The Political Economy of Government Subsidised Housing in South Africa

The Political Economy of Government Subsidised Housing in South Africa
Author: Sithembiso Lindelihle Myeni
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2019-08-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429774788

This book unpacks the political economy of government subsidised housing programmes in South Africa. Exploring government policy towards subsidised housing in South Africa, this edited collection analyses various programmes, their shortcomings and potential options to address these weaknesses in the context of a country suffering from an exponential demand for housing in the face of insufficient supply. The Political Economy of Government Subsidised Housing in South Africa looks at the complex and contested nature of the issue in post-apartheid South Africa, stimulating debate and knowledge sharing on housing programmes, proffering solutions to the issue. The book explores the issue from both practical and intellectual standpoints, exploring the relationship between historical institutional legacies and contemporary power structures, and their role in provision of housing for the growing population of South Africa. This book will be of great interest to students of urban and regional planning, political economy, development studies, and African studies.

Housing Market Dynamics in Africa

Housing Market Dynamics in Africa
Author: El-hadj M. Bah
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2018-03-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1137597925

This open access book utilizes new data to thoroughly analyze the main factors currently shaping the African housing market. Some of these factors include the supply and demand for housing finance, land tenure security issues, construction cost conundrum, infrastructure provision, and low-cost housing alternatives. Through detailed analysis, the authors investigate the political economy surrounding the continent’s housing market and the constraints that behind-the-scenes policy makers need to address in their attempts to provide affordable housing for the majority in need. With Africa’s urban population growing rapidly, this study highlights how broad demographic shifts and rapid urbanization are placing enormous pressure on the limited infrastructure in many cities and stretching the economic and social fabric of municipalities to their breaking point. But beyond providing a snapshot of the present conditions of the African housing market, the book offers recommendations and actionable measures for policy makers and other stakeholders on how best to provide affordable housing and alleviate Africa’s housing deficit. This work will be of particular interest to practitioners, non-governmental organizations, private sector actors, students and researchers of economic policy, international development, and urban development.

The Political Economy of Mental Illness in South Africa

The Political Economy of Mental Illness in South Africa
Author: André J van Rensburg
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2021-02-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429574673

The book describes key socio-political reforms that helped shape post-apartheid South Africa’s mental health system. The author interrogates how reforms shaped public, community-based services for people living with severe mental illness, and how features of this care has been determined, in part at least, by the relations between actors and structures in the state, private for-profit health care, and civil society spheres. A description of the development of South Africa’s post-apartheid health system, and the contentions that emerge therein, sets the stage for an analysis of the country’s most tragic human rights failure during its democratic period, namely the Life Esidimeni tragedy. The roots of the tragedy are not only framed as a loss of life and dignity as a result of political corruption and administrative mismanagement, but as a power differential that ultimately highlights an unjust system that relegates its most vulnerable citizens to commodities, without voice and without agency. The book concludes that the commodification of severe mental illness has been a product of neoliberal discourses that have shaped the economistic ways in which the post-apartheid South African state have governed poverty and severe mental illness. This book will be of interest to scholars of health, social and economic policy in South Africa.

Public Policymaking in a Globalized World

Public Policymaking in a Globalized World
Author: Robin J. Lewis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2018-01-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351362755

The inexorable advent of globalization has transformed the public policymaking process into a multi-faceted challenge that transcends traditional policymaking boundaries and forces scholars, experts, and practitioners to redefine their field in terms of both theory and practice. While every policy dilemma has a specific location in time and space, most significant policy issues— climate change, food and water, economic development, global pandemics, terrorism and violence, and migration, to name just a few—now require a collective framing of the problem and a collaborative effort to take effective action. The essays in Public Policymaking in a Globalized World offer valuable insights into how policymaking is evolving from a circumscribed field of inquiry into a truly global dialogue that can help stakeholders to focus on key issues that threaten the survival of our planet.

The Political Economy of Modern South Africa

The Political Economy of Modern South Africa
Author: Alf Stadler
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2022-10-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000634760

Originally published in 1987 this book argues that South African politics reflect the changing ways in which the region has been incorporated into the world economy. It traces the effects of a process of industrialisation under the dominance of mining on the other sectors of the economy, and on the evolution of the class structure. It shows how a coercive labour system influenced the definition of political and social rights in racial terms and profoundly influenced the development of authoritarian controls over blacks in the urban and rural areas from the 1920s onwards. The book includes an essay on the different strands in the reform movement and speculates about the social and political forces which underlined the political changes which began to take place during the mid-1970s.

The Political Economy of Nation Building

The Political Economy of Nation Building
Author: Mack Ott
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 439
Release: 2017-07-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351477277

Donor nations may advise and counsel, but the creation of a liberal nation state falls to its own people. They must create laws, exercise their liberties, provide freedom of belief and expression, and protect individual property rights. No nation becomes or remains free unless its people build, use, and defend these institutions, and protect them with understanding, vigilance, and effort. The Political Economy of Nation Building reviews the effects of political structures on the evolution and stability of liberalism in developing nations and considers the outlook for their success.Discussing the origins and applications of the modern liberal state from an explicitly Anglo- and Euro-centric view, Mack Ott addresses the origins of the rule of law and innovations that led to the rise of a market economy, separation of faith and governance, and the autonomy of finance - key components of the liberal state. He then addresses the emergence of sustained economic growth, a bridge between the liberal infrastructure and its application during the construction of a nation.Ott examines budget policy and laws, and accurate and timely economic and financial statistical reporting that assure donors that the recipient government is operating within the constraints of law. He addresses the beneficial effects of privatization of state-owned industry, examines the costs and benefits of nurturing non-governmental associations, and concludes with a review of transparent fiscal and monetary policies and the importance of non-interference in financial markets by the state.

Law and the Political Economy of Hunger

Law and the Political Economy of Hunger
Author: Anna Chadwick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2019-01-31
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0192557211

This book is an inquiry into the role of law in the contemporary political economy of hunger. In the work of many international institutions, governments, and NGOs, law is represented as a solution to the persistence of hunger. This presentation is evident in the efforts to realize a human right to adequate food, as well as in the positioning of law, in the form of regulation, as a tool to protect society from 'unruly' markets. In this monograph, Anna Chadwick draws on theoretical work from a range of disciplines to challenge accounts that portray law's role in the context of hunger as exclusively remedial. The book takes as its starting point claims that financial traders 'caused' the 2007-8 global food crisis by speculating in financial instruments linked to the prices of staple grains. The introduction of new regulations to curb the 'excesses' of the financial sector in order to protect the food insecure reinforces the dominant perception that law can solve the problem. Chadwick investigates a number of different legal regimes spanning public international law, international economic law, transnational governance, private law, and human rights law to gather evidence for a counterclaim: law is part of the problem. The character of the contemporary global food system-a food system that is being progressively 'financialized'-owes everything to law. If world hunger is to be eradicated, Chadwick argues, then greater attention needs to be paid to how different legal regimes operate to consistently privilege the interests of the wealthy few over the needs of poor and the hungry.

Social Policy in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Social Policy in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Author: Ndangwa Noyoo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2019-11-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000731480

This book critically examines the current social policy in post-apartheid South Africa and proposes an alternative social policy agenda to create a new development pathway for the country. Taking social policy as a vehicle that will facilitate the creation of a new society altogether, namely the "Good Society," the author argues for the adoption of policy that will socially re-engineer South Africa. The author shows how the policy tools and development interventions which were undertaken by the post-apartheid state in driving South Africa’s transformation agenda failed to emancipate many individuals, families, and communities from the cycle of intergenerational poverty and underdevelopment. He contends that social policy interventions that foster the social re-engineering of South African society must take place to untangle the inherited colonial-apartheid social order. This book includes comparative analyses on the Global South and Global North to present the ways in which countries such as post-Second World War Great Britain and Sweden, and post-independence Zambia of the 1960s and 1970s, were able to use social policy to create new societies altogether or places similar to the "Good Society." The conceptual and methodological issues that form the basis for this book reside in public policy-making and the public good and will be of interest to scholars of social policy, social development, and South African society.

Handbook on Critical Political Economy and Public Policy

Handbook on Critical Political Economy and Public Policy
Author: Christoph Scherrer
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 520
Release: 2023-01-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1800373783

This comprehensive and stimulating Handbook examines the contribution of political economy to public policy. It provides an overview of several strands of critical political economy, supported by case studies from OECD countries, Latin America, South Africa, and South and East Asia.

The Political Economy Of U.s. Policy Toward South Africa

The Political Economy Of U.s. Policy Toward South Africa
Author: Kevin Danaher
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2019-07-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000304574

By tracing U.S. involvement in South African political and economic development since the late 1800s, this book analyzes U.S. corporate and government motives for maintaining the political status quo in South Africa. In recent decades, according to the author, U.S. policy toward South Africa has grown more contradictory: Endeavoring to protect the United States's reputation on the question of race, government officials denounce apartheid, yet Washington remains the main force blocking an international response to South African policies. As the situation in South Africa continues to polarize, the U.S. is increasingly isolated in its position of verbally condemning yet materially supporting South Africa's white minority regime--a regime confronting the distinct possibility of civil war.