The social and economic successes of Asia have drawn global attention to the developmental state as a possible model for developing countries. In South Africa, many, including government, see this as a possible panacea to the country’s social, economic and institutional crises. However, a government committing itself to constructing a developmental state is one thing; actually implementing the necessary institutional and policy reforms to bring that into reality is another.
In this seminal collection, Constructing a Democratic Developmental State in South Africa: Potentials and Challenges, an interdisciplinary team of distinguished scholars examine how South Africa could go about building a democratic developmental state, while drawing on relevant conceptual models and useful comparative experiences from other countries. The macro- and microeconomic questions, as well as the institutional, governance and social challenges facing South Africa are lucidly analysed, as are the country’s advantages; such as its existing constitutional democracy, rents from its mineral resources and the commitment of its political leadership to creating a democratic developmental state.
Providing an eloquent and intelligent account of what the state’s primary goals should be at this point, the contributors make the case that for South Africa to become a developmental state that is both democratic and socially inclusive, economic and social policy have to be intertwined; development and democratic agendas have to be mutually reinforcing; and a competent bureaucracy needs to be built to enhance state capacity.
An authoritative and comprehensive study that illuminates the political economy of economic development, this work is invaluable for anyone interested in the political and economic future of South Africa and similar developing countries.
Contents
1. Constructing a democratic developmental state in South Africa: potentials and challenges Omano Edigheji
PART ONE Conceptual issues and historical experiences
2. Constructing the 21st century developmental state: potentialities and pitfalls Peter B Evans
3. From maladjusted states to democratic developmental states in Africa Thandika Mkandawire
4. How to ‘do’ a developmental state: political, organisational and human resource requirements for the developmental state Ha-Joon Chang
5. Limits of the authoritarian developmental state of South Korea Eun Mee Kim
6. Foiling the Resource Curse: wealth, equality, oil and the Norwegian state Jonathon W Moses
PART TWO Policy-making and economic governance in South Africa
7. The effect of a mainstream approach to economic and corporate governance on development in South Africa Seeraj Mohamed
8. Can South Africa be a developmental state? Ben Fine
9. Consolidation first: institutional reform priorities in the creation of a developmental state in South Africa Anthony Butler
PART THREE South Africa’s macroeconomic and industrial policy landscapes
10. Towards an appropriate macroeconomic policy for a democratic developmental state in South Africa
- Kenneth Creamer
11. Competition policy, competitive rivalry and a developmental state in South Africa Simon Roberts
PART FOUR Social policy and its institutional underpinnings in South Africa: what hope for a developmental state?
12. The South African post-apartheid bureaucracy: inner workings, contradictory rationales and the developmental state Karl von Holdt
13. Intermediate skills development in South Africa: understanding the context, responding to the challenge Salim Akoojee
PART FIVE Agrarian reform
14. The agrarian question and the developmental state in southern Africa Sam Moyo
About the editor
Dr Omano Edigheji specialises in the political economy of development and is Research Director in the Policy Analysis Unit of the Human Sciences Research Council.
It’s 93 days, 12 hours, 17 minutes and some seconds before the FIFA Soccer World Cup 2010 opens in South Africa.The stadiums are mostly complete, the tickets are being bought and many a dream is being thrown onto the water. But – will the World Cup be all that South Africans hope it will be? Dr Udesh Pillay, co-editor of Development and Dreams: The Urban Legacy of the 2010 Football World Cup is cautious. In a recent interview, he urges South Africans to adopt a more pragmatic stance on the event and its perceived benefits.
Dr Udesh Pillay, principal investigator and executive director at the Human Sciences Research Council, said the event presented many positives for the country, but its economic benefits had been overstated. Pillay's research on the World Cup has spanned almost five years and culminated in the publication of the book Development and Dreams: The Urban Legacy of the 2010 Football World Cup.
Development and Dreams: The Urban Legacy of the 2010 Football World Cup edited by Udesh Pillay, Orli Bass, Richard Tomlinson Book homepage
EAN: 9780796922502 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
A serious skills shortage could ensure that the South African mining industry lags behind when the world begins to recover from the current recession. That is the message from the third biannual Mining Survey conducted by Landelahni Business Leaders. Skills shortages are a big problem in many sectors of South African business and industry, as Johan Erasmus and Mignonne Breier document in their Skills Shortages in South Africa.
Why is it that we produce more mining engineers than all English speaking countries combined yet still have a shortage, asks Sandra Burmeister, CEO of Landelhani, in the Business Day.
According to the third biannual Mining Survey by Landelahni Business Leaders, when the world begins to climb out of recession South African mining production could be left behind.
According to the Skills Survey, the shortage could hamper future growth as training is below par, and the situation is made worse with many skilled workers leaving the country.
Landelahni CEO Sandra Burmeister says despite being a mining driven economy, South Africa failed to take advantage of the commodities boom earlier this decade.
The global economy is increasingly challenging the accepted divides between home life and work life, between employment and unemployment, and between paid work and unpaid work. In this context, it is imperative to rethink the concepts of “work”, “knowledge” and “learning”. And in order to move from where we are now to where we aspire to be, researching learning and work is not enough; we also need to be researching how to learn/work differently.In this first segment of a four-part podcast package, the co-editors ofLearning / Work: Turning work and lifelong learning inside out , Dr Linda Cooper and Professor Shirley Walters introduce themselves and explain the need to examine how we learn and work, and why the recently held Fifth International Conference on Researching Work and Learning (RWL5) was an important opportunity to do so.
Duration: 5 min 03 sec
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The second segment looks at how in the world of work and learning, certain voices and experiences – usually those of middle class males – often dominate. Here Shirley Walters and Linda Cooper examine the question, ‘whose knowledge counts?’
Duration: 3 min 47 sec
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There are many problems with the way in which the worlds of learning and work are currently structured and operate. The editors of the volume argue that there are no short cuts to effective learning.
Duration: 4 min 56 sec
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In this fourth and final part of the podcast package, editors Shirley Walters and Linda Cooper discuss examples of good practice and how we can learn and work differently. Much of it draws on approaches and techniques that once were integral to progressive education but have been lost. And it begins with some of the basics.
In South Africa, so-called conservative values are conventionally held to be the so-called norm – especially when it comes to sexuality. Journalist and author Christi van der Westhuizen talks to Melissa Steyn, co-editor of The Prize and the Price: Shaping Sexualities in South Africa about the nature of heteronormativity and how it defines the “proper way” to be sexual in SA:
Q: Why study hetero-normativity?
A: Because hetero-normativity is so powerful in the way it structures social behaviour, expectations and our identities. It is invisible, so we tend not to be conscious of the extent to which it shapes our society.
This is true for most dominant ideologies. But hetero-normativity is even less within our conscious understanding day-to-day than, for example, how whiteness operates to shape the racial order.
Power regulator NERSA’s announcement today allowing Eskom to raise electricity rates by 24.8% in 2010, 25.8% in 2011 and 25.9% in 2012 ensures that questions around Africa’s power grid won’t go away any time soon.
In the following podcast, contributors to the book McDonald, Liz McDaid, David Fig and Wendy Annecke probe the intricacies of the contemporary electricity sector. The commentary ranges from the use of nuclear power to the search for alternative energy sources, the gendered nature of the manufacture and distribution of electricity, the provision of free basic electricity, the building of hydro-electric dams and more. Listen:
Professor Goolam Vahed, author of Inside Indian Indenture with Ashwin Desai, recently gave a lecture at the Unversity of Cape Town entitled “Indentured Indian Workers on the Plantations of Natal and Beyond: 1860-1911″. The lecture is part of a series of events commemorating 150 years of Indian history in South Africa.
The history of Indians who came to then Natal in the late 19th century was explored in a lecture by Associate Professor Goolam Vahed of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Department of Historical Studies on 3 February.
The lecture, titled Indentured Indian Workers on the Plantations of Natal and Beyond: 1860-1911, was the first in a series of events commemorating the 150th anniversary of Indian history in South Africa, presented by UCT in conjunction with the 1860 Legacy Foundation.
The Zuma Administration: Critical Challenges, a collection of essays concerning the challenges facing the current government under Jacob Zuma, was launched last week in Cape Town.
The book is edited by Kwandiwe Kondlo and Masuphye Maserumule – both present at the launch. Their work seeks to stimulate debate and thinking, to challenge entrenched views and perceptions and to break new ground. Interpreting the dynamics since the birth of democracy in South Africa in1994, through the era of the Mbeki administration and the transition to the Zuma administration, it provides fresh perspectives on the questions of land reform, rural development, service delivery, intergovernmental relations, and poverty reduction in South Africa.
Chinese trade with and investment in Africa is big – and it’s getting bigger. Chris Alden, co-editor of The Struggle over Land in Africa: Conflicts, Politics & Change, and Riaan Meyer take a closer look at the shape these investments are taking and how they in turn will shape Africa’s future (and possibly put an end to the dollar’s reign).
The role of Chinese finance is a key driver of this trend. Through diversification of instruments and sources it is setting the pace for Chinese engagement and concurrently providing a window into its changing approach to global finance.
The conventional view of Chinese finance in Africa is that it is a lump sum concessional loan, negotiated in secret between Beijing and the host government, built around the twin pillars of a substantive Chinese investment in infrastructure in exchange for access to African resources. The idea is that it is all wrapped in a commitment to non-interference and peopled by Chinese companies, unskilled labour and supplies.
Such is the power of this image that African leaders themselves have been seduced by it. Former leaders Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, Omar Bongo of Gabon and, most recently, Guinea’s Moussa Dadis Camara all believed that this was the definitive Chinese approach and pursued arrangements with Beijing on this basis. And in the main, their efforts to secure such deals have been dogged by controversy.
Celebrate 20 years of Nelson Mandela’s release with HSRC Press
The Meaning of Mandela is a lively, engaging and witty collection of lectures bringing together the renowned African and African-American scholars – Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates Jr and Wole Soyinka – to reflect on the public meaning of the iconic Nelson Mandela. Any one of these authors would have been a pleasure to read in his own right, but to have all three of them enjoined in this common intellectual effort is an enlightening experience.
In this one book you will find the profound philosophical and political interpretations of Cornel West, the storytelling genius and witticism of Henry Louis Gates Jr, and the wisdom of Africa’s grand man of letters and the first person of African descent to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Wole Soyinka.
Graced with a Foreword by former chairman of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, The Meaning of Mandela should be required reading in philosophy and politics departments, a feature in the boardroom and an essential part of your carry-on luggage.
About the contributors
Xolela Mangcu (editor) was previously a Director of the Steve Biko Foundation and is a former Executive Director of the Society, Culture and Identity research programme of the HSRC. Dr Mangcu is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Public Intellectual Life Project of the University of the Witwatersrand.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr is a literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual. He currently serves as the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Harvard University, where he is the Chair of the African and African American Studies and the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.
Cornel West is a prominent American scholar and public intellectual. Formerly at Harvard University, West is currently Professor of Religion at Princeton University.
Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian writer, considered by many to be Africa’s most distinguished playwright. He was the first person of African descent to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986. He has taught in the Universities of Lagos, Ibadan and Ife, and is currently the Elias Ghanem Professor of Creative Writing at the English Department of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
The Meaning of Mandela: A literary and intellectual celebration edited by Xolela Mangcu, Cornel West, Henry Louis Watts, Wole Soyinka Book homepage
EAN: 9780796921642 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
