostly Coloured and African social housing tenants and the largely White property owners is illustrated in the complaints of the latter. These complaints generally reflect dismay at the way ‘other’ groups live. In fact, much of the discourse around the condition of the neighbourhood reflects a phenomenon of ‘othering’ that mirrors the social divisions in this neighbourhood. Many residents’ comments were infused with racially charged and class-based remarks, with some lamenting that government housing brings people of lower socio-economic class and that the province should sell the area so that ‘decent’ people may settle here.Footnote 23 In referencing the residents of the council flats, one ZNW member claimed that ‘those people don't even pay their rent’.Footnote 24 The member specifically drew a contrast between what they perceived as crime-ridden ‘social housing’ and the ‘proper, normal middle-class flats’.Footnote 25
Such comments highlight deep racial, socio-economic and cultural divisions in Zonnebloem. That these race and class-based divisions reinforce each other makes each of these identity points all the more salient, contributing to a perception of neighbours as ‘others’. This has limited processes of social integration between diverse groups in the process. While Muyeba and Seekings noticed that race and class seemed less important to one's everyday interactions with neighbours in Delft, the same cannot be said for Zonnebloem, where walls seem to separate two insular communities, and the residents of Justice Walk find it exceedingly difficult to form connections with neighbours in the De Waal flats, neighbours who are unlike them in multiple ways. This has stunted the formation of inter-group trust in Zonnebloem, with implications for collective action in the area. Without relationships of trust, residents of Zonnebloem – with the exception of a few dedicated individuals – appear unwilling to participate in community policing initiatives, since many do not trust that others in their neighbourhood will sufficiently share this burden.
CONCLUSION
This paper has presented a comparative case study of community policing in two multi-ethnic communities of Cape Town, South Africa. Through analysis of original data, I have demonstrated how patterns of inter-group trust impact the degree to which diverse communities are able to elicit participation in local goods provision. I have also illustrated how contextual variables structure patterns of inter-group interaction within these communities, and in doing so, shape environments of trust and prospects for collective action in these communities. Cross-cutting cleavage structures in Delft bolstered the development of inter-group trust across the community, enabling Delft's residents to participate in community policing initiatives. By contrast, reinforcing cleavages in Zonnebloem have suppressed the development of inter-group trust among Africans, Coloureds and Whites in the area. As a result, its neighbourhood watch receives little support from the community and has been unable to achieve its public safety goals.
These findings offer important implications. For one, they add nuance to the literature on the effects of identity on political attitudes and outcomes, by highlighting the varied and context-dependent impact of identity on trust attitudes. Moreover, they suggest that the collective action problems assumed to doom diverse societies to persistent failure are, in fact, far from intractable. Where inter-group trust is present, the hurdles that prevent collective action may be less high. Often, it has the power to mediate the adverse effects of diversity and generate beneficial outcomes for those societies endowed with it.
