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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.

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.