Browsing by Author "Tapscott, Chris"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Between supply and demand: the limits to participatory development in South Africa
    (SAGE, 2013) Tapscott, Chris; Thompson, Lisa
    Much of the focus in the literature on participatory development has been on the demand side and on the extent to which citizens succeed in pressuring the state to deliver basic services. Less attention has been focused on the supply side of participatory development, namely on how state institutions give effect to development policies. Post-Apartheid South Africa is replete with policies and legislation supporting participatory processes and yet in practice this has seldom lived up to the ideals espoused. This article examines the delivery of public housing in poor communities in three municipalities in South Africa and argues that there is a mismatch between how the formulators of policy understand participation and how it is interpreted by beneficiary communities and local officials. It concludes that considerably more attention needs to be focused on why officials fail to translate national policies into action if participatory democracy is to attain any legitimacy in the population at large.
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    Dynamics of building a better society: Reflections on ten years of development cooperation and capacity building
    (SUN Media, 2014) Tapscott, Chris; Slembrouck, Stef; Pokpas, Larry; Ridge, Elaine; Ridge, Stan
    The modern world is an environment of rapid change. Per Dalin points out that we are experiencing an unprecedented ten revolutions occurring simultaneously. There are revolutions prompted by globalisation and the population explosion, revolutions in knowledge and information, in the economy, technology, ecology, culture, politics, aesthetics, and values. Dealing with change on this scale requires a paradigm shift of the kind last experienced when science began to deepen its challenge to other forms of knowing in the 17th century. We have to learn to know and see differently. That is not easy. With this in mind, the philosopher Manuel Castells points us to a combination of global knowledge, networks and communication as our fundamental means of dealing with the challenges of the 21st century. We need to work in partnerships. There can be no going it alone. Learning to see and understand differently is still the primary challenge in South Africa’s ongoing transition to democracy. 20 years ago, emerging from the apartheid past with a mission to engage with apartheid’s terrible ongoing legacy, UWC knew that it needed partners to face Dalin’s ten revolutions in their local incarnations. Transformation of the kind that enables people to move beyond apartheid’s authoritarian certainties requires a profound paradigm shift from both oppressor and oppressed. This shift is inseparable from a global challenge. New perspectives and new knowledge are required to respond to the non-linear, persistent and ubiquitous changes, both social and natural, that are now beginning to impact on humans across the world. It is in partnerships across cultures and nationalities that we are most likely to gain these perspectives and find this knowledge. And it is in partnerships that we find the assurance and the social conviction necessary to make the new knowledge and perspectives available and ultimately unavoidable. This understanding lay behind our response in 2002 to the panel interviewing us as shortlisted candidates for the VLIR-UOS institutional university cooperation programme. The panellists expressed profound doubts about our choice of the Humanities and the Social Sciences above the Natural Sciences as the main thrust of the programme. We explained that our vision and mission led us to believe that we must try to create a sense of co-responsibility amongst all humans if we are to confront successfully the already threatening changes to our physical and social environment. We argued that our future as a species would depend essentially on the success of our collaborative relationships with other humans globally. This called for a caring and open perspective. Clearly, our vision was convincing. We were selected. A decade of partnership with Flemish universities has been a major factor in the rapid advances that UWC has made in that period. The programme, co-created by UWC , VLIR-UOS and four Flemish universities, has focused on “The Dynamics of Building a Better Society”. In caring about how change takes place and being open to its complexity, we strove together, with signal success, to build capacity, stimulate research, and on the strength of actual achievements to create Research Centres in 5 strategic areas: The African Centre for Citizenship and Democracy The Interdisciplinary Centre of Excellence for Sports Sciences and Development The Centre for Research in HIV and AIDS The Institute for Water Studies The Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research This book tells the story of how we did so. It is a celebration of people from two cultures learning to work together in the interests of humankind, and doing so successfully.
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    An exploration of the concept of community and its impact on participatory governance policy and service delivery in poor areas of Cape Town, South Africa
    (Taylor & Francis, 2018) Thompson, Lisa; Tapscott, Chris; De Wet, Pamela Tsolekile
    The inclusion of citizen participation as a means to the equitable delivery of public services has distinguished South Africa’s democratic development trajectory over the last 20 years. While equitable resource allocation remains high on the agenda of more recently democratised states, most of which have highly diverse and unequally resourced populations. Influencing the design of more inclusive participation is the notion of a universal citizenship that applies the concept of the equality of individuals to the needs, identities and sense of agency of citizens both between and within states. The liberal democratic theoretical conceptualisation of the individual centres on the notion of universal citizen, who is the recipient and embodiment of democracy through the rights bestowed through the democratic model. This conceptualisation has been criticised for its inability to deal with the imprecision of individual and collective political identities, especially as these evolve in newly democratic contexts. The construction of a single identity citizen living in communities imbued with homogenous characteristics is carried forward into the policy construction of participatory governance. This article explores and challenges the notion of the single identity citizen that belongs to one homogenous community that can be identified and drawn into formally constructed government spaces. The paper explores the construction of political and socio-economic identities and how notions of community are constructed by citizens, on the one hand, and government policies, on the other.
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    Overcoming the past and shaping the future: The quest for relevance in teaching and researching public administration in Africa
    (Springer, 2021) Tapscott, Chris
    The status of teaching and research on public administration in Africa countries, in many respects, remains a vestige of the colonial era and this is reflected in the epistemologies that underpin the design of the curricula and pedagogies adopted. They have been further shaped by the injunctions of neoliberalism and conditionalities of donor aid which promote normative northern models of public administration. Recognising this reality African scholars and others have, for some time, advocated for transformative models of policy formulation and governance which more accurately reflect African contexts. Commencing with an analysis of the historical factors that shaped state formation and administrative practices in post-colonial Africa, this article broadly examines how public policy and governance are taught and researched in African institutions.
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    Performance management in developmental local government: a search for an effective and workable approach
    (University of the Western Cape, 2003) Moodley, Nishendra; Tapscott, Chris; School of Government; Faculty of Economics and Management Sciences
    No abstract available.
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    Reconsidering the origins of protest in South Africa: some lessons from Cape Town and Pietermaritzburg
    (Unisa Press, 2011) Nleya, Ndodana; Tapscott, Chris; Thompson, Lisa; Piper, Laurence; Esau, Michelle
    Protest politics in South Africa has a long history and has been deployed differentially in different historical moments. Whereas protests formed an important vehicle during the fight against apartheid, their rebirth and propulsion to the centre of the struggles in the post-apartheid dispensation have come as a surprise to many. A majority of these protests, so-called ‘service delivery protests’, are reported as emanating from communities’ dissatisfaction with municipal service delivery as well as problems relating to lack of communication between council and councillors on the one hand and citizens on the other. In this article, we interrogate data from five study sites located in Cape Town and Pietermaritzburg. While we found support for the importance of service delivery, our data contradicts many widely held assertions as regards what causes these protests. We were able to show, for example, that these so-called ‘service delivery protests’ may actually emanate from reasons that extend beyond service delivery. Since our data indicates that levels of participation in Cape Town are higher than in Pietermaritzburg on the one hand, illustrating perhaps the different provincial contexts, there is also variation between the relatively high participation rates of the ‘black African’ sites of Langa and Khayelitsha, on the one hand, and the lower rates of the ‘coloured’ site of Bonteheuwel, on the other, which we ascribe to the disengagement of the community in Cape Town, from both local and national politics.