The delivery of social development outcomes is key to the success of stakeholder-sensitive projects

Earlier this year, I was given the opportunity to meet with project managers working for the City of Cape Town in the Informal Settlements Department. They discussed the professional, personal and practical dilemmas they faced while delivering projects that have a profound impact upon the well-being of members of the Cape Town community. With their co-operation, this article examines the fundamental process of stakeholder engagement in the context of these complex and politically sensitive projects.

Housing in Cape Town: the numbers

Urbanisation has caused the City of Cape Town population to double in 20 years to a conservative estimate of 3.7 million people. There are some 240 settlements with over 130 000 informal dwellings, accommodating an estimated 190 000 households. The housing backlog, as published in 2006, was 260 000 dwellings – and growing.

The population continues to increase steadily, with a net annual inward migration of 18 000 families – approximately 50 000 people – largely from the Eastern Cape. Most of these families have at least one breadwinner searching for work.

Within these settlements, 73% of the households rely upon the state for basic living support.

Facts and figures about settlements are subject to a number of complex assumptions: some are unlikely to be accurate, but they are more reliable than any competing assumption. One basic assumption is that one dwelling equals one family, which is known to be an oversimplification. Even the terminology has been a barrier to easy understanding. It is only recently that agreement was reached as to the correct definition of an informal dwelling, namely: “a wood and iron structure, which does not meet basic standards of safety in building” (City of Cape Town, Sustainability Report 2005.)

Another source of potential error is that it is impossible actually to count the number of dwellings. Instead, the settlement estimates are based upon a combination of aerial photography, software analysis and visual examination. The process involves manual processes, and requires extensive expertise – thus an assessment of a single settlement takes up to eight weeks.

The City has a specialist unit – its Corporate GIS (geographic information system) Branch – that has been responsible for ‘shack’ counts since 2002. This is performed first through aerial photography before using a sophisticated combination of techniques called orthorectification to convert the photographs into a statistically valid count. (See Fig. 1)

A new shack count has recently been completed, with the information having come on-stream in late May 2011.

Adequate housing remains the principal priority for provincial and national government, and will be for some time to come.

The greatest challenge is getting ‘quality’ land (that which has good access to civil infrastructure), drains, roads and schools to the main job centres, and to sources of income – mainly in or near Cape Town itself.

Informal Settlements Portfolio: the tensions

The City’s Human Settlements Directorate is tasked with ensuring initial basic services are available to the informal communities as their needs and numbers increase, as well as providing permanent homes.

The Directorate’s five-year plan focuses on accelerating housing provision, and ensuring land utilisation is properly planned, well managed and closely monitored.

The plan goes beyond the provision of merely the bricks and mortar, but also seeks to specify the social planning necessary to create integrated ‘living environments’ that offer residents access to economic, recreational and cultural opportunities and activities; as well as the basic civil infrastructure services of health, welfare, school and police services.

The Informal Settlements department is the unit within Human Settlements responsible for executing and monitoring the projects set up to deliver the five-year plan.

It is further responsible for the first-line response to emergencies in the settlements. The urgency of delivering to human needs when recovering from a disaster – fire, floods, subsidence – makes serious inroads into the human, material and financial capital of this department.

From discussions with its project managers, the tension between the strategic and the immediate on their limited resources typically and frequently disrupts the longer term development projects.

The emergency situations are just that – emergencies – and always have a significant level of political oversight, often at the highest level in Provincial Government. Even while I was there, one of the senior project managers was called out of the meeting to attend a briefing with the mayor on the status of a high-profile initiative.

The projects in the Informal Settlements portfolio are constantly under scrutiny. Having a high profile can be a valuable asset for a project but, as most experienced project managers know, it changes – and raises the project risk profile. Sometimes, a project simply needs to ‘get on’ without pirouetting in the spotlight for all to see its prowess!

Temporary housing is set up in temporary relocations areas (TRAs). These are designed around a grid system that provides dwellings of 18 square metres, with four dwellings sharing one toilet. The gaps between dwellings conform to safety requirements and successfully deal with the types of fire hazards common in the settlement areas.

Road access is provided, and effective soak-aways reduce the chances of flooding.

“Over the last few years, we have made real progress on the speed at which we construct temporary housing structures that are safe from flooding and fire. Once we have cleared the land, we can get the groundworks and facilities up very quickly”.

These are still temporary dwellings, however, and attract all the problems that go with people living in accommodation that does not provide long-term stability. (Security of tenure remains a highly contentious and politically charged issue. The lack of security of tenure, where South African residents feel insecure in their own dwellings, is often the source of conflict, social instability and a lack of trust.) These dwellings are typically sited far from the cities, where work and the main civil infrastructure and services are located.

In the Western Cape, perhaps the best known TRA is Blikkiesdorp. Set up four years ago, the latest estimates from the Informal Settlements Department is that residents may need to remain in the TRA for at least another five years – longer than the common definition of “temporary”.

In response to the longevity of these TRAs, the strategy is shifting gradually toward
incremental development areas (IDAs).

The main difference between a TRA and an IDA is in the design of the grid system. In an IDA, the approach allows for the temporary dwellings to be upgraded to 98m² solid dwellings by combining two dwellings – providing much-improved quality housing. Future plans envisage replacing the single-storey structure with double-storey structures, thus providing more space and solutions for a greater number of families.

These are clever ideas and sensible engineering; and from a build and design point of view, it is a relatively simple project proposition. However, as one of the leading project managers said, “We recognise that technical solutions must be tempered by social acceptability. The thing is... engineering is the least of our problems”.

Social fairness: a fundamental principle

One of the anticipated problems with IDA is identifying which families will retain their housing location and which will have to be moved to another. These social factors are far trickier to solve than the engineering problems.

The Informal Settlements project managers are all well-versed in understanding that ‘irrational’ and ‘emotional’ factors are more powerful in deciding the successful outcome of a project than a coldly logical ‘correct’ plan.

Interestingly enough, given the long-term issues associated with TRAs, it has been found that the construction of a new TRA is easier than refurbishing, or relocating existing ones.

In 2010, it was necessary to organise the emergency relocation of informal dwellings constructed in the Burundi floodplain: Replacement dwellings were created in Mfuleni, but the residents were not happy. This was not merely because they did not want ‘newcomers’.

Its root cause was a perceived lack of ‘fairness’. From their perspective, the people from Burundi – who had built shacks on floodplains (areas that are not approved for dwellings) – had managed to ‘jump the queue’ and get access to new dwellings.

The local facilitators, who had been asked to explore the cause of the tensions, found a very strong sense of social fairness in the Mfuleni community, nicely summarised by one resident, who said: “This is not fair – we have families in our own area that have been waiting for years for better dwellings”.

Eventually, a negotiated solution was worked through, whereby those Mfuleni residents on the waiting list were moved into the new dwellings, and the people from the Burundi floodplains were moved into the older Mfuleni dwellings. An engineer might not have understood that, but the Informal Settlement project managers got the picture immediately.

Social fairness is a well-developed sense – particularly in tight-knit communities – and is concerned with who gains what, and whether the outcome and the process is seen as equitable by the parties affected.

Urban planners have long been aware of the social effects of plans and projects, but so many project management methods ignore the fundamental disciplines that are needed to deal with them, and their effect on the progress of a project.

Without mechanisms for analysing fairness and dealing with community reactions to the consequences of compromises, the success of projects subject thereto have a very limited chance of success.

In projects such as these, the ‘rational’, engineering solution is not the right one. As one person put it, “In this project, the politics is more important than the plans.” She was not saying the plans were not important, simply that they were not enough – which is probably true for many social projects.

In the case of Mfuleni, the concept of what was fair was not merely one issue – it was the main issue. It proves the value of exploring alternative options, and the crucial role of local arbiters in surfacing the causes of community concerns so that the project can address them directly
and effectively.

Aligning agendas: who are the stakeholders?

Stakeholder engagement is a poorly understood and usually very badly implemented project management discipline. It has been ignored by project management associations for years; and when discussed at all, it is normally discussed between individuals who clearly do not understand it. Only in the past few years have real energy and thought been put into this crucial area for project managers.

The common definition of a project stakeholder underlines this lack of understanding. When you read that “a stakeholder is a group or person who has an interest in your project”, you should despair. The reason is that the project instantly becomes an impossible management task, with most right-thinking project managers dropping the task from their ‘must-do’ lists.

Of the many things wrong with the definition, we will refer merely to two:

First of all, if there is already a management system in place to deal with a particular group or individuals, what possible value is there in creating a second management process to deal with them? It will cause only confusion.

So how can project team members be stakeholders? Well, they certainly (hopefully) have an interest in the project, and they can certainly affect its outcome, but there is already a powerful management system in place to support and deal with them. If team management cannot or does not deal with its issues, interests and agendas, there is no reason a stakeholder process will do so.

Secondly, if the groups or individuals cannot have an impact on the execution or success of the project, there is very little point in spending valuable management effort on engaging with them.

These two ideas, with several others, lead to a more useful definition of a stakeholder: “an individual (or a group with a single ‘voice’) who has an interest in the outcome of a project, has the ability to influence that outcome, and who cannot be engaged or managed in any other way.”

This more powerful analysis of what and who a stakeholder in a project is, offers the project manager real insights into how, and how much effort, to put into managing the agendas of otherwise complex-to-handle ‘outsiders’.

The first technique is to focus on understanding what has become called the WIIFM (“What’s In It For Me”) factors.

Gaining WIIFM alignment between groups is not easy to achieve but, as Cesar & Bruno observed, it is a very important contributor to overall success where the project is stakeholder-sensitive. They suggest that projects positively generate alignment of agendas and, where necessary, set up ‘lateral projects’ – the sole purpose of which is to secure WIIFM factors for groups that would otherwise be alienated or disenfranchised by the original initiative.

(A lateral project addresses the views and needs of key stakeholder groups. In complex projects, it may be necessary to manage several different lateral projects, each adapted to the stakeholder WIIFM factors, in order to achieve the successful outcome of the primary project.)

This approach is one of which Informal Settlements projects managers are keenly aware. Sometimes, a small scope increase on the project can have a big impact upon its acceptability and ultimate success; but while the project management team can identify lateral project opportunities, they are not always empowered to take them forward.

Participative planning: creating a stakeholder community

There is, however, one thing that flows directly out of the definition suggested for stakeholders – and that is how to make individuals or ‘single voice’ groups into proper stakeholders. A good method is to give interested parties a way to become influential on the progress and outcomes of the project, through the introduction of “participative planning”.

Participative planning is now a fundamental principle in the City of Cape Town improvement strategy – “nothing for us without us” – and it strongly believes this is the way forward. It has found out that quick fixes are not sustainable, and there is a strong theoretical basis for this view in the stakeholder engagement processes.

There are problems with participative planning, however, as it delays the onset of action; and communities that have been waiting for a long time, have simply run out of patience and now expect actions and solutions immediately.

Perhaps because stakeholder engagement is so poorly understood, the level of confidence in the project management processes of organisations and municipal councils is too low; but for whatever reason, participative planning is quite uncommon everywhere in the world.

When practised, it is often misunderstood or misdirected. How often have you received a planning letter from the Council, skipped through the pages and wondered: “What does this have to do to me?”

As one manager commented, “We send out notices; meetings occur, but the level of engagement is too low. We haven’t found the terms that mean something to the community.”

Hangberg settlement in Hout Bay was a highly publicised example of a difficult community engagement. In 2010, the City attempted to protect the integrity of a mountain firebreak, which was being compromised by the erection of structures within it.

The result was a near riot. Why? The residents understood the purpose and the need for this obvious safety action, and people do not normally act against their own self-interest – but something else was going on.

Perhaps the most significant factor here was the fact that an action was being driven through quickly, while the residents had been waiting years for action on their housing upgrade projects. An in-situ upgrade of the informal settlement project had failed to be implemented despite years of abortive attempts.

The projects had attempted to create a positive stakeholder community, using a form of participative planning in the form of an in-situ ‘steering group’ drawn from the Hangberg community.

It soon became apparent that unless the needs of the surrounding community – in terms of solutions for the persons living in backyards and overcrowded conditions in the rental housing – were addressed, the broader Hangberg community would not support the in-situ upgrade project.

A policy adopted within the last year at Hangberg has proved to be much more successful. Now, only members of the community who can prove they have a personal stake in the development plans can attend and give voice to their views. They are vetted to ensure they live in the area, and only then are they allowed into meetings, and allowed to vote.

A new steering group has been formed from these people, and real progress is being made on creating a genuine consultative group – real participation, real influence and real stakeholders.

Stakeholder engagement – getting the right people in the field of play

Stakeholder engagement (a more precise and less arrogant term than “stakeholder management”) means involving the ‘right people’ in the right engagement process – who are not necessarily the active supporters (or detractors) of the project, either.

The entire stakeholder engagement process has been likened to a rugby game. The project managers’ purpose is to ensure the ‘players’ are engaged on the field in the right positions and at the right time. Sometimes the pitch is invaded by spectators but, sadly, these are the ones who are least important to the project.

The really important group – the ones who frustrate so many project managers, and whom they rightly fear – are the ones who do not come to meetings or read notices, who will not engage, or who do anything except; in the final analysis, they do determine whether the project is successful or not. Influencing this group, which we will call the “passives”, is the target for all stakeholder engagement activity. If you can get this group on board, the project outcomes are assured.

The difficulty is that the passives are just that – passive. It is almost impossible to engage with them, so a more complex strategy is required than merely communication.

Although, in the Mfuleni case, there was a deep-seated sense of ‘social fairness’ within the community; and at the same time, it did polarise a few groups – the vast majority of people simply were not interested in the project and “did not want to get involved”. They were passive, but still managed to derail the progress of the project.

The solution to this problem lies in a brilliant analysis by Cesar & Bruno, which is illustrated in figure 3. They were the authors who named the passives as a stakeholder group, together with eight others.

They studied the difficulties that politically, environmentally and socially sensitive projects encountered, and found that, for the most part, indirect strategies that involved different types of stakeholders in different ‘plays’ were much more effective than the ‘just tell them like it is’ approach adopted so often by the rational engineers and ‘technos’ who run so many projects.

A glance at the model shown in figure 3 shows stakeholders mapped in terms of their levels of “synergy” and “antagonism” toward the project. Each of the groups has a different value to the project manager, and each requires a different engagement approach.

As we have mentioned, ultimately the passives are the real prize – it is their acceptance or rejection that will have the greatest influence on the overall success of the project. But, as in the Hangberg case, often the problem for the project manager is getting this group of people (who really the beneficiaries of the outcome) to take any interest at all.

One of the characteristics of the passives is that they are singularly unimpressed by the high levels of commitment found in “zealots” – those people who are passionate about the project. From the passives’ perspective, any opinions offered as to value or benefit is automatically discounted, “they would say that, wouldn’t they...”; and the energy levels can be seen as threatening.

The people by whom the passives are affected are the “waverers”. Waverers (and every project manager has met these) are people who are fence-sitters: perhaps they will and perhaps they will not support the project. While the waverers play in this space, the passives feel quite comfortable in ignoring the project. When, however, the waverers begin to move toward (or against) the project, the passives follow – silently but massively.

So, how do you influence the waverers? The single most common mistake made by project managers less experienced in handling sensitive projects, is to launch their zealots to influence the fence-sitters. It seems a sensible thing to do: we trust these committed people, we know what they will say, and we know they are on ‘our side’.

But so do the waverers – and that is just the problem. Nothing ‘new’ is heard; the argument is discounted exactly because it is coming from a zealot.

The stakeholders who really can influence the waverers are the “allies”. Glance once again at figure 3 and note where the allies sit in the synergy versus antagonism grid. They are ‘for’ the project, but they have their own perspectives – there are areas of difference. They are seen to be “their own person”, and that gives them the influential edge.

If you want to get the waverers (and you do!), as these will get the passives (which you must), then rely on your allies. You will worry; you will be less sure of what they will say. They will say things you wish they had not – but they will deliver the waverers in ways and numbers that your zealots cannot.

While we are on the subject, the manner in which project managers often deal with the “opponents” to the project can be revealing. Many treat these stakeholders in much the same way as they treat their allies. They spend time with the opponents, trying to ‘understand’ them. They make concessions; they share their plans and approaches with them in an attempt to win them over. Big mistake!

The allies will notice that their own treatment is on a par with the treatment given to opponents, which they will find disappointing to the point of irritation. The opponents, on the other hand, realising that their strategy is working, continue with their opposition.

There are other ways, and better ways. Remember the early Hangberg experience, with the project dealing almost exclusively with its opponents. (See Fig: 2)

Community social facilitation as an approach to sensitive projects

The need for a great emphasis on community engagement is clearly recognised by the City of Cape Town. For the first time, in 2011, budget has been set aside for social facilitation as part of the project approach. The role of the facilitator is to act as a translator between the City and the community – to promote engagement and participative planning.

Although some argue this role of social facilitation requires specialist skills, and many project managers simply do not have them, I am not convinced. Many of the project managers in the Informal Settlements Department team are ready and clearly capable of taking on this difficult role, and are passionate about ensuring their projects successfully implement social policy.

Unfortunately, the real issue is that the project managers and many of the senior champions in the City of Cape Town are simply wrongly positioned to be successful. They will be seen as zealots. Many of these people are inspirational; all are strong and passionate supporters of the policy – and that makes them less persuasive and less effective in influencing the waverers, many of whom may mistrust the City’s intentions.

On projects such as Mfuleni, the intervention of independent arbiters such as church representatives was the crucial element.

When the lessons learnt from these sensitive projects are formalised into best practice, the City should consider carefully the capability profile and political positioning of the facilitators involved. The selection of arbiters who act as the City’s allies on future projects will prove to be one of the most important decisions affecting the ultimate success of its development projects.

In conclusion

Housing development projects deliver outputs – the buildings and the infrastructure. The dilemma is that without recognition of the need to create the reception strategy – to focus on the delivery of the social development outcomes – the success of social, stakeholder-sensitive projects is akin to playing the lottery: there is plenty of money spent with only a faint chance of achieving the large prize at stake.

Stakeholder-sensitive projects are the most complex of all. It is sad but true that many government and high-impact societal projects across the world feature among the least successful projects. This may be due to the fact that we are not adapting the project approach sufficiently to deal with the issues in question, and instead taking too many direct strategies and applying them to the wrong projects.

Project management is not the application of a method, as Cesar and Bruno remark: “To be success in the implementation of a sensitive project on a human level, one has to change the map... To throw oneself into a sensitive project with a blueprint and a fixed budget is as foolish as travelling to India with a map of Brazil.”

The Informal Settlements Department’s projects highlight these fundamental project insights:

• Engineering is the least of the problems;
• You must engage with the stakeholders – the right ones in the right way;
• Multiple agendas generally mean that a ‘rational’ solution based on the technical problem is the wrong one;
• The concept of “fairness”, and in many cases “social fairness”, is a powerful driver of the behaviours and attitudes of many stakeholders;
• WIIFM is not a narrow, selfish perspective – it is the vehicle to gain stakeholder buy-in;
• Stakeholder issues cause many more failures than engineering ones – parallel, lateral projects designed to deliver to WIIFM analysis is a more effective way of spending money than on new technologies; and
• Finally, and specifically for the Informal Settlements development projects – social facilitation is critical, and people fulfilling this role should be aware of the socio-dynamics of the role in the context of the City’s stakeholder engagement strategy.

A final word

Although progress has been impeded at times, since 2003 the Housing Directorate has delivered more than 23 800 housing opportunities – a life-changing opportunity for the thousands of people who have benefited from this.

Talking with the team there is a sense of pride in what has been achieved, and frustration about what has not. Being a project manager in this environment demands commitment on a major scale, and this is one thing that the team is clearly not short of.

My thanks go to Mzwandile Sokupa, manager of informal settlements; and members of his team (Densil Faure, Natasha Murray, Gregory Exford and Cornelius Meyer) at the City of Cape Town. ☑

Louise Worsley

Worsley is director of Projman cc, and lectures on the University of Cape Town executive development programme. She can be contacted via e-mail:

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