Development Planning in South Africa
Provincial Policy and State Power in the Eastern Cape
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:15th Dec '19
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
The first empirical study of the inner workings of South Africa's dysfunctional policy development process, exposing the challenges of large-scale policy overhaul and the frictions at the heart of the South African state.
Celebrated as a beacon of democracy and reconciliation, many people in South Africa continue to live in severe poverty, particularly in the Eastern Cape Province. Backed by the United Nations Development Programme, the Eastern Cape's provincial government consequently launched an historically ambitious programme – the Provincial Growth and Development Plan – aimed at tackling the province's poverty, unemployment and inequality over a ten-year period in a radical policy overhaul. Drawing on the author’s first-hand engagement with the planning process, Development Planning in South Africa is an empirically rich study that utilises a strategic-relational approach to explore the ways in which this unprecedented challenge was negotiated and eventually undermined by the South African state. The first work of its kind, the book provides an indispensable micro-level study with profound implications for how state power is understood to be organised and expressed in state policy. Relevant beyond South Africa to policy implementation in both developing and developed states globally, the book is essential reading for students and scholars of government studies, political economy, development, policy studies and social movements.
A comprehensive and meticulous discussion of the evolution of a far-reaching, ultimately failed, provincial development plan. Focussing on a discursive analysis, Reynolds records how the social content got burnished away, neoliberal economic prerogatives came to the fore and the government placed to the fore mega-interventions that could make the state look good in obvious ways. * Bill Freund, University of KwaZulu-Natal *
Reynolds’s compelling policy analysis of the Eastern Cape illustrates how a sophisticated, strategically sensitive approach can explain the limits on state power in challenging the logic and rule of capital in post-apartheid, neoliberal South Africa. * Bob Jessop, Lancaster University *
i>'Development Planning in South Africa shines powerful new light on the multi-layered relations of power that limited and undermined a seemingly promising initiative to break the chains of poverty and inequality in the Eastern Cape. * Gillian Hart, University of Berkeley *
A fascinating account of the policy process in a developing country. The author’s “insider” perspective gives the analysis a particular originality and depth of understanding. Useful for undergraduate and postgraduate students of political economy and development. * Janet Cherry, Nelson Mandela University *
An analytically sound, comprehensive treatment of the planning process in the Eastern Cape that gives the reader a case study and general insights about how and why development programmes fail. Not to be missed. * John Weeks, School for Oriental and African Studies *
ISBN: 9781786991638
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 372g
288 pages