Democratic deepening in South Africa: the effect of public-private contracts on local government service delivery and local citizen participation

ABSTRACT LOCAL GOVERNMENT in South Africa is well positioned to meet some of the substantive challenges posed by the democratic deepening and development discourses in new democracies. It is responsible for the delivery of services to local citizens in a way that is ‘equitable, accessible and financially sustainable’. It is also supposed to ‘develop a culture of municipal governance that compliments formal representative government with a system of participatory governance’. Democratic decentralisation in South Africa does however have its limits in fiscal and institutional terms. Furthermore the course of developmental decentralisation is affected by levels of civil society activity and political will. Also, following the global trend towards New Public Management and national pressure on local government to be economically viable, various local authorities in South Africa have opted to enter into public – private partnerships for service delivery. These contract based arrangements significantly alter the way basic services are defined and destroy the relationship between local authorities and local citizens. Services become commodities as opposed to rights, local citizens become consumers and local authorities cease to be politically accountable. This thesis examines the effect contract based service delivery has on democratic deepening in terms of local citizens being afforded their rights to basic services and having meaningful opportunities to participate in the affairs of their local authorities

Shifting consciousness and challenging power: Women activists and the provision of HIV/AIDS services

In 2003, the South African government shifted AIDS policy making HIV treatment available in the public healthcare sector. The antiretroviral roll out, while hailed as a success, has required continued activism to ensure genuine implementation. Women particularly the poor, traditionally bear the brunt of the impact of HIV/AIDS socially and economically. Very often they do this in most marginalised spaces. This paper draws on theories of participation and empowerment to understand female activism during the period of antiretroviral roll out in South Africa. The paper seeks to understand how processes of empowerment linked with the first stage - access to ARVs impacted on the second stage - ARV roll out .It also considers how female activists understand their empowerment in the context of their role. The focus is grassroots activism females in Lusikisiki and Khayelitsha. This paper draws from a qualitative study on bottom-up policy advocacy utilising participatory observation and in-depth interviews with activists and civil society organisations. The main findings are that during the roll out phase of the HIV/AIDS campaign women activists worked from transformed "ways of thinking and being" in terms of HIV/AIDS and in terms of their role in the struggle for health rights. Their contesting embedded notions of power contributed to the democratisation of HIV/AIDS services. The transformation also caused shifts in the ways women mobilised, framed their understanding of the struggle and accessed participation spaces

Philanthropy and Development in Southern Africa: Philanthropy and Resource Governance

Philanthropic practice in the resource extraction sector is significantly under researched and forms the basis for this study. An obvious concern for social justice scholars and development scholars alike is that massive profits accumulated from resource extraction initiatives in Africa are seldom re-invested in the communities directly impacted or even more broadly in the development agendas of countries that house these resources. This paper considers the role of philanthropy in the resource governance debate. It begins by outlining the scope of resource governance and considering understandings of philanthropy. Drawing on preliminary evidence from three (random) examples of resource extraction in Africa, it argues that philanthropic practice has some way to go before reaching its optimal potential and that further research is required to gain more insight into this potential. The paper concludes with a discussion on philanthropy's role in resource governance and incorporates a series of recommendations