Browsing Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences by Title
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Cousins, Ben (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2011)[more][less]
Abstract: This report describes the ‘living law’ of land in one part of Msinga, a deep rural area of KwaZulu-Natal. It presents research findings from the Mchunu and Mthembu tribal areas, where a three-year action-research project was carried out by staff of the Mdukutshani Rural Development Programme. Launched in 2007, at a time when implementation of the Communal Land Rights Act of 2004 (CLRA) appeared imminent, the project aimed to gain a detailed understanding of land tenure in Msinga, facilitate local-level discussion of potential solutions to emerging problems around land rights, provide information on the CLRA to residents and authority structures, and help generate ideas on how local people could engage with the new law. Meetings, interviews and focus groups convened by the project between 2007 and 2009 generated lively discussions and debates on a range of issues and problems related to land tenure in Msinga. Policy-makers need to consider how to convene conversations of this kind, on a large scale, before they launch a new round of tenure reform policy formulation and law making. Our experience suggests that well designed processes are critically important to ensure informed discussion, but also that ordinary rural people, not just their leaders, are more than ready to engage in debates about policies that could have major impacts on their lives. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/390 Files in this item: 1
CousinsLandMsinga2011.pdf (3.011Mb) -
Hall, Ruth (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2007)[more][less]
Abstract: This report investigates emerging trends evident in the limited literature available on the impact of land restitution on livelihoods, and suggests ways of thinking about, and planning for, livelihoods. The report has a two-fold emphasis: its primary focus is on rural restitution claims where land has been restored, but it also addresses rural land reform more generally. Where land ownership has been transferred to land reform beneficiaries, similar patterns and challenges may arise, regardless of whether the land was acquired through the redistribution or the restitution route. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/90 Files in this item: 1
Hall_Impact2007.pdf (1.418Mb) -
Rena, Ravinder (Ottawa United Learning Academy & Denfar Transnational DevelopmentOttawa United Learning Academy & Denfar Transnational Development, 2012)[more][less]
Abstract: About two thirds of the WTO’s around 150 members are developing countries. They play an increasingly important and active role in the WTO because of their numbers, because they are becoming more important in the global economy, and because they increasingly look to trade as a vital tool in their development efforts. An attempt is made in this paper to examine whether the WTO policies have positive or negative effect on the trade of developing countries. The paper further discusses that the Doha Round of Talk is a myth, a fiction, or is it a reality. Can the spirit of Doha, which launched a new round of negotiations and work with an explicit pledge to deliver development-friendly results, be redeemed or not? Finally, it analyses the special differential treatment (SDT) for developing countries. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/531 Files in this item: 1
RenaWTO-Policies2012.pdf (245.6Kb) -
Tilley, Susan (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2007)[more][less]
Abstract: This paper provides some insights into international experience and attempts to distil the key areas of strategic value for consideration in developing a national strategy for support provision to land reform beneficiaries in South Africa. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/74 Files in this item: 1
Tilley_International2007.pdf (1.269Mb) -
Tapela, Barbara (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2005)[more][less]
Abstract: This report is based on research carried out between June 2003 and April 2005 in the Greater Sekhukhune Cross-Border District Municipality, which straddles the boundaries of the Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces. This research took place in two case-study sites, namely the Hereford and the Phetwane Irrigation Schemes. However, this report focuses on findings from Hereford only. The research was primarily concerned with the impact of BEE, articulated through joint ventures, on the ‘livelihoods’ of people living in emerging small-scale irrigation schemes in some of the least affluent rural areas within the municipality. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/71 Files in this item: 1
Tapela_Joint2005.pdf (816.7Kb) -
Nleya, Ndodana (Unisa Press, 2011)[more][less]
Abstract: The notion of service delivery protests in South Africa has perhaps become a cliché in South Africa. While there was a lull in protest activity (excluding industrial action) in the first decade of democracy, the second decade has been characterised by increased militancy reminiscent of the anti-apartheid struggle days, with many of these diagnosed as so-called service delivery protests. To be sure, service delivery issues are often mentioned as part of a blend of issues that have caused the different communities to protest in media reports. The role of service delivery in the generation of these protests however has so far not been investigated directly. This article reports the results of a quantitative study using path analysis to investigate the strength of the claim of the link between service delivery and protests in Khayelitsha, one of the protest prone townships in Cape Town. The article concludes that that service delivery affects protests directly and indirectly through its impact on perceptions of service delivery, perception of condition of life and the attendance of meetings. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/596 Files in this item: 1
NleyaServiceDeliveryProtests2011.pdf (1.207Mb) -
Turner, Stephen (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape & Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere Inc. (CARE), 2005)[more][less]
Abstract: The study compares the livelihoods and inter-household sharing mechanisms in a Lesotho village across a 28 year period. The report examines the complex socio-economic structures and systems that are in place in the rural village. Despite external signs of improved housing standards, the study finds ominous signs of growing vulnerability as much of the community's economic backbone has been lost. Options for assistance by external agencies and by social protection systems are explored. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/70 Files in this item: 1
Turner_Livelihoods2005.pdf (882.4Kb) -
Hall, Ruth; Cousins, Ben (NISC (Pty) Ltd and Taylor & Francis, 2013)[more][less]
Abstract: Land and agrarian reform has the potential to expand South Africa’s rangeland commons and enhance their contribution to the livelihoods of the rural poor, yet to a large extent this has been an opportunity missed. Shifting policy agendas have prioritised private land rights and commercial land uses, seeking to dismantle the racial divide between the white commercial farming areas and the ex-Bantustans by allocating former white farms to black farmers. These agendas and planning models reflect class and gender bias and a poor understanding of common property. If reform policies are to contribute to the reduction of high levels of rural poverty and inequality, then greater recognition of the potential role of livestock production on the commons must inform policy and planning. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/645 Files in this item: 1
HallLivestock2013.pdf (31.54Kb) -
Isaacs, Moenieba; Hara, Mafaniso (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2008)[more][less]
Abstract: This research investigated the drivers and the impact of HIV and Aids in fishing communities in South Africa, in order to assist the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism: Marine and Coastal Management (DEAT:MCM) with mainstreaming of HIV and Aids into policy on fisheries. The research was based on in-depth analysis of four fishing communities in the Northern Cape, Western Cape and Eastern Cape. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/67 Files in this item: 1
Isaacs_Mainstreaming2008.pdf (319.2Kb) -
du Toit, Andries (Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape., 2011)[more][less]
Abstract: This paper considers the role of ‘measurement’ and other forms of poverty knowledge in a context where the nature and direction of global economic growth is creating ‘surplus populations’ suffering various forms of marginalisation in the global economy. It links the development of different forms of poverty knowledge with the ways in which states and non-state agents seek to ‘govern’ poverty and poor populations, and with the ‘biopolitics’ whereby calculations are made about the differential allocation of resources towards different sectors of the global population. The paper argues that addressing the root causes of poverty requires social actors to go beyond the narrow limits of institutionally sanctioned and bureaucratically invested ‘poverty knowledge’ that currently dominate policy thinking. Rather than seeking to understand poverty by measuring the characteristics of members of populations, they should try to understand poverty as an aspect of social relations, and try to come to grips with differential insertion of populations in the fields of force of modern globalised capitalism. Analysis should abandon simple notions of ‘marginalisation, and come to grips with the agency of poor people and the complex relationships between informality, marginality, exclusion and incorporation. Ultimately, however, a more nuanced understanding of the role of poverty knowledge in present day biopolitics does not bring with it any easy answers: rather, it challenges applied social scientists to be more aware of the responsibilities they bear as producers of 'useful' knowledge in a time of increased global instability. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/580 Files in this item: 1
WP20.pdf (622.6Kb) -
Pretorius, Joelien (Institute for Strategic Studies at the University of Pretoria, 2008)[more][less]
Abstract: The relevance of the Non-Aligned Movement has been in question since the end of Cold War bipolarity. In the post-Cold War order, whether interpreted as cosmopolitan, unipolar, multipolar or globalised in nature, there are still challenges to the main purpose of the Non-Aligned Movement, which can be defined as the pursuit of self-determination and development for so-called Third World states. The rise of China is impacting on the current world order, possibly returning it to a kind of bipolarity, which the Non-Aligned Movement members can exploit. In addition, the 'Beijing Consensus' may provide new terms on which developing countries can be integrated into the global economy in a way that would accommodate and encourage their development. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/472 Files in this item: 1
PretoriusWorldorderChina2008.pdf (226.8Kb) -
Piper, Laurence (Unisa Press, 2011)[more][less]
Abstract: This article explores the significance of an important event, namely, the Pioneers of Participation workshop held in November 2009 in Cape Town, for public participation advocacy in South Africa. By tracing the shifting consciousness of one participant, a key provincial official (Jackie O whose name has been changed), the article shows both how such events can change mindsets to create better informed, better inspired and more connected advocates for public participation, and that this transformation is not necessarily permanent. Hence, it is argued that events like the Pioneers workshop are best located in a broader advocacy strategy appropriate to the particular context of state-society relations. In South Africa’s case it is argued that this strategy ought to focus on the twin objectives of policy reform – both to make formal participatory spaces more inclusive, democratic and empowered and to support the emergence of independent, popularly rooted yet technically competent civil society formations that are capable of mediating both popular needs and the policy system. How these objectives ought to be realised is an open question, but it is clear that events like the Pioneers workshop can be a galvanising and mindset changing resource in this broader strategy. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/584 Files in this item: 1
PiperParticipation2011.pdf (1.131Mb) -
Cliffe, Lionel (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2007)[more][less]
Abstract: Since the 2005 Land Summit, new approaches to land reform have been on the agenda, yet there remains little clarity on the way forward. The main focus has been on means of accelerating the redistribution of land through new modes of acquiring land. Acquisition is an important matter but if treated in isolation risks mis-specifying the core problems evident in land reform in South Africa. A new phase of land reform located within a wider agrarian reform is needed and will require new institutional arrangements. Any alternative strategy will have to revise the institutional mechanisms that have been handling land reform thus far. Are the procedures and the institutions that are in place to design and implement land reform adequate and appropriate to the kind of new tasks envisaged? What new farming units and activities are intended, and what post-transfer support will be required to make this agricultural system productive? This paper explores mechanisms appropriate to one kind of agricultural alternative: a vision of a productive, small-scale essentially household farm sector. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/66 Files in this item: 1
Cliffe_Policy2007.pdf (365.8Kb) -
Piper, Laurence; Nadvi, Lubna (Zed Books, 2010)[more][less]
Abstract: This chapter seeks to explore the character of popular mobilization in South Africa, mostly at the local level. This is done through exploring the interaction of two independent processes. The first concerns the relative empowerment of political parties and the disempowerment of civil society (especially social movements) by the democratization process in South Africa. The second concerns the introduction of new institutions of public participation in local governance. Hence, while the latter are portrayed as ‘invited spaces’ in which communities can engage the local state constructively, the poor design of these spaces, a lack of genuine will on the part of elites and the relative power of key social actors mean that, in practice, they are either meaningless processes or simply co-opted by political parties. Notably, civil society has tended either to disengage from the local state and focus on provincial and national levels, or to resort to forms of popular protest to be heard by local government – the non-governmental organization (NGO) sector usually favouring the first approach and social movements the second. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/488 Files in this item: 1
PiperPartyDominance2010.pdf (133.1Kb) -
Luescher-Mamashela, Thierry (Faculty of Education, University of the Free State, 2009)[more][less]
Abstract: The racial desegregation of the student bodies of historically white universities in South Africa has had significant political implications for student politics and university governance. I discuss two key moments in the governance history of the University of Cape Town (UCT) critically. The first involves the experience of racial parallelism in student governance in the late 1980s and early 1990s, making specific reference to the re-conceptualisation of the UCT Students’ Representative Council (SRC) as a ‘NUSAS-SRC’, along with the recognition of the political salience of race in the student body. The second traces the origins of the demographic representivity rule in the university’s statute to student demands for the dissolution of the UCT Council, and its replacement by a Transformation Forum in the early 1990s. I thus show that the recognition of race as politically significant in university governance is the outcome of a deliberate struggle, by students in general, and black students in particular, to de-privatise and politicise any sense of racial/racist marginalisation, and therefore to open up race as a topic for deliberation in the political realm of the post-apartheid university. Thus, the institutionalisation of race has come to serve the interests of the struggle for non-racialism. Description: Research article URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/226 Files in this item: 1
LuescherDesegregation2009.pdf (145.3Kb) -
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) -
Pretorius, Joelien (University of the Free State, 2008)[more][less]
Abstract: This article traces the politics of meaning-fixing with respect to the role of the defence force as apartheid declined from the mid-1980s, as it was negotiated from a current to a past organising principle of the “security imaginary” in the period 1990 to 1994 and as the post-apartheid period commenced after the 1994 elections. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/454 Files in this item: 1
PretoriusSecurity2008.pdf (663.5Kb) -
Naicker, Visvanathan; Combrinck, Theodore; Bayat, Abdullah (University of the Western Cape: School of Business and Finance, 2010)[more][less]
Abstract: Executive Summary: By almost any measure, most South African public schools, and schools in the Western Cape, are underperforming academically. For a number of years, there has existed a wide degree of consensus among education stakeholders, and particular government, that the problems in our schools extend beyond academic under-achievement. Massive budget allocations, overhauling curricular, restoring skewed learning resources, retraining educators and attempting to deal with the more pressing community problems and social ills that influence the results of a school are all necessary interventions. But, unless there is a concurrent improvement of schools from a „business‟ management point of view, there is no guarantee that the resources allocated to schools, both materially and in the form of educators, will be optimally deployed. Principals need to be occupied with the tasks of managing and leading teaching and learning i.e. instruction leadership, not managing routine administration. In recognising the potential of school administrative personnel to provide relief and support for the administrative role of principals, the Western Cape Government initiated a training course – the CSBA – in July 2008 for school business administrators. The ground-breaking pilot programme was completed in February 2010. Thereafter the WCED commissioned an evaluation of the results achieved. The purpose of the evaluation is to inform the WCED‟s plans for development of the course going forward. This report represents a synopsis of the findings of the evaluation. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/412 Files in this item: 1
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Manenzhe, Tshililo; Lahiff, Edward (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2007)[more][less]
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Pretorius, Joelien (Faculty of Military Science, Stellenbosch University, 2005)[more][less]
Abstract: American plans for Missile Defence (MD) and the weaponisation of space should be analysed in the larger framework of the contemporary Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA).1 Soviet military analysts have written about this revolution from as early as the 1970s, but it was the application of information age technology (IT) in the 1991 Gulf War that captured the imagination of military planners and policy makers, especially in the US. The US is actively pursuing an RMA, conceptualised as integrating new IT into weapons systems and integrated command, control, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) and, in turn, doctrinal, operational and organisational change in the military to take advantage of information dominance on the battlefield. This relates to MD and the weaponisation of space in two ways. Firstly, very few countries have the financial and technological capability to modernise their defence forces along the lines of a US-defined RMA, which means that they may resort to so-called asymmetric means to exploit the vulnerabilities or weaknesses of a strong, conventional power. Ballistic missiles (in association with chemical, biological or nuclear payloads) are one of the asymmetrical threats most commonly cited in speeches and military documents of the US and used as justification of MD. Secondly, the RMA increases the US military’s reliance on space-based military assets for C4ISR. Placing weapons in space to protect these assets is seen as a logical step to ensure a key aspect of US dominance on the battlefield. This paper explores the extent to which the strategic framework of the RMA has a bearing on US MD and space weaponisation arguments. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/455 Files in this item: 1
PretoriusDefenceMilitary2005.pdf (261.3Kb)