Browsing by Subject "Local government"
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Powell, Derek (SUN Press, 2012)[more][less]
Abstract: Local government is a mirror of the larger political and economic forces, cleavages and problems that are shaping South African society. It is these deeper fault lines in society, rather than the Zuma government’s turnaround strategy or the 2011 local elections result, which will drive future policy and determine its effects. This is the first lesson of local government reform in all four terms of national government examined in this chapter. In each term, national policy reforms were moulded by shifting political and economic circumstances and larger national interests, not simply by the unfolding logic of the original blueprint for local government in the 1998 white paper. The outcome of eighteen years of policy reform, however, was not the new society imagined in the white paper, but an imperfect transition that is local government today: where peaceful electoral competition coexists with violent public protests, racial group areas endure in fact, even if not in law, pockets of good governance survive amidst systemic corruption and mismanagement, and national policy goals consistently exceed local government’s capacity to deliver them and the economy’s skills base. The second lesson flows from that reality – due to the fact that the problems of local government are so nested in the broader problems of our society, further local government policy reform and sweeping national turnaround strategies are likely to have imperfect impacts on ‘the problem of local government’ in South Africa. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/551 Files in this item: 1
PowellLocalGovernment2012.pdf (198.7Kb) -
de Visser, Jaap; Steytler, Nico; Machingauta, Naison (Community Law Centre, University Western Cape, 2010)[more][less]
Abstract: On 3-4 November 2009 the Community Law Centre hosted a seminar entitled “Policy Dialogue on the Future of Local Government in Zimbabwe”. A diverse spectrum of local government practitioners was assembled to discuss issues related to local government in Zimbabwe. The seminar was structured around six critical themes relating to local government, namely socio-economic transformation, local government institutions and elections, local government financing, traditional authorities, local government functions and supervision of local government. Six authors from Zimbabwe prepared and delivered position papers on the above subject matters against the background of comparative comments from South African academics. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/208 Files in this item: 1
DeVisserLocalGovtZimbabwe2010.pdf (2.142Mb) -
Nleya, Ndodana; Tapscott, Chris; Thompson, Lisa; Piper, Laurence; Esau, Esau (Unisa Press, 2011)[more][less]
Abstract: Protest politics in South Africa has a long history and has been deployed differentially in different historical moments. Whereas protests formed an important vehicle during the fight against apartheid, their rebirth and propulsion to the centre of the struggles in the post-apartheid dispensation have come as a surprise to many. A majority of these protests, so-called ‘service delivery protests’, are reported as emanating from communities’ dissatisfaction with municipal service delivery as well as problems relating to lack of communication between council and councillors on the one hand and citizens on the other. In this article, we interrogate data from five study sites located in Cape Town and Pietermaritzburg. While we found support for the importance of service delivery, our data contradicts many widely held assertions as regards what causes these protests. We were able to show, for example, that these so-called ‘service delivery protests’ may actually emanate from reasons that extend beyond service delivery. Since our data indicates that levels of participation in Cape Town are higher than in Pietermaritzburg on the one hand, illustrating perhaps the different provincial contexts, there is also variation between the relatively high participation rates of the ‘black African’ sites of Langa and Khayelitsha, on the one hand, and the lower rates of the ‘coloured’ site of Bonteheuwel, on the other, which we ascribe to the disengagement of the community in Cape Town, from both local and national politics. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/555 Files in this item: 1
NleyaProtestPolitics2011.pdf (2.491Mb)
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