Explore publications.

This study examines the institutional ecosystem of public safety in South Africa by evaluating collaborative governance between the South African Police Service (SAPS) and Community Policing Forums (CPFs). The study explores how resource constraints, institutional trust deficits, and accountability tensions affect the co-production of public safety, which constitutes a critical form of socio-economic infrastructure for communities and local business environments. Guided by ecosystem governance and co-production perspectives, the study adopted a qualitative research design. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with SAPS officials, CPF executives, and community and business stakeholders within the Bothaville policing district in the Free State Province. Purposive sampling was employed to recruit 20 information-rich participants with direct experience of public safety governance and community policing initiatives. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The findings reveal systemic weaknesses within the local public safety ecosystem. While participants acknowledged the importance of collaborative and proactive approaches to crime prevention, the effectiveness of these arrangements was constrained by severe resource shortages, declining institutional trust, and a misalignment of accountability between police and community stakeholders. The study found that competing interpretations of oversight, authority, and responsibility undermine stakeholder cooperation, information sharing, and the collective capacity to co-produce public safety outcomes. The findings suggest that strengthening public safety ecosystems requires formal mechanisms that promote transparency, accountability, and stakeholder collaboration. CPFs should be strategically supported as platforms for mobilising community participation, facilitating information sharing, coordinating local risk-management initiatives, and strengthening police-community partnerships. This study advances scholarship on collaborative governance by conceptualising public safety as an institutional ecosystem shaped by stakeholder interdependence, trust, accountability, and resource capacity. It contributes to the ecosystem governance and co-production literature by demonstrating how governance failures within stakeholder networks constrain the effective delivery of public safety in resource-constrained emerging-economy contexts.

Financial education has gained global attention as essential to financial well-being, yet national strategies often remain fragmented in design and implementation, constraining policy coherence. To address this fragmentation, this article explores the South African financial education ecosystem through a collaborative governance lens to enhance international efforts for sustained, coordinated policy approaches. The Quintuple Helix Model and the Integrative Framework for Collaborative Governance informed a deductive qualitative analysis of statutory law, policy documents, and grey literature to delineate the mandates of key ecosystem actors. The findings reveal four categories—highly formal, semi-formal, knowledge-based and informal. The article introduces a novel Collaboration Mandate Framework for financial education within a governance regime to assist diverse actors in tackling South Africa’s persistent socio-economic challenges. The article concludes that operationalizing a financial education collaborative governance regime offers a viable pathway to enhance policy coherence, strengthen multi-actor collaboration, and improve financial well-being in South Africa.

As aesthetic education extends beyond the classroom, it no longer concerns only individual cultivation of aesthetic sensibility, but also involves the formation of public value. However, existing studies remain insufficient in explaining how it is constructed as public value through cross-organizational collaboration within local contexts. Therefore, positioned as a conceptual paper with an illustrative policy-case orientation, this study adopts a public value management perspective to analyze the interactions among governments, schools, communities, and arts nonprofit organizations in the process of publicizing aesthetic education. The Taiwanese policy and practice examples are used as illustrative cases to clarify how cross-organizational collaboration supports the proposed framework, rather than as empirical cases for comparative or generalizable case-study analysis. The findings indicate that the public value of aesthetic education is not naturally generated by policies or curricula; rather, it is gradually formed through continuous coordination, integration, and collaboration among multiple actors, in which arts nonprofit organizations play a central intermediary role. Finally, this study proposes a cross-organizational construction mechanism as a reference for cultural governance and educational practice.

This exploratory qualitative study investigates the systemic factors contributing to persistent failures in strategic planning within law enforcement organisations. Drawing on 25 semi-structured interviews with strategic planners, station commanders, middle managers, and senior law enforcement managers, the study examines how organisational experiences, perceptions, and institutional dynamics shape the development and implementation of strategic plans. Guided by Systems Theory, New Public Management, Public Value Theory, and Evidence-Based Policing, the study applies Braun and Clarke’s thematic analysis to identify critical weaknesses in environmental scanning, leadership stability, evidence utilisation, organisational capacity, resource allocation, and monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. The findings reveal that strategic planning failures are deeply rooted in governance gaps, fragmented organisational processes, and inadequate analytical and institutional capacity. The study refines the Integrated Strategic Planning Model for Law Enforcement (ISP-LE) and offers practical recommendations to strengthen evidence-informed, democratically aligned, and operationally grounded planning. Implications for policy, organisational reform, and future research are discussed.

There are numerous obstacles that local government managers still have to overcome have given rise to fresh and creative ideas for providing their communities with high-quality services at lower costs. Delivery of services in a cooperative manner It is becoming more common for the public sector to use civil society and/or the private sector to offer public goods and services. Three significant facets of these developing relationships are examined by the author in this article. Numerous such creative initiatives have surfaced as a result of the local government's cooperation with corporate, nonprofit, or other public organizations. However, before delving into this matter, the paper discusses why public partnerships are necessary in South Africa in order  to get quality services, and then specific instances of cooperative service quality projects are discussed. This article offers a viewpoint to emphasize crucial considerations that local officials should make when determining which services could profit from these kinds of partnerships and which type of cooperation might be most likely to assist a community in reaching its objectives.

Governance is still a contested concept in both theory and practice.  A proliferation of the concept has sprung up in literature.  One comes across variations where reference is made to co-production, public governance, good governance, hybridity governance, hybrid governance, to name but a few. The aim of this paper is to provide a conceptual overview of the evolution of the concept governance in general and hybrid governance particulary focused on selected African countries.  It is important to clarify what hybrid governance involves, and its implications for state capacity and service delivery.  Furthermore, it is imperative to discern whether hybrid governance could be a useful conceptual tool for facilitating more organised systems of service delivery in parts of Africa and South Africa, or whether it is just “new developmental jargon”. The paper employed a qualitative research approach where secondary sources of information, constituting document analysis, premised around forms of hybrid governance in selected African countries were explored. The paper makes a conceptual contribution to the collaborative international governance discourse.

Promoting inclusion requires acknowledging and tackling many aspects and overcoming obstacles and disparities that hinder equitable access to opportunities, resources, and services. It is worth mentioning that the hierarchical method of creating policies and providing services in urban areas frequently neglects to consider the varied requirements and viewpoints of different communities. Therefore, it is necessary to further investigate approaches to policymaking and service delivery that take into account the different needs and perspectives of the community. This article examines the City of Johannesburg as a case study to investigate a collaborative approach for municipal governments to enhance inclusion in urban areas. Using a qualitative research design, this study gathers data by analysing documents and reviewing existing literature. The data are examined using the process of content analysis. The report reveals that coproduction approaches enhance inclusivity in the City of Johannesburg by fostering collaboration opportunities between local governments and communities. It illustrates that when individuals participate in the formulation of policies and the provision of services, local governments may more effectively access the many needs and viewpoints of the community and develop policies and services that are more efficient and inclusive. The report also emphasises the difficulties linked to the implementation of a coproduction strategy and suggests the need to enhance capabilities and establish trust and communication among stakeholders.

The main focus of the article is the necessity of using M&E as a catalyst and accelerator for increased public service efficacy. The South African government has been under tremendous pressure lately to meet the needs of its people in terms of development. This needs to be carried out in a transparent and citizen-focused way. The purpose of this article is to provide a strong link between performance management and M&E, two enablers that are now essential to the success of public service delivery in the twenty-first century, in light of the requirement to guarantee that M&E enhances such service delivery to the public. Additionally, the corrupt existing condition of affairs belies our understanding of the amount to which programmes have the intended effects and the degree to which they may continue to supply services over time.  A diverse look at the meaning of M & E will be offered in this presentation. This is a conceptual study based on an examination of the literature from many sources, such as academic publications, popular media pronouncements, and policies.

Over the past decades there has been a remarkable paradigm shift in Public Administration. Traditional Public Administration was in dire need for a change of a New Public Administration (NPA) approach in the 1980s. From early 2000s, the NPA began to be subjected to heavy criticism, which influenced public administration to take complete control of different reforms and approaches regardless of their diversity, complexity, hybrid and contradictory situations rather than offering the perfect approach and reform to the public sector. The New Public Management (NPM) and Post-New Public Management (Post-NPM) paradigms emerged in times whereby the NPA was already experiencing a massive deconstruction and reconfiguration of the public sector management. To scan and understand the remarkable paradigm shift in the field and practice of public administration, this study applies both NPM and Post-NMP to examine different views, principles, values and norms, and reform proposals for South African Public Administration. Methodologically, this study used qualitative research methods with the aid of secondary data to evaluate both the NPM and post-NPM paradigms, criticisms, arguments, challenges, and changes in public policy implementations. Recommendations are provided based on the existing challenges confronting the current public administration in South Africa. This study contributes to literature, new policy proposals and research within public administration.

This conceptual paper attempts to demonstrate its strength by first accepting that the (p)ublic (a)dministration's loci-foci is within the jurisdiction of the executive branch amongst the two remaining branches of government, namely, the Legislature and the Judiciary. In the executive, the administration of the state is observed. Secondly, this paper argues that while p. a. may be with the executive arm, there is however its place beyond just the said administration of the executive arm. This paper employs the use of public-private partnerships that emanated from the New Public Management Paradigm as well as monitoring and evaluation theory and practice in the public sector to argue its assertion that public administration is being practiced beyond the executive branch. The development programs and projects initiated by the government and handed to the service providers need to be monitored and evaluated to ensure value for money and meet public expectations. As a result, the expectation of quality service from the service provider should be the norm of the day. It is therefore, through the cooperative trajectory between the government and the private sector, that this paper proposes that public administration can be associated with the executive branch but not necessarily limited to the said branch of government. This paper employed desktop research and the existing relevant literature to support its argument and contribution to the discipline of public administration.

This paper explores stakeholder engagement in the strategic management process for service delivery in government. The main objective is to determine the factors influencing insufficient stakeholder engagement of strategic management processes for service delivery by a government department. The four moments of translation concept of Actor Network Theory (ANT) was utilised as a theoretical framework to understand and explain the interplay between the initiator of the network of service delivery and other actors in the network in aligning diverse interests to achieve service delivery goals. The assumption was that the phenomenon was ontologically subjective and that it was appropriate, epistemologically, to adopt an interpretive paradigm as the leading research philosophy, using a mixed approach of qualitative and quantitative elements wherein quantitative data was used to test the reliability of the qualitative data. Using the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) as a case study, a sample of 26 participants included 11 managers of WCED and 15 Khayelitsha Education Forum (KEF) members representing the community, school governing bodies and school principals and educators of 64 schools around Khayelitsha township. The study revealed that stakeholder engagement could address non-service delivery during service delivery strategy formulation and implementation. The findings suggest that a network of aligned interests should be established for continuous engagement in implementing strategic plans and service delivery in line with the mandate of Government departments and entities. The results imply intense arrangements and relationship building between government departments and citizens are needed to improve stakeholder relationships and alignment of service delivery expectations to reduce service delivery challenges.

Scholars contend that public administration, as a discipline, is still in its infancy and, more often than not, fumbles for its own identity.  It is generally regarded as an amalgamation of various disciplines. It is therefore no wonder that scholars in public administration, more often than not, fail to locate their empirical research, in sound theoretical frameworks for research in public administration, in general.  The core objective of the study was to determine whether Master of Public Administration (MPA) graduates, from a selected university of technology in South Africa, grounded their research in theoretical frameworks, rooted in the identified public administration domains.  Desktop research was employed where purposely selected MPA dissertations were scrutinised, using content analysis. MPA qualifications generally comprise a range of modules in conjunction with the production of a mini-thesis.  This has not been the case at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) since 2016.  MPA graduates are required to produce a full dissertation only.  The study intended to highlight the importance of conducting research that contributes to public administration theory development, especially at universities of technology. The study found that if CPUT wants to acquire a competitive edge in the international higher education landscape in general and in the field of public administration in particular, it must aspire to deliver MPA graduates who demonstrate the ability to grow the mass of theoretical knowledge in the discipline.  The study recommends that theoretical frameworks, in the study domains associated with research in public administration be taught explicitly in the form of seminars in the absence of teaching them in formal credit-bearing modules, which is the case at CPUT.


 
 
 
 The aim of this paper is to evaluate the relationship between public policy which brings about within the concept of process model and political environment. In this descriptive study, the answers of three questions will be search which are 1) how do public policies proceed as a process 2) which partners are effective in this process; lastly 3) which kind of relation is available between political environment and public policy specifically. After a comprehensive literature review, the answers of aforementioned questions are supplied in the following; 1) the process flow of public policy includes firstly establishing public policy, secondly problem determination, agenda setting, policy formulation, implementation and lastly evaluation. 2) The main partners of this process are formal, informal and international organizations. 3) Political environment can be descripted as a combination of political systems, political culture and socio-economic conditions which have key determining role on public policy process.