Planning for regional resilience in the central Karoo, Western Cape, South Africa

Abstract

Transcending a number of disciplines, the word ‘resilience’ has become pervasive in academia, policy and practice. In urban and regional planning and allied disciplines, resilience has received considerable attention in the context of urban areas, epitomised by the notion of urban resilience. There is however a paucity of resilience-related work in rural areas. The aim of the thesis is therefore to analyse regional resilience planning in the context of rural or peripheral areas of South Africa. The thesis uses the case study of Central Karoo region in the Western Cape province of South Africa to address the following research objectives: one, description of the economic, social and environmental shocks that the Central Karoo region is prone to. Two, analysis of the extent to which the policies guiding spatial planning in the Central Karoo region incorporate regional resilience. Three, description and explanation of factors that influence the level of incorporation of regional resilience in the planning policies and development plans relevant to the Central Karoo region. Using the notion of rationality in planning, the thesis is based upon a catholic and integrative theoretical framework, which incorporates elements of rational comprehensive planning theory and communicative planning theory. The study relied on a combination of secondary and primary sources of data. Documents that have a bearing on planning and development were analysed in the computer programme of Atlas.ti; and primary data were collected through interviews with seven key respondents, who were selected through snowball sampling technique. The analysis discovered that development frameworks that have relevance to the Central Karoo region do not adequately incorporate regional resilience. Reasons for this poor acknowledgement of resilience include the inadequate allocation of resources. It is proposed that further research be conducted to among others analyse the implementation of planning documents in so far as regional resilience is concerned.