Sihle Moon restarts the "Developmental State" debate – where will he take us? He has done us an exceptional service, in part, because he has published a book based on his York University PhD, through Africa's most important publisher – albeit one not well enough known in South Africa: Africa World Press. (AWP also published my own PhD about 20 years ago and, with Moon's work, I have a much greater sense of AWP's rigorous yet accessible approach, and it is won ...

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2021-Jun-25 09:33:43

Would the question about the political administrative interface ever be settled? For cases about it in the post-apartheid South Africa abound. Mkhuseli Apleni's (the Director- General of the Department of Home Affairs) case is one of many. What do they suggest, policy vacuum or inadequacies in the system of the administration of the state? Is this the reason the National Development Plan (NDP) calls for stability at the political-administrative interface? Apleni's case reminds us of t ...

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2021-Jun-25 09:30:58

This article contends that because of austerity measures and the pressure to limit its wage bill, the public sector is a major user of precarious workers. The jobs these workers fill are low-paying, with no benefits. They represent an attempt by the state to deal with structural unemployment and poverty in a situation where the economy is not absorbing the working population. There has been research on the various forms of precarious work in the public sector; the Expanded Public Works Progra ...

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2021-Jun-25 09:25:03

To what extent does e-governance matter for political modernisation in East and Southeast Asia? What is its impact on political modernisation? The literature shows that there are three elements of e-governance: "open data", "online service" and "e-participation". Political modernisation is divided into three elements: government's transparency, offline political participation and the level of liberty. Using second hand data from the United Nations (UN) databa ...

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2021-Jun-25 09:20:21

How did the members of the KwaZulu- Natal (KZN) Provincial Human Resource Development Forum (PHRDF) experience knowledge sharing? This is the question that the study upon which this article is based. The Socialisation, Externalisation, Combination and Internalisation (SECI) model was used as a means of understanding knowledge sharing within a community of practice and as an instrument for giving direction when preparing interventions that can improve practice. The model has previously been us ...

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2021-Jun-25 09:16:48

Enhancing public sector performance is on the agenda of most governments. In South Africa, as the analysis of the literature indicates, there is a dearth on studies that systematically assess the implementation of public sector performance improvement tools. This article is based on the study that explores the implementation of the Management Performance Assessment Tool (MPAT) within the South African public sector for the period 2011-2016. It borrows from implementation science and assesses ...

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2021-Jun-25 09:14:16

In 2015, the South African Parliament voted for a support package worth more than R83 billion (approximately $6,77 billion) to the electricity utility, Eskom, a State Owned Enterprise (SOE). Was this based on a general policy or on executive discretion? This article considers this question. It does this by discussing the literature dealing with the policy versus the discretion issue, within the context of its definition of policy. The methodological approach for this is content analysis. It a ...

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2021-Jun-25 09:11:31

This article focuses on residential environments and examines the conditions of the public low income housing neighbourhood in Lagos, Nigeria. It uses the Anikantamon public low income housing estate as a case study. The article argues that Lagos, which represents the hope for city development in Nigeria, is experiencing a rapid growth rate that has culminated in a situation where demand for housing is outstripping supply. It posits that the ill consequences of the mismatch between supply and ...

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2021-Jun-25 09:06:42

Often editorials of scientific journals are written as prefaces. These two are not the same. A preface introduces a publication, where the contents of the different chapters that it contains are simply summarised. An editorial serves a much bigger purpose, for it is an editor's opinion written to engage scholarship on various matters of public interest. ...

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2021-Jun-25 09:04:05