Inclusion, exploitation or unfair advantage? The ambiguities of community participation in a South African special economic zone

This article examines the contradictory terms of ‘inclusion’ in market-led development through an ethnographic study of the Atlantis Special Economic Zone (SEZ) on the periphery of Cape Town, South Africa. Drawing on twelve months of fieldwork and over seventy interviews with zone officials, elected community representatives and residents, it traces how unemployed people are mobilized as ‘representatives’ in the SEZ’s community participation programme, which is meant to evidence the zone’s social licence to operate while providing little remuneration. Officials frame participation as shared value and market inclusion; participants experience it as unpaid labour and reputational risk; and residents often interpret it as an unfair channel to insider advantage. In a peripheral setting marked by chronic unemployment and long-delayed investment, these competing framings show how programmes promising inclusion demand new forms of labour – moral, affective and material work through which people seek recognition, belonging and livelihoods – yet often incur social and economic losses. Building on Africa-focused debates about market inclusion as adverse incorporation, and on the anthropology of volunteering, the article argues that contemporary inclusionary projects depend on the unwaged efforts of the poor and reproduce new forms of precarity – even as they sustain the fiction of the ‘inclusivity’ of markets on the continent.