Horizontal Coordination, Government Performance and National Planning: The Possibilities and Limits of the South African State

Implementing the National Development Plan? Lessons from Co-ordinating Grand Economic Policies in South Africa

“…Our aim is to critically assess the configuration and efficacy of the institutional arrangements behind previous efforts to co-ordinate grand economic policies. We believe that this will supplement previous work that has narrated the transition between various economic policy strategies over the past 20 years, including the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), the Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy, the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative (AsgiSA), and the New Growth Path (NGP) (Gelb 2007;Kraak 2011;Moyo and Mamobolo 2014;Munslow and Fitzgerald 1997). It may also generate useful lessons to enable policy-makers and observers to assess the feasibility of the NDP's institutional arrangements and the likelihood of its successful if not smooth implementation.…”

“…The NDP is the latest in a line of such policies which has attracted analytical enquiry. For example, Kraak's (2011) analysis of horizontal coordination and government planning traces the evolution and efficacy of multi-sectoral coordinating efforts in the South African government through the experiences of the RDP, GEAR, and AsgiSA policies. He concludes that these efforts failed to engender coordinated action within the state bureaucracy and belied the intractable challenges of breaking through institutional silos, prompting the creation of new coordinating structures which ultimately yielded the NDP.…”

The Green Economy in South Africa: Global Discourses and Local Politics

“…As many commentators have noted, there is a pervasive 'implementation deficit' (Oelofse et al 2006, 62) when it comes to environmental policy in South Africa, and this is particularly true outside the big cities and the provinces of Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Western Cape. This lack of capacity, and the apparent inability in many cases of state bodies to follow through on stated policies, represents a considerable constraint on achieving sustained green growth (Evans 2010;Kraak 2011). This is despite the fact there have been some interesting provincial and municipal-level schemes and initiatives to encourage a green economy transition.…”

Vocational education and training for African development: a literature review

“…This is less well established in Africa, perhaps because it does not speak well to the challenges of development, and because it has focused on formal labour markets, which are small in the African context (Nölke and Claar 2013). Nonetheless, there has long been interest in this approach in South Africa, where Kraak, Allais and others have used it to explain the particular shape of the evolving post-apartheid skills system (Kraak 2004(Kraak , 2010(Kraak , 2012Allais 2007Allais , 2013. More recently, Wedekind (2018) has explored the processes of institutional shaping of the apprenticeship system in South Africa that looks beyond the regulatory domain, whilst Allais (2018) argues that positional competition for credentials in a stagnant and small formal labour market is undermining the development of strong VET in South Africa.…”