“Our struggle with addressing in South Africa” – Capturing public stakeholder perspectives

Addresses are important for socio-economic gains and good governance in cities and municipalities. However, some countries, including South Africa, experience deficiencies in their address infrastructure. As a result, stakeholders who need addresses and address data to perform their respective mandates need to manoeuvre to find workarounds to overcome these deficiencies. In this paper, we explore the challenges and responses within the South African address infrastructure from the vantage point of governance stakeholders. Findings from semi-structured interviews reveal ambiguity about the need for addressing and uncertainty about its implementation. Adaptive strategies are deployed to overcome governance deficiencies, but these come at a significant cost. To resolve the struggle for an address infrastructure in South Africa, a congruent and coordinated governance approach informed by clear definitions, mandates and responsibilities is recommended. This study represents the first of its kind in capturing insiders’ perspectives on governance-related challenges from the vantage point of addressing stakeholders. The improved understanding of addressing governance challenges paves the way for further research into a transformative way forward for addressing in the country.