Governing coastal risk and vulnerability New pathways within developing city-scale contexts, Cape Town, South Africa

This dissertation is about the governance of coastal risk and vulnerability in developing city-scale contexts, South Africa. While this research focuses on the geographic area constituting Cape Town, one of Africa’s most important coastal economic hubs and rapidly growing coastal cities, understanding the causality of coastal risk and vulnerability at the local level necessitates enquiries into the coastal governance landscape at broader provincial, national and international scales. The configuration of this multi-scalar governance landscape and the dynamic interplay between government tiers, public-private sector interactions, prevalent discourses and knowledge regimes, power differentials, the political contestation of cities, developmental status, organisational form as well as South Africa’s spatial legacy of apartheid planning, all play a role in the production, amplification and transfer of coastal risk at the local level. Through the application of theoretical frameworks such as Interactive Governance, Bureaucracy, Risk Society, Procedural Justice, Integrated Coastal Management and Adaptive Governance, this research identifies both impediments, and enablers, towards transformative, responsive and inclusive governance approaches as required for the mitigation of coastal risk and vulnerability at the local level. Main methodological frameworks applied in this research include an organisational ethnography, participatory action research as well as an argumentative discourse analysis.