South Africa: Community Peace Programme
As post-apartheid planners in South Africa turned their attention to criminal justice reform in the early 1990s they sought citizen involvement in policing, community dispute resolution and criminal trials. Much of the emphasis on participatory justice has fallen by the wayside since then. Although community policing is thriving in some areas it has not been universally adopted, as originally planned. Early legislation allowing lay participation in criminal trials is rarely used and a proposal for community courts has languished in the country’s Law Reform Commission for more than five years. There are, however, community safety forums that mix community crime prevention and public service delivery and involve community leaders; they receive modest funding from some provinces and victim-offender mediation is done in some townships. The parole system has recently been reformed to include community members and crime victims on the parole boards.
An interesting development, now defunct because of shifts in governmental priorities, was the Community Peace Programme (http://www.ideaswork.org/index.html), recently affiliated with the University of Cape Town, which used local resources in poor communities to resolve individual disputes—quarrels over money, insults and threats, property offenses—and mount projects that addressed collective needs—for children’s day care and recreation, community cleanup, health education. The program assumed that people have skills and knowledge that they could use to manage their lives even in conditions of extreme poverty and inequality. Members of Peace Committees held a “gathering” in an informal setting at which they helped disputants and other community members explore the causes of individual disputes, seek resolution, and adopt a plan of action intended to prevent further conflicts. The process was nonjudgmental, applied no force or other sanctions, and focused on the future; a simple code of conduct reflected the values of local peacemaking. Peace committee members were paid a small stipend for each dispute. In addition to the peacemaking function of the Committees, each dispute generated money for a PeaceBuilding Fund that went toward modest community development projects that the committee sponsored. Taken together, the two roles represented a form of local governance beyond (but not hostile to) the state. Recognition of the empowering nature of the Committees can be seen in the establishment of the program in schools around the country; it operated in about 250 schools when funding ended. Criminologist Clifford Shearing, who was instrumental in launching the program in 1997, sees the Peace Committee model as an expression of localized and responsive nodal governance that can be replicated elsewhere.