This article is an enquiry into the public policy response to the South African AIDS epidemic. Since AIDS first appeared in the country in 1982 there have been numerous good policy documents written by successive South African governments - yet the epidemic shows little sign of abating. Successive South African governments have defined the policy problem in different ways: moving from a moralistic to a biomedical approach, the most recent public policy response has been (discursively at least) to view the epidemic as a developmental and human rights-based problem. However, despite the drafting of broadly inclusive and well-conceptualised policies, previous as well as the current South African governments suffer from a crisis of implementation. This is the result of a failure on the part of South African governments to consistently and correctly define the AIDS policy problem itself. This has resulted in a contested policy environment