Roots and reach: Place-Based processes for polycentric governance in rural South Africa

Rural populations in South Africa's former homelands face persistent marginalisation amid institutional weaknesses, corruption, and complex overlaps between traditional and democratic governance systems. Polycentric governance, characterised by semi-autonomous nodes across levels fostering accountability and adaptation, offers a framework for addressing these challenges, yet research on how civil society organisations contribute remains limited. This study examines how place-based civil society organisations emerge and survive to enable desirable systemic change in such contexts. Through research-practice partnerships with seven well-established organisations, data were collected via 160 organisational documents and 20 semi-structured interviews with senior staff. Inductive thematic analysis, timeline mapping, and theories of change diagrams revealed nine interrelated place-based processes framed by two core themes: relations and impact. These processes form a core trajectory, from focused effort to cultivating credibility and enabling learning, that is amplified by reinforcing feedback loops (e.g., re-framing the potential of functional institutions in rural areas) and characterised by tensions such as autonomy versus embeddedness and growth versus grounding. The findings highlight practical lessons for nascent organisations and underscore the need for sustained investment in these organisations as key nodes for systemic learning, rural agency and polycentricity. This work contributes to governance literature by illuminating undervalued sites of innovation, advocating for practice-informed approaches to legitimise and scale rural-led solutions.