{"title":"Inside the municipality: locating debates on local government","authors":"Mosa M. Phadi, P. Vale","doi":"10.1353/trn.2020.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/trn.2020.0010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45045,"journal":{"name":"Transformation-Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa","volume":"52 1","pages":"1 - 11"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85468886","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Paperwork and power plays: contestation and performance at a Limpopo municipality","authors":"J. Pearson","doi":"10.1353/trn.2020.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/trn.2020.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article considers the role that documents played in episodes of political conflict that gripped the conflictual Mogalakwena Local Municipality in Limpopo province, South Africa. Advancing from the idea that an organisation is a 'collective storytelling system', the article shows how the authoring of official documents offers an important tool for actors in state institutions to anchor a narrative in a material form, emblazoned with letterheads and signatures, symbols of official legitimacy. Access to the means of documentary production and distribution can be used to generate resources of state power: to bestow power-plays with the seal of official validity; to legitimise actions in the language of bureaucratic neutrality, of disinterested rationality, of 'good governance'. Yet in the context of acute political division that prevailed at the Municipality, in which actors advanced competing versions of events, documents and the processes through which they were produced and disseminated became sites of contest. Tracing dynamics around documentary productions and processes in the Mogalakwena crisis reveals crucial ways in which power and authority are constituted and contested in a local municipality through narrative forms, symbolic strategies and story performances.","PeriodicalId":45045,"journal":{"name":"Transformation-Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa","volume":"58 1","pages":"59 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84601293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Governing mining towns: the case of Lephalale","authors":"E. Monama","doi":"10.1353/trn.2020.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/trn.2020.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:South Africa's failure to transform the spatial geography of apartheid has been centrally attributed to policy failure. Drawing on empirical research in Lephalale, a town in South Africa's Limpopo province, this article looks at the intersection between local government, spatial planning and mining companies in undoing the disintegrated apartheid geographies. It argues that understanding the failure to bridge the divided landscape requires not only a consideration of policy frameworks and issues of capacity building but, importantly, also a knowledge of the history and geography of local government institutions and the public-private interface within which policy strategies operate.","PeriodicalId":45045,"journal":{"name":"Transformation-Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa","volume":"49 1","pages":"103 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88612785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Twentieth-Century South Africa: a developmental history by Bill Freund (review)","authors":"Nicolas Pons-Vignon","doi":"10.1353/trn.2020.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/trn.2020.0020","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45045,"journal":{"name":"Transformation-Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa","volume":"11 1","pages":"153 - 160"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74458088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The relationship between social welfare policy and multidimensional well-being: An analysis using the South African Child Support Grant","authors":"A. Cooper, Z. Mokomane, A. Fadiji","doi":"10.1353/trn.2020.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/trn.2020.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Socio-historical context and ideology are often overlooked in analyses of how social welfare policy is used to promote well-being. This paper uses the South African Child Support Grant (CSG) to illuminate how a policy may enhance or hinder well-being, not only for individuals but also for a society. Forged through a combination of the inherited apartheid state's architecture, the redistributive ideology of the ruling African National Congress, social development theory and the constraints of economic globalisation, the CSG has produced paradoxically positive material well-being outcomes for many poor South Africans and possibly reproduced problematic subjective and relational forms of well-being nationally. Analysing how the grant, as a social policy, is historically and ideologically situated illuminates some of the constraints imposed upon a twenty-first century democratic developmental state as it tries to find its way in a global market, redistribute wealth, satisfy different constituencies and promote individual and collective well-being. Grants are a necessary but insufficient strategy for a twenty-first century democratic developmental state like South Africa.","PeriodicalId":45045,"journal":{"name":"Transformation-Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa","volume":"42 1","pages":"73 - 94"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90319673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Media in Postapartheid South Africa: postcolonial politics in the age of globalization by Sean Jacobs (review)","authors":"K. Tomaselli","doi":"10.1353/trn.2020.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/trn.2020.0007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45045,"journal":{"name":"Transformation-Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa","volume":"15 1","pages":"134 - 138"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81732186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rethinking Global Labour by Ronaldo Munck (review)","authors":"S. Hayter","doi":"10.1353/trn.2020.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/trn.2020.0008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45045,"journal":{"name":"Transformation-Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa","volume":"31 1","pages":"139 - 141"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78063359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"'Living inside the movement': The Right2Know campaign, South Africa","authors":"S. Mottiar, T. Lodge","doi":"10.1353/trn.2020.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/trn.2020.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Right2Know (R2K) campaign was initiated to protect access to information and, more broadly, freedom of expression in South Africa. The campaign is structured at national and provincial levels and is a 'democratic activist driven' organisation mobilising activists, supporters and allied organisations. R2K activists describe their own organisation as a hybrid, combining features of formal hierarchy with the more fluid and open characteristics of social movements. More widely, analysts view 'such hybrid protest formations as organisational configurations that might check cyclical processes in which social movements decline after initial phases of mobilisation'. This paper focuses on R2K's experience to test whether its hybrid character has helped it to retain vitality and resist bureaucratisation.","PeriodicalId":45045,"journal":{"name":"Transformation-Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa","volume":"22 1","pages":"120 - 95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83271754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}