Tag Archives: South Africa

Problem-focused coalitional governance in action – three case studies

December 8, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , 2 Comments

(Abundance series #3)

Ideas can help break an accelerating downward spiral of polarization by offering inspiration – but to be credible, a positive vision also needs to be accompanied by a practical agenda for action. Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson’s best-selling book, Abundance offers a compelling positive vision along with a sharp wake-up call for progressive governance. But it largely leaves unresolved how that vision can become a strategy for action.

This post explores that question through three linked mini- case studies which focus on one central dimension of problem-focused coalitional governance: how civil society engages at the level of concrete problems – and how different modes of engagement shape outcomes. The three cases are:

  • Mini-case study #1 explores how ongoing, adaptive engagement by civil society has been key to South Africa’s reversal of a disastrous HIV/AIDS pandemic  – a decade-long high-profile adversarial campaign was followed by  sustained efforts to work more coalitionally with reformers within government to help strengthen both policymaking and implementation.
  • Mini-case study #2  explores how problem-focused coalitional governance helped improve learning outcomes in a half-dozen countries, even in the face of broader governance messiness.
  • Mini-case study #3  explores how a disproportionate emphasis on hierarchical, arms-length and adversarial modes of engagement has constrained national, subnational and school-level  efforts to improve learning outcomes in South Africa.  

The mini-case studies draw on a chapter, co-authored with long-time civil society activist Mark Heywood, in a just-published book, The State of the South African State, plus a decade of prior comparative research on the political economy of education sector reform.

Together with two companion essays, this piece forms part of a short series that probes how to close the gap between vision and action.  A stage-setting post  situates Abundance within the larger arc of literature on political orders, and highlights both the book’s positive vision and its critique of progressive governance. A companion conceptual post (see here) lays out a framework centered around the collective efforts of coalitions of reform-oriented public officials and non-governmental actors to address concrete problems. (A fourth post, forthcoming in January, will be a stocktaking and update of Los Angeles’ efforts to address homelessness in the face of a a worsening fiscal crisis. (See here for some of my recent research on both LA’s crisis and recent governance reforms aimed at addressing it.)

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Mini case study #1: South Africa’s HIV-AIDS Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) (Click here for access to the Levy-Heywood case study;  Heywood has played a leadership role in the TAC since its inception.)

The TAC is an extraordinary example of successful activism on the part of civil society: “Upon the TAC’s formation in 1998, no person living with AIDS was receiving life-saving antiretroviral treatment in the public health sector and almost all infected people died….. [A decade later, South Africa began to roll out what has become….]  the largest HIV treatment program in the world, now covering over 5.8 million people and nearly 80 per cent of the eight million people living with HIV in South Africa.   Perhaps the most dramatic evidence of this programs results has been a rise in life expectancy of more than a decade for men and women and a massive drop in infant mortality due to HIV infection.”

The case study explores the interplay between adversarial and coalitional strategies over the TAC’s quarter century of effort: “The TAC’s history can be divided into two parts: a period of confrontation over government policy and President Mbeki’s AIDS denialism (1998–2007); and a coalitional period (and when deemed necessary, confrontation and/or challenge), working with committed public officials over implementation of a policy that TAC eventually managed to co-create with the government (2007 to the present).”

The first period was characterized by: “….almost a decade of intense conflict between TAC and the government over its policy, particularly its refusal to include a treatment component to HIV prevention and care….This first period was bitter and divisive……

Eventually, government responded to pressure from the TAC (and broader disquiet , including from within the ANC, with the prevailing policies): In late 2006/7, the TAC delegated several of its leaders to work with the Office of the Deputy President to develop a new framework for a National Strategic Plan on HIV….agreement was reached in early 2007….. Key TAC leaders were appointed to senior positions in the South African National AIDS Council, SANAC  (a body that had been set up by President Mbeki in 1999), where they worked closely with government. For a period SANAC became a forum for de facto co-governance of the AIDS response.

From 2007 onwards, there was a far-reaching transformation in how government and civil society engaged with each other: “The TAC offered public servants in the Health Department a vision of care and treatment that provided hope, encouraged innovation and inspired (rather than commanded) performance…… Through its branches, TAC assessed the actual state of delivery on the ground and frequently allied with local health workers. It was central to setting up organizations like the Stop Stockouts Project which monitors the availability of essential healthcare medicines and children’s vaccines…..The TAC tackled the serious stigma that surrounds HIV infection by building hundreds of branches for people living with HIV. Its branches were conduits for its pioneering program of ‘treatment literacy’ carried out with the guidance and support of health professionals.”

South Africa’s approach to addressing HIV-AIDS had shifted from accelerating disaster to an exemplar of what coalitional,  learning-oriented and deliberative governance can achieve – a ‘best practice’ case that paralleled the primary health care reforms in the Brazilian state of Ceara, documented by Judith Tendler in her classic book, Good Government in the Tropics.  (Note, though that, as mini-case-study #3 will explore further, an embrace of coalitional engagement has been more the exception than the rule in democratic South Africa.)

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Mini case study #2: improving learning outcomes in middle income countries.

The second mini-case study draws on a synthesis of a dozen country studies of  the politics of education policy reform and implementation written for the Research Programme on Improving Systems of Education (RISE).  What follows highlights some striking (and paradoxical when considered through a conventional lens) findings on how problem-focused coalitional governance added value at each of national, provincial, district and school levels.

At national level:

A comparison of the case studies of education sector governance in  Chile and Peru points to both some limitations of top-down governance, and some strengths of problem-focused coalitions. In Chile,  interactions among stakeholders largely were top-down and systematically managed, yet improvements in learning outcomes were modest.  By contrast,Peru achieved large gains in learning outcomes, even though it has long had to navigate an extraordinarily turbulent political and institutional environment – including an education sector led by 20 ministers in 25 years. As the Peru country case study  explored in depth,  Peru’s messier, less formalistic and more iterative process of policy formulation and adaptation helped build broad legitimacy among stakeholders:

“ Civil society organizations – NGOs, universities, think tanks and research centers – have also played a key role in defining policy agendas [and….]  in the development of education policies and reforms. Though agreements are often ignored by ministerial administrations and political parties,   they have certainly contributed to the continuity of agendas and to the advancement, through piecemeal, of reforms.”

At provincial level

In his award-winning 2022 book, Making Bureaucracy Work: Norms, Education and Public Service Delivery in Rural India  Akshay Mangla distinguishes conceptually between legalistic and deliberative bureaucracies, and analyzes the strengths and weakness of each in improving learning outcomes in two Indian states:

“Legalistic bureaucracy in Uttar Pradesh has promoted gains in primary school enrollment and infrastructure…. enabling officials to resist political interference when providing inputs to schools…..[But] local administration’s adherence to rules imposed administrative burdens…. Cumulatively, these processes contributed to low quality education….”

By contrast, in Himachal Pradesh, deliberative norms and participatory/coalitional governance have been mutually reinforcing. “At independence, Himachal Pradesh was among India’s least literate states…. HP is now among India’s leading states with respect to literacy and primary education policy education indicators….. Deliberative bureaucracy is found to have made a decisive impact…  enabling state officials to undertake complex tasks, co-ordinate with society and adapt policies to local needs, yielding higher quality education services.”

At district level.

Ghana and Bangladesh  illustrate how local coalitions helped improve learning outcomes, even in the face of broader systemic weaknesses. In Ghana, interactions between decentralization and clientelism added to the incoherence and politicisation of the education sector. But there was a silver lining: “The drivers of improved performance and accountability do not flow from the national to the local level, but instead have to be regenerated at the level of districts and schools…. In [some] districts…. there was evidence of the emergence of a developmental coalition between community, school and district-level actors….including ‘political officials and teacher unions…..evident at district level, and mirrored at the community level.”

Similarly: “Bangladesh features an education system which, while formally highly centralized, is in practice fairly decentralized and discretionary in whether and how it implements reforms….. Learning reforms were adopted and implemented to the extent that the relationship between school authorities, the local elites involved in school governance, and the wider community aligned behind improved teacher and student performance.”

At school level

Kenya’s long history of involving parents and communities in the governance of schools has had far-reaching consequences. As a long-standing observer of the system reported: “What one sees is an expectation for kids to learn and be able to have basic skills…. Exam results are…. posted in every school and over time so that trends can be seen. Head teachers are held accountable for those results to the extent of being paraded around the community if they did well or literally ban from school and kicked out of the community if they did badly.”

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Mini case study #3: South Africa’s fraught efforts to improve learning outcomes.

Notwithstanding the encouraging examples in mini-case-study #2, many education systems seem stuck in low-level equilibria, with repeated fruitless attempts to improve poor learning outcomes by doubling down on top-down, legalistic reforms.  Heywood and Levy’s second case study (which draws on Levy et. al, 2018) explores the balance between adversarial/legalistic and coalitional/deliberative approaches at each of national, provincial and school-levels. 

At national-level: “South Africa’s education sector stakeholders (inside and outside of government)  have failed to co-operate sufficiently to be able to bring about effective change. Part of the reason for this failure can be traced to more general societal pre-occupations with adversarial civil society approaches and bureaucratic insulation. [Examples include]:

  •  A failure among experts to constructively work through their disagreements has been an important part of why the country has repeatedly failed to put in place any systematic assessments of learning before the end of twelfth grade……
  • South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU) has almost uniformly been demonized by sector professionals, media and many politicians as disruptive and as a principal cause of the sector’s failures even though, as with teachers’ unions everywhere, SADTU has to navigate inherent tensions between its role as an advocate of the material interests of teachers and its role as a professional organization. Coalitional approaches would include efforts to build common cause with teachers committed to the more professional parts of this dual identity….”

At subnational-level: “Civil society’s default mode of engagement at provincial level often has been adversarial. Yet judicial victories and resulting court-imposed obligations to improve infrastructure have limited potential for impact [in those provinces]  where bureaucracies lack the legalistic/logistical capacity for follow-through.”

At school-level: The 1996 South African Schools Act (SASA)  included reforms that gave far-reaching authority to school governing bodies in which parents were the majority. These reforms were motivated in part by the liberatory impulses of grass-roots democratic movements, and in part by the concerns of apartheid-era elites about how schools would be governed. The latter has enabled public schools serving (now more multi-racial) elites to perform well. By contrast:

“While a few exemplary civil society organizations work collaboratively at school and community levels, there has been little sustained effort to breathe life into the SASA architecture within low-income communities….. We [Heywood and Levy] recognize that, outside elite settings, it can be difficult for parents and communities to exercise their voices…but it is not the practical challenges facing civil society that account for the lack of attention paid to the possibilities for inclusive governance created by SASA. Rather, it is the ideational lens through which South Africans approach the role of civil society in public service provision.”

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As the mixed response to Abundance reveals, efforts to translate a positive vision into a practical agenda for change seem repeatedly to become snarled in binary either/or discourses. The reasons seem rooted less in evidence than in competing ideational ‘priors’ – in this instance a ‘high modernist’ perspective that top-down institutional engineering is necessary and sufficient to effect change,  versus a ‘social justice’ perspective centered around mobilizing against unjust and corrupt elites.

The case studies in this blog post (and the conceptual framework laid out in a companion post) point towards a hopeful third possibility – namely that bringing attention to the practical can inspire in its focus on concrete gains, in its evocation of human agency, and in the power that comes from cultivating shared (problem-level) purpose to actually get things done. As Heywood & Levy argue, what to prioritize varies by place and time.

Here is how we open our chapter: “Civil society played a key role in the struggle to end apartheid. In the first three decades of South Africa’s democracy, civil society’s continuing efforts to hold government to account have yielded some massive, vital victories. But times have changed……” 

Here is how we conclude: “A crucial, continuing challenge for the South African state is to renew a sense of hope and possibility. Highlighting failures and mobilizing around them  does not renew hope – on the contrary, it can risk deepening disillusionment. The times call not for deepening confrontation, but for a mode of social mobilization on the part of civil society that fosters, rather than undercuts, a sense of solidarity and shared purpose.”

The above is not relevant only to South Africa.  The contemporary USA finds itself trapped in its own downward spiral of disillusionment and polarization.  In Abundance, Klein & Thompson offer acounter- vision that is intended to inspire. This, they  suggest, will require a state that is both capable and willing to act. But as a vibrant recent literature (synthesized here) has explored, effectiveness alone is not sufficient to renew civic perceptions of the legitimacy of the public domain. n his 2020 book, The Upswing, Robert Putnam sought to draw lessons for the contemporary USA from the 1880s and the 1920s: 

A distinct feature of the Progressive Era was the translation of outrage and moral awakening into active citizenship …Progressive Era innovations were seeking to reclaim individuals’ agency and reinvigorate democratic citizenship as the only reliable antidotes to overwhelming anxiety… National leadership came after sustained, widespread citizen engagement….. A [new] upswing will require ‘immense collaboration’, [leveraging] the latent power of collective action not just to protest, but to rebuild.”

Perhaps the ideas and experiences laid out in this blog series can contribute in a small way to setting aside either/or polarities and embracing a similarly inclusive vision of change.

‘Undocumented’ in LA – some stubborn facts

June 20, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I’ve lived through this before. My first two decades of life were during peak apartheid  in Cape Town, South Africa. Beneath the glistening surface of the city’s sunshine, mountains and ocean was tyranny.  Police cars roamed the street, looking to immediately deport black people who didn’t have the required ‘dompas’ document. Families were forcibly removed from their homes. Informal settlements were bulldozed. Brutalization coarsened life -not only for those who were direct targets, but for everyone.

When I came to the United States in the late 1970s, it was with a sense of relief, hope and possibility – now I was living in a land dedicated to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, a country that promised, in words engraved above the main entrance to the Supreme Court building,  “equal justice before the law”. And when I moved  to Los Angeles about three years ago, I was thrilled to discover a city that, contrary to East Coast stereotypes, was vibrant, welcoming, and rich in its cultural  diversity. Yet in the days since the Trump administration unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and federal troops  on the city I have lain awake at night, shocked and distressed by  the parallels between my early years in Cape Town and what is happening in LA.

As someone committed to exploring how history shapes culture, politics and the economy I am mindful of the many differences between LA and Cape Town, and their implications for policy choices. But in what follows my primary purpose is not to explore nuance, but to assemble some baseline data (taken, except where noted, from  a 2024 California-wide study, centered around 2019 data)  in a way that directs attention to two urgent issues: (i) the catastrophic social and economic consequences for LA  if the Trump administration continues to pursue  its militarized and rhetorically shrill and polarizing approach  to forced removals; and thus (ii) the urgency of crafting a different way forward.  I organize the data around five sets of stubborn facts.

Stubborn Facts I: Undocumented residents  comprise a significant share of of LA’s – and California’s – population.

Stubborn Facts II: Undocumented residents are deeply embedded into Californian society.

  • 31% of California’s  2019 undocumented population  had been resident  in the state for 20 or more years; 41% for 10-19 years; 13% for 5-9 years; and 15% for less than five years.
  • More than half of the undocumented population live in households that include a citizen or permanent resident.
  • 20% of all children  under age 18  in LA County (and 17% across California)  live in a household where at least one person is undocumented.

Stubborn Facts III: The assault on undocumented residents targets especially the state and county’s Latino population

  • 48% of the population of LA County – and 39% of all Californians  –  are Latino.
  • 86% of California’s total Latino population of 15.2 million people are citizens or permanent residents.
  • As of 2019, about 75% of California’s undocumented population was Latino; almost 1.7 million people came from Mexico, and a further 360,000 from El Salvador and Guatemala. An additional 2.3 million Latino citizens of California live in a household where at least one person is undocumented;  4 million people will thus be directly affected by mass deportations.  
  • Across California,  29% of Latino children live in a household where at least one person is undocumented.

Undocumented residents are  intertwined with California’s long-established Latino community – a  community that  cuts across  classes, and localities.  In the vibrant, culturally-diverse Los Angeles County, whose Latino residents are neighbors, friends, and co-workers, targeting the undocumented Latino population for forced removal will be devastating – not only for those immediately affected, but for all of us.

Stubborn Facts IV: Undocumented residents are woven deep into the economic fabric of Los Angeles.

  • As of 2019, over 64% of all California’s undocumented residents above the age of sixteen were employed (as compared with 59% for the working age population as a whole); less than 5 percent   were unemployed.
  • Median 2019 hourly wages  across California were $13 per for undocumented workers, $19 for immigrants and $26 for the US-born population
  • Across California,  52 percent of  undocumented residents have less than a high school education; 22% have a high school diploma; and 26% have at least some college education.
  • Across California, undocumented workers account for approximately half of all employment in  agriculture –  and a similar percentage of child care, home aide, housecleaning and other domestic workers.
  • In LA County, undocumented workers account for about a third of all construction sector employment, 21% of manufacturing employment,  and 17-20% of employment in hospitality, wholesale and retail trades.

Forced removal of undocumented workers will thus have devastating consequences for labor supply at the less skilled end of the labor market, with widespread bankruptcies and cost escalations likely in multiple sectors.  

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History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.  South Africa’s forced removals began in the late 1940s. They set in motion a  cascading cycle of decade-long protest, two decades of brutal repression and dehumanization – and then mass civic uprising. Sustained efforts at forced removals in LA will almost surely  be accompanied by a parallel combination of protest and repression – a massive blow to the heart of a great city.

How to avoid catastrophe? To address this question, we need to add a fifth set of stubborn facts to the four laid out above. Between 1970 and 2024, the share of the American population that was foreign born  rose from 4.7% to 15.6%,  with the latter the highest percentage since at least 1850. In the four years of the Biden administration the estimated number of undocumented people living in the United States rose by over 5 million.  If catastrophe is to be avoided, simply ignoring the structural underpinnings of America’s current anti-immigrant fervor is not an option.

But nor is it an option to ignore the far-reaching social and economic consequences of the draconian imposition of immigration policy. The bloodless technocratic advocacy of ‘robust’ enforcement of existing policies (for example, this New York Times  podcast conversation between right-of-center columnist Ross Douthat and the American Enterprise Institute’s Matthew Continetti) is as outrageously detached from any realistic reckoning with consequences as reckless, twitter-fueled  pyromania.

It has been clear for decades where a constructive path might be found – through the hard work of legislative reform.  But instead of  reform,  contestation over immigration policy has become Exhibit Number One of a broken political system.    Back in 1986, Republican-championed immigration reforms, signed into law by then president Ronald Reagan,  provided a path to citizenship for undocumented migrants who had lived and worked in the USA for at least  five years.  By contrast, a 2024 effort at legislative compromise  offered a path to permanent residence and citizenship only for undocumented residents who both  were married to US citizens, and had been in the USA for at least ten years – an astonishingly inadequate proposal when viewed through an LA lens. Even so, it was the opposition of then presidential candidate Donald Trump, not Democratic opposition, that ended the reform effort.)

But the parallel with South Africa does not only provide a cautionary tale of how things could go wrong; it also points to the possibility of something radically different.  The country’s  extraordinary ‘rainbow miracle’ transition to democracy shows that, even for conflicts that seemingly are intractable, a collective commitment to finding a way forward can yield transformational positive change. Has the USA become so incapable of collective, problem-solving deliberation that (to paraphrase the eighteenth century philosopher Samuel Johnon) even the threat of a hanging cannot focus our minds?

100 DAY UPDATE: Protecting the guardrails of democracy – some lessons from South Africa

April 28, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In early February, I wrote a blog post that laid out some lessons for today’s USA’s from South Africa’s efforts to protect the guardrails of democracy. Here is a link to the piece.  A hundred days into the Trump administration, how well does the piece stand the test of time? While the four lessons it highlighted (see the end of this post for a summary…..) remain reasonably on target,   for at least three reasons South Africa’s experience turns out to be a more imperfect lens for understanding how to meet the challenges of sustaining democracy in the face of hostile actors than I realized at the time of writing.

First is a fundamental difference between South Africa’s early 1990s struggles to stay on a democratic path and those of the contemporary USA. In South Africa, those in control of the state (FW de Klerk’s National Party), while hesitant, wanted to go down the path of democratic constitutional reform. By contrast, in early 2025 USA,  the levers of government seem unequivocally in the hands of those who have demonstrated no commitment to a constitutional democratic order.

Second, while top-down cronyism aptly describes at least part of Jacob Zuma’s South Africa, and Donald Trump’s USA, its consequences depend in important part on the character and commitment of  the leaders. I won’t try to parse which of the two is more corrupt. But what does seem clear is that Jacob  Zuma – whose life had been shaped by the African National Congress and its struggle against apartheid (including ten years’ imprisonment with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island)  – was committed in at least some part of his identity  to the ANC’s aspirations and values. These values included longstanding, deeply-rooted commitments to democracy, to non-racialism, and to the rule of law. These commitments required Zuma to at least think twice before acting in ways that were directly contrary to these values.  Donald Trump shows no evidence of any similar commitment and associated restraint.  

Third is the relentless ideological zeal of at least parts of the Trump administration. An anti-government discourse has long been part of the Republican Party’s DNA. Even so,  I have been startled by the (Musk-ian) recklessness with which agencies have been dismantled, heedless of consequences in the real world. Delving further into the  ideological pedigree of the ideas held by another part of Trump’s unwieldy (but unfailingly loyal) coalition has left me feeling even more shaken and (a little) vulnerable.

Beneath the sometimes genteel language of political philosophy is the stuff of nightmares. To illustrate, here is a quote from Patrick Deneen (whose intellectual pedigree passes through Princeton, Georgetown, and currently the University of Notre Dame, and who both JD Vance and Pete Hegseth have found inspirational):

“What is needed, in short, is regime change – the peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class and the creation of a postliberal order…..Where necessary, those who currently occupy positions of economic, cultural and political power must be constrained and disciplined by the assertion of popular power…… The power sought is not merely to balance the current elite, but to replace it…..The aim should not be a form of ‘democratic pluralism’ that imagines a successful regime comprised of checks and balances, but rather the creation of a new elite that is aligned with the values and needs of ordinary working people”.

For those of us who know history’s catastrophes  deep in our bones, these words are chilling. Perhaps the one silver lining is that, as of this time of writing, the agenda has been laid bare, its execution has been chaotic, and it is (perhaps) being stopped in its tracks by increasingly mobilized resistance. So, as with so much of my work these days, I’ll end by taking inspiration from Albert Hirschman’s bias for hope – in this instance the hope that, as per the first lesson of the February post, American democracy can indeed make it intact to the November 2026 mid-term elections.

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Here are the four “lessons from South Africa” laid out in the February piece:

Lesson #1: For the next 21 months,  the unwavering navigational north star is to get  to the  November, 2026 midterms with the machinery of electoral democracy still fully functional – avoid being knocked off course by even the most venal provocations.

Lesson #2: Leveraging checks and balances  lays important, necessary ground for victory in the struggle against tyranny – but its victories are not in themselves decisive.

Lesson #3: Keeping democratic space open requires a coalition that is broader than the usual fault lines of political partisanship –   a  sense of urgency and willingness to act not only from ‘natural’  opponents but from elite actors for whom it is more expedient to stay silent.

Lesson #4:  A vision of democratic renewal is key to a decisive victory against encroaching tyranny – more than short- and medium-term band aids are needed.

Protecting the guardrails of America’s democracy –  some lessons from South Africa

February 13, 2025 By in democracy, governance, inclusion, institutions Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Now what? Four weeks into the Trump administration, a wrecking ball threatens to wreak havoc with millions of peoples’ lives. A  sense of urgency is in the air. Indeed, we urgently need to bear witness to the emerging scale of disaster.  But holding open the door to a hopeful future needs more than urgency.  It needs  clarity of goals, tactics and  strategy – plus a longer-term vision that looks beyond the immediate crisis. To help bring clarity, it can be helpful to make comparisons.  

In seeking to understand America’s challenges,  I have long looked to South Africa’s decades-long struggle to establish and sustain its own democracy. A recent effort contrasted how polarization and inequality interacted. My task here is  the more immediate one of seeking fresh insight into how a democracy can respond to a wrecking ball taking aim at its institutions. The search yielded  four lessons of relevance to America’s current moment. First:

  • For the next 21 months,  the unwavering navigational north star is to get  to the  November, 2026 midterms with the machinery of electoral democracy still fully functional – avoid being knocked off course by even the most venal provocations. 

In April 1993, a team of far-right assassins that included a former member of the white apartheid parliament murdered Chris Hani,  a  popular, senior leader of the ANC’s left-wing.  At the time, South Africa’s  recently unbanned African National Congress was in the midst of fraught, on-and-off  negotiations to  end apartheid – but until a new constitution could be agreed on, power remained in the hands of the apartheid-era National Party. When news of the assassination broke, the country erupted in rage; the stage was set for crackdown.  Instead, in a masterful display of statesmanship, Nelson Mandela went on national television and successfully redirected attention to the journey ahead. The country’s first democratic elections, held in April 1994,  resulted in a massive ANC victory, with Mandela sworn in as national president.

Decades after its inspiring transition from apartheid to democracy, South Africa confronted a new challenge to its constitutional order – and again demonstrated the centrality of  the electoral process to its defense.  Jacob  Zuma, the ANC leader who acceded to the presidency in 2009,  was increasingly using state power in personalized and often corrupt ways, under the guise of a populist anti-elite agenda. Given the ANC’s continuing electoral dominance, defeating Zuma’s successor in a national election (Zuma himself was term-limited….)  was not a plausible strategy.  In selecting a successor,  the ANC itself had to decide whether to re-embrace the democratic constitutional order. This it did. Cyril Ramaphosa, a central protagonist in the crafting of the constitution in the 1990s,  won the November 2017 (intra-party) electoral contest to become Zuma’s successor by a hairs-breadth –   and then decisively won the 2019 national elections.   Ramaphosa’s victory not only underscores the centrality of elections in pushing back against tyranny, how he won underscores the relevance of the second and third lessons.

The second lesson is largely familiar:

  • Leveraging checks and balances  lays important, necessary ground for victory in the struggle against tyranny – but its victories are not in themselves decisive.

In the 2010s, South Africa’s defenders of democracy brilliantly used checks and balances institutions to push back against state capture. The pushback included brave, determined inquiry from the ‘Public Protector’, an official, but arms-length  agency with a mandate to investigate abuse of power; investigative journalism, underpinned by university-based researchers whose efforts added to the credibility of efforts to document what was happening; and a high-profile  public inquiry led by the Deputy Chief Justice of the country’s supreme court.  Four weeks into the Trump administration, similar momentum is building in the United States. The courts are intervening; elected Democrats in the House and Senate are becoming increasingly emboldened and forceful in mobilizing resistance; citizens are spontaneously coming out in support.  But experience in South Africa and elsewhere shows that more is needed.

The result of a too-narrow pre-occupation with tactical victories can all-too-easily be to win many battles, but lose the broader war.   Hence the third lesson:

  • Keeping democratic space open requires a coalition that is broader than the usual fault lines of political partisanship –   a  sense of urgency and willingness to act not only from ‘natural’  opponents but from elite actors for whom it is more expedient to stay silent.

It takes courage to override expediency and party loyalty and lead with principle. In 1930s Germany, expedient silence (indeed, often, tacit support)  on the center-right opened the door for Adolf Hitler, and all that followed. 2010s South Africa, by contrast, saw some inspiring examples of courage. Veteran leaders of the ANC (including Pravin Gordhan; Ahmed Kathrada;  and  Mavuso Msimang to name just a few) were willing to override lifetimes of loyalty and take a high-profile principled stand against state capture in favor of constitutional democracy.  In the USA, principled Republican leaders  who took a stand against Richard Nixon in the early 1970s showed similar courage. But in today’s United States, aside from a few lonely voices, the silence from the center-right is deafening.

The combination of a multi-front effort to leverage checks and balances institutions and mobilization of a broad coalition may be enough to eke out an electoral victory – but it has not been enough to decisively turn the tide. Both the 2019 South African and 2020 U.S.,  elections enabled a temporary pause in attacks on constitutionalism. But more than a pause was needed. Hence the fourth lesson:

  • A vision of democratic renewal is key to a decisive victory against encroaching tyranny – more than short- and medium-term band aids are needed.

On offer in South Africa’s 1990s “rainbow miracle” was not only formal constitutional change, but hope – “a better life for all” as per the African National Congress’s campaign slogan. Indeed, after decades of stagnation, the first fifteen years of democracy witnessed a steady acceleration of economic growth, and a reduction in the incidence of extreme poverty. But by the time Zuma acceded to the presidency, the promise had reached its sell-by date. Ramaphosa promised only a return to the earlier formula, and his presidency has turned out to be a time of muddling through. Viewed from the vantage point of 2025, parallels with the Biden presidency are clear.

For an electoral victory to result in a decisive political realignment, it needs to build credibility on two fronts – inclusion, and public governance. South Africa’s early successes centered around an expansive “we” – underpinned by an economic program that addressed many everyday concerns of working people. In the wake of 2024’s electoral shock, the Democratic Party in the U.S.  seems increasingly to be learning the lesson that the cobbling together of multiple disparate parts does not add up to an expansion vision of ‘inclusion’. To  win credibility with the electorate the message needs both  sharpening  and  consistent championing by credible messengers.

As for  the capacity to govern, a distinctively American challenge is to break through the relentless drumbeat of political demonizing of the public sector. But the challenge goes well beyond messaging.  All-too-often,  the result of a progressive vision of governance in which one good thing is added on top of another is way less than the sum of its parts – each good thing is accompanied by a small dose of administrative process, and the cumulative sum of the good things is sclerosis. The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan makes the point pithily:

“A word to Democrats trying to figure out how to save their party…. Most of all, make something work. You run nearly every great city in the nation. Make one work—clean it up, control crime, smash corruption, educate the kids. You want everyone in the country to know who you are? Save a city.”

In 1860 when Abraham Lincoln became president, he described America as “the world’s last best hope”. That is how it felt to me when I came to this country almost five decades ago. Is the vision of America as a beacon to the world coming to an end? Is there no alternative to angry, chauvinist isolationism? Making it through the present moment without deepening disaster requires tactical resistance – but it also calls for more.   We also need to raise our sights. What kind of country do we want the United States of America to be?

South Africa – Making the case for hope

June 26, 2024 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

In the aftermath of South Africa’s recent election renewed hope has made an unexpected appearance.. Because the ANC lost its majority, it now needs to govern by coalition. Forced to choose between “good governance” or “ethno-nationalist” coalition partners, it has signaled a clear preference for the former. At first glance, the new coalition is hardly a recipe for political stability and policy coherence.  Even so, for reasons that I lay out in my new piece in The Conversation this lack of coherence need not prevent a virtuous spiral from taking hold.

To realize the potential of the moment, the country needs to move beyond a political culture where false certainties abound. Hope is a fragile flower. The zone of agreement between the coalition members is small. Outside that zone, the potential for bitter disagreement is huge. Difficult choices lie ahead – but focusing on these is not the immediate priority. For the next year or two the urgent task is to focus on shared goals, and to avoid the kinds of policy and power conflicts that can turn hope into rancor, recrimination and enmity. Now is the time to build momentum – to give a new season of hope a chance to take hold.

Between South Africa’s frying pan and America’s fire

April 28, 2022 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Fueled by hope, I spent the 2010s travelling back-and-forth between South Africa and the USA, sharing  an optimistic approach to integrating governance and development strategies with mid-career practitioners at both SAIS and the Mandela School. But the subsequent decade unfolded in unexpectedly toxic ways in both countries. It felt important to complement with-the-grain pragmatism with an exploration of underlying challenges. A 2021 co-authored paper explored why things turned rancid in South Africa.  My new paper –  How Inequality and Polarization Interact: America’s Challenges Through a South African Lens, also published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – takes a comparative perspective.  This post lays out five personal take-aways from the comparison. (Here’s a link to the paper’s executive summary).

Take-away #1:  Far more than is the case for contemporary South Africa,  America’s current wounds – increases in inequality since the 1980s, and their attendant social and political correlates –   have been self-inflicted.

Back in the 1970s, I had been  drawn to the USA by its openness, its commitment to freedom, equal dignity and equal justice for all – everything that the South Africa I left behind was not.  With its 1990s ‘rainbow miracle’ transformation from apartheid to constitutional democracy, South Africa became a new  beacon of possibility for people around the world who value democratic governance and inclusive societies. However,  the country’s subsequent reversals were not wholly unexpected. Three decades after the end of apartheid,  South Africa remains among the world’s most unequal countries, and its fraught racial history continues to fester – though the rawness and relative recency of the anti-apartheid struggle perhaps continues to offer some immunization against a further-accelerating downward spiral.   

For the United States, however, the converse may be true. In the decades subsequent to World War II, the combination of an equitably growing economy and a vibrant civil rights movement had fostered the hope of deepening economic and social inclusion. But  beginning in the 1980s, the benefits of growth became increasingly skewed, and  ‘culture wars’ became increasingly virulent. Complacency bred of long stability may have lulled America  into  political recklessness at the inequality-ethnicity intersection – a recklessness that risks plunging the country into disaster.

Take-away #2:  In both South Africa and the USA, the drivers of polarization have been multiple and mutually reinforcing; essentialist explanations that focus narrowly only on a single dimension –  economic, institutional,  cultural or racial  – and ignore the others are, at best, seriously incomplete.

The Carnegie paper distinguishes between polarization’s demand-side and its supply-side.  The demand-side comprises the way citizens engage politically – as shaped by power, by their perceptions of the fairness of economic outcomes, and by whether they frame identity  in inclusive or in us/them ways.  The supply-side comprises political entrepreneurs and the ideas they champion –  ideas about how the world works; ideas about identity. Mutually-reinforcing interactions between the demand- and supply-sides can become increasingly toxic – potentially even to the point of a doom loop that destroys constitutional democracy.

Take-away #3: Both South Africa and the USA need to be more pro-active in renewing economic inclusion  – but  making the shift from an inequality-fueling to an inclusion-supporting economy is less daunting than it might seem.

When considered through the lens of the interaction between inequality and ideas, pro-inclusion policies are less important as ends in themselves than for how they affect the willingness  of citizens to accept the rules of the game (including the distribution of economic outcomes) as broadly legitimate.  As South Africa’s rainbow miracle turnaround in the 1990s and early 2000s shows, a turn from anger to hope does not need a comprehensive package of pro-equity reforms. Rather, reforms that foster “good-enough inclusion”—some immediate gains that signal that things have changed, combined with credible signals that longer-term structural change is underway—can set in motion a virtuous spiral, which can be sustained as long as the momentum of  positive policy change continues to unfold over time.

Take-away #4: The influence of economic elites, though often obscured beneath the headlines,  has been central in both countries – for both good and ill. 

In South Africa, as Alan Hirsch and I explored in depth,  South Africa’s business establishment played a leading role in helping to midwife negotiations between the white minority government and the ANC.  In the USA, organized business was an important part of the elite consensus that fueled three decades of inclusive economic growth subsequent to World War II. In recent decades however, a segment of the elite  has actively financed  political entrepreneurs who have skillfully championed a combination of polarizing cultural discourse and distributionally regressive economic policies. This is a classic example of elite capture, a phenomenon familiar to scholars of comparative politics.  Paralleling what happened in 1980s South Africa, might America’s economic elites wake up to these risks and become more open to inclusive renewal?

Take-away #5: In settings that are open politically, turnaround will be achieved less by directly engaging  polarization’s most toxic champions, than by working around them.

Mass political mobilization was pivotal to South Africa’s shaking loose the shackles of apartheid – and new calls to the barricades might seem to be the obvious response to current political and governmental dysfunction.   However,  different times and different challenges call for different responses.  Currently, both the South African and U.S. governments are, at least aspirationally, committed not to accelerating polarization but to strengthening both inclusion and the institutional foundations of democracy. In such contexts, some compelling research suggests that what is called for is not fighting polarization with more polarization but lowering the temperature by fostering deliberative discourse, focused on positive, hope-evoking options. As happened once before in the USA,  the aim would be for a myriad of collaborative, problem-focused grassroots initiatives  to serve as potential building blocks for  a twenty-first-century social movement– a  movement that views cooperation in pursuit of win-win possibilities not as weakness but as key to the sustainability of thriving, open, and inclusive societies.

Between South Africa’s frying pan and America’s fire

April 27, 2022 By in governance, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

Fueled by hope, I spent the 2010s travelling back-and-forth between South Africa and the USA, sharing  an optimistic approach to integrating governance and development strategies with mid-career practitioners at both SAIS and the Mandela School. But the subsequent decade unfolded in unexpectedly toxic ways in both countries. It felt important to complement with-the-grain pragmatism with an exploration of underlying challenges. A 2021 co-authored paper explored why things turned rancid in South Africa.  My new paper –  How Inequality and Polarization Interact: America’s Challenges Through a South African Lens, also published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – takes a comparative perspective.  This post lays out five personal take-aways from the comparison. (Here’s a link to the paper’s executive summary).

Take-away #1:  Far more than is the case for contemporary South Africa,  America’s current wounds – increases in inequality since the 1980s, and their attendant social and political correlates –   have been self-inflicted.

Back in the 1970s, I had been  drawn to the USA by its openness, its commitment to freedom, equal dignity and equal justice for all – everything that the South Africa I left behind was not.  With its 1990s ‘rainbow miracle’ transformation from apartheid to constitutional democracy, South Africa became a new  beacon of possibility for people around the world who value democratic governance and inclusive societies. However,  the country’s subsequent reversals were not wholly unexpected. Three decades after the end of apartheid,  South Africa remains among the world’s most unequal countries, and its fraught racial history continues to fester – though the rawness and relative recency of the anti-apartheid struggle perhaps continues to offer some immunization against a further-accelerating downward spiral.   

For the United States, however, the converse may be true. In the decades subsequent to World War II, the combination of an equitably growing economy and a vibrant civil rights movement had fostered the hope of deepening economic and social inclusion. But  beginning in the 1980s, the benefits of growth became increasingly skewed, and  ‘culture wars’ became increasingly virulent. Complacency bred of long stability may have lulled America  into  political recklessness at the inequality-ethnicity intersection – a recklessness that risks plunging the country into disaster.

Take-away #2:  In both South Africa and the USA, the drivers of polarization have been multiple and mutually reinforcing; essentialist explanations that focus narrowly only on a single dimension –  economic, institutional,  cultural or racial  – and ignore the others are, at best, seriously incomplete.

The Carnegie paper distinguishes between polarization’s demand-side and its supply-side.  The demand-side comprises the way citizens engage politically – as shaped by power, by their perceptions of the fairness of economic outcomes, and by whether they frame identity  in inclusive or in us/them ways.  The supply-side comprises political entrepreneurs and the ideas they champion –  ideas about how the world works; ideas about identity. Mutually-reinforcing interactions between the demand- and supply-sides can become increasingly toxic – potentially even to the point of a doom loop that destroys constitutional democracy.

Take-away #3: Both South Africa and the USA need to be more pro-active in renewing economic inclusion  – but  making the shift from an inequality-fueling to an inclusion-supporting economy is less daunting than it might seem.

When considered through the lens of the interaction between inequality and ideas, pro-inclusion policies are less important as ends in themselves than for how they affect the willingness  of citizens to accept the rules of the game (including the distribution of economic outcomes) as broadly legitimate.  As South Africa’s rainbow miracle turnaround in the 1990s and early 2000s shows, a turn from anger to hope does not need a comprehensive package of pro-equity reforms. Rather, reforms that foster “good-enough inclusion”—some immediate gains that signal that things have changed, combined with credible signals that longer-term structural change is underway—can set in motion a virtuous spiral, which can be sustained as long as the momentum of  positive policy change continues to unfold over time.

Take-away #4: The influence of economic elites, though often obscured beneath the headlines,  has been central in both countries – for both good and ill. 

In South Africa, as Alan Hirsch and I explored in depth,  South Africa’s business establishment played a leading role in helping to midwife negotiations between the white minority government and the ANC.  In the USA, organized business was an important part of the elite consensus that fueled three decades of inclusive economic growth subsequent to World War II. In recent decades however, a segment of the elite  has actively financed  political entrepreneurs who have skillfully championed a combination of polarizing cultural discourse and distributionally regressive economic policies. This is a classic example of elite capture, a phenomenon familiar to scholars of comparative politics.  Paralleling what happened in 1980s South Africa, might America’s economic elites wake up to these risks and become more open to inclusive renewal?

Take-away #5: In settings that are open politically, turnaround will be achieved less by directly engaging  polarization’s most toxic champions, than by working around them.

Mass political mobilization was pivotal to South Africa’s shaking loose the shackles of apartheid – and new calls to the barricades might seem to be the obvious response to current political and governmental dysfunction.   However,  different times and different challenges call for different responses.  Currently, both the South African and U.S. governments are, at least aspirationally, committed not to accelerating polarization but to strengthening both inclusion and the institutional foundations of democracy. In such contexts, some compelling research suggests that what is called for is not fighting polarization with more polarization but lowering the temperature by fostering deliberative discourse, focused on positive, hope-evoking options. As happened once before in the USA,  the aim would be for a myriad of collaborative, problem-focused grassroots initiatives  to serve as potential building blocks for  a twenty-first-century social movement– a  movement that views cooperation in pursuit of win-win possibilities not as weakness but as key to the sustainability of thriving, open, and inclusive societies.

Virtuous circles and downward spirals  – the power of ideas & the limits of technocracy

November 15, 2021 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , Leave a comment

What will it take to shake loose the distemper of our times, and initiate a virtuous spiral of renewal? In a recent UNU-WIDER webinar, Alan Hirsch and I explored why a narrow focus on growth and good governance will not be enough to get South Africa (and, by analogy, other countries similarly trapped in a vicious cycle of disillusion and despair) back on the path of building a thriving, inclusive society.  Conventional policy discourses are well-suited to address  circumstances and  questions such as these: How to maintain rapid growth, while making it increasingly inclusive? Assuming  political and social stability,  and taking a medium-to-long-term horizon, what policy and expenditure decisions will best achieve the country’s development goals?  These are public policy challenges for a season of hope.

However,  South Africa  (and numerous other countries) no longer is in a season of hope.  Growth has ground to a halt; inequality festers; institutions decay; the threat of accelerating turmoil looms. The frontier challenge is not one of making mid-course adjustments, while sustaining momentum; it is a challenge of renewal, of setting in motion  a new virtuous spiral. Addressing this challenge needs a broader approach to crafting a way forward than is provided by the conventional tools – one that goes  beyond the technical details of policy,  and looks also at policy’s inter-relationship with perceptions, expectations and power.  The UNU-WIDER webinar and a background multi-author Carnegie paper “South Africa: When Strong Institutions and Massive Inequalities Collide” use this broader perspective to explore how South Africa might find its way back onto a path of inclusive growth.  This post lays out the underlying logic.

Perceptions and power – the ideas that people have about how the world works and their place in it – play a central role in driving the ebb and flow of economic and political momentum. As the figure below highlights,  interactions among four drivers are the fuel for virtuous (and vicious) spirals: 

  • Ideational driver #1: whether political and policy choices are perceived as zero-sum, or prioritize a search for win-win, co-operative options;
  • Ideational driver #2: perceptions across a broad swathe of a country’s citizenry as to the legitimacy and fairness of prevailing political and institutional arrangements;
  • Ideational driver #3: whether expectations of the future are optimistic or pessimistic.

And  (as influenced by each of the above)

  •  The strength of political leadership’s decision-making authority.

Consider ideational driver #1: All-too-often political discourse is framed in zero-sum, ‘my-way-or-the-highway’ terms. This is mistaken. As Bill Ferguson has spelled out in detail, an extraordinarily wide range of public challenges (from budgeting, to the governance of public agencies, to community service provision)   are better understood through the lens of co-operation and its challenges.  

What shapes the propensity to co-operate? As game theory teaches,  one key determinant of whether win-win or more narrowly zero-sum approaches predominate comprises the time horizon of protagonists. Longer time horizons, and thus repeated interactions, support co-operative outcomes. This time horizon is influenced directly by ideational drivers #2 and #3.

Ideational driver #2’s relevance is highlighted by Francis Fukuyama. Perceptions of legitimacy and fairness are foundational for a thriving society, he argues, because:

“Political power is the product not just of the resources and numbers of citizens that a society can command but also the degree to which the legitimacy of leaders and institutions is recognized. Legitimacy means that the people who make up the society recognize the fundamental justice of the system as a whole and are willing to abide by its rules….”

These perceptions are, of course, subject to change. As Albert Hirschman taught us, perceptions of fairness and legitimacy need periodic reinforcement, else hope can all too readily turn to anger – with, as per the figure, the ideational turn cascading throughout society.

Ideational driver #3 was a centerpiece of John Maynard Keynes’ analysis of the  influence of expectations of the future (and their volatility) on private investment and economic growth. As Keynes put it:

“[Private] investment depends on judgments about the future which do not rest on an adequate or secure foundation……..Our theory of the future is subject to sudden and violent changes. The practice of calmness and immobility, of certainty and security, suddenly breaks down. New fears and hopes will, without warning, take charge of human conduct…..”

Interactions between expectations and growth on the one hand, and ideational drivers #1 and #2 on the other,  are two-way.   In one direction: rapid growth (especially when it is inclusive) enhances opportunities, fuels hope and lengthens the time horizons of both emerging elites and non-elites. In the other: a more co-operative orientation among elites and enhanced perceptions of legitimacy and fairness on the part of a broad swathe of society each can bring greater optimism as to what the future may hold, thereby helping to fuel private investment.

The fourth driver – the decision-making authority of political leadership – both fuels and is fueled by the other three. As the figure suggests,  political leaders can support a virtuous circle by being decisive in their decision-making. The degree of decisiveness depends, in part, on how a leader chooses to lead. It also depends on the context within which that leader is embedded: Hopeful expectations; commitments among elites to co-operate, despite their differences; and a perception across society that the rules of the game are legitimate and fair – all of these add to the ability of political leaders to effect change.

How to get a virtuous spiral underway? This takes more than understanding the drivers and their interdependencies – the crucial challenge is  to identify entry points capable of providing sufficient momentum to kickstart the process. Momentum won’t be shifted by yet another round of pronouncements of policy intent. Their limitation isn’t only one of the unlikelihood of action, there is  a chicken-and-egg problem.  Even were the standard menu of growth, governance and inclusive reforms to be implemented, it would take some time for them to have a discernible effect on peoples’ lives – but until that effect is evident, the reforms will do little to move the needle on the ideational drivers. And the medium-run on which reform packages focus is unlikely to arrive unless action is sufficiently bold to shift expectations.

One way to rapidly reshape expectations is to address directly the challenge of fairness and legitimacy. How to do so in ways that fuel hope rather than fear, anger, recrimination and pushback by elites threatened by change? Key in the South African context is for reforms along the lines of what we call in the Carnegie paper ‘growth-compatible redress’.  Such redress would include initiatives that can make an immediate difference in the lives of the marginalized, complemented (or perhaps even superseded) by approaches to  redress that are sustainable and supportive of investment in capabilities over the longer-term, thereby helping to accelerate upward mobility – with the package underpinned by more conventional policy and governance reforms. (Appendix B of the Carnegie paper, pp. 73-76, provides more detail of what such reforms might comprise.)

Expectations might also be shifted in virtuous-circle-initiating ways through action on the leadership and governance fronts. While rebuilding institutional capacity takes time, credible signals that the game has changed can be sent quickly, and can rapidly alter incentives and behavior. Bold actions that leaders might take to signal such a shift could include:

  • A willingness to work in coalition with rivals – as a potent and highly visible way to strengthen mutual accountability.
  • A corresponding willingness to  break loose from the deadweight of so-called allies stuck in endless stale discourses whose practical consequence is a reproduction of the status quo and a defense of narrow parochial interests. And
  • A broader invitation for a new kind of active citizenship across a broad range of stakeholders – one that prioritizes co-operation around win-win possibilities.

(Click here for some additional discussion of these options.)

As an economist by training, I know that it can be discomfiting to turn attention away from the seemingly solid ground of technocratic discourse towards the more squishy terrain of perceptions and power. Yet doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result the next time is not a recipe for success. Can societies stuck in a deep hole  of disillusion, anger and despair find the political and policy imagination and moral courage to do things differently? 

 Here is a link to a recording of  the 2 November, 2021 UNU-WIDER webinar with Alan Hirsch, “When Good Governance is Not Enough: Can South Africa Meet the Challenge of Economic Inclusion”

Inclusion and growth can reinforce one another – South Africa’s false dilemma

August 18, 2021 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , Leave a comment

What economic policies are pro-growth? In recent weeks, a heated debate has been raging in South Africa over the pros and cons of a basic income grant. Underlying this debate are some radically different views as to the relationship between growth and inclusion. The debate revolves less around whether accelerated growth is a necessary part of any hopeful way forward for South Africa – on that there is broad agreement –  and more around questions of what it will take to kickstart growth  and, indeed, whether growth plus the existing package of social policies can adequately address the challenge of inclusion.

Having spent the better part of four decades wrestling with this conundrum, I couldn’t resist adding my two-cents-worth to the debate,  in a piece published earlier this month in The Conversation.  This blog piece reproduces part of that piece – and also locates the argument in a broader context.

That growth and inclusion are in tension with one another is commonplace – but the tension plays out to an extreme extent in South Africa. In an April 2021 discussion of  economic policy in South Africa, Harvard University’s Dani Rodrik reflected on:

“…the inadequacy of prevailing economic ideas to effectively address the structural problems that the South African economy faces – a mismatch between what South Africa produces, and what the country’s factor endowments are.  South Africa’s production structure largely is biased towards skill-intensive sectors, while the labor force largely is unskilled…..”

“[A crucial challenge] is to stimulate labor-intensive production…..This is structural transformation in reverse – low-skill activities tend to be non-tradeable, and generally have lower total factor productivity… It requires an industrial policy that promotes productive employment of a very different kind,  the kinds of things we don’t normally associate with industrial competitiveness:  relatively low-productivity activities; small and medium enterprises;  perhaps informal activities that are mostly service-oriented.  This takes us into such new terrain that it is not entirely clear how to proceed….. we don’t know a lot about how to do it…..”.

Rodrik usefully locates South Africa’s challenge within the context of the contemporary globalized economy. However, the dilemma confronting South Africa hardly is new. As Jonny Steinberg put it in a recent article in Business Day:

“South Africa’s labour markets have been unable to provide work for the able-bodied for two generations now. There is no reason to believe they will provide work for all…..”

Three decades ago, I wrote a piece (the first in the World Bank’s informal working paper series on the South Africa economy) that laid out the dilemma, and explored the possibility of addressing it via the promotion of labor-intensive, light manufacturing. (Actually, my pre-occupation with the dilemma dates back to a  SALDRU working paper I wrote in 1981). As I put it the 1992 piece:

“South African manufacturing increasingly has failed to generate jobs, with virtually no increase in employment between 1976 and 1988.  This failure cannot simply be attributed to a poor overall growth performance….. Indeed, between 1976 and 1981 manufacturing growth was associated almost entirely with an increase in capital input, with the capital-labor ratio increasing by almost 75% and virtually no growth in employment….”

The working paper went on to propose:

“….  a strategy for fostering labor-intensive, export-oriented growth….[focused on]…. the upmarket segments of labor-demanding activities….. Policy initiatives may be an important source of encouragement for South Africa’s private sector to invest in the acquisition of competitive capability in labor-rather than capital-intensive sectors of industry.”

Those ideas failed to gain traction at the time I championed them – and indeed, as Rodrik implies, confront an even less propitious global environment in the 2020s. Steinberg describes vividly the contemporary challenge:

“We could go on pretending that we live in the 1960s, and that our welfare system really is for the frail. Or we could say the days of full employment are just around the corner. But that takes us into dubious ethical terrain. Like Vladimir and Estragon, we can keep waiting for Godot while generations of South Africans live and die.”

What, then, is to be done? As I explored in the article in The Conversation (and reproduce in what follows),  in South Africa’s current circumstances pro-inclusion policies may be necessary to kickstart growth.  Albert Hirschman’s classic analysis of  Latin America’s ‘changing tolerance for inequality’ lays out the logic:

““It can happen that society’s tolerance for increasing disparities may initially be substantial [for example, South Africa in the first fifteen years of democracy] post-1994…..] Tolerance for inequality  is extended in the expectation that eventually the disparities will narrow again. … Nonrealization of the expectation that my turn will soon come will at some point result in my ‘becoming furious’ that is, in my turning into an enemy of the established order……

Hirschman distinguished between:

“Two principal tasks or functions  [that] must be accomplished in the course of the growth process. The first is the unbalancing function, the entrepreneurial function, the accumulation function…… Increasing social and income inequalities are an important part of this picture.”

Once hope has curdled into anger and despair, renewing growth will depend on :

the ‘equlibrating’ distributive, or reform function… to correct some of these imbalances,  to improve the welfare and position of groups that have been neglected or squeezed, and at redistribution of wealth and income in general.”

Viewed from this perspective, employment subsidies, basic income grants and other social interventions to address poverty and improve prospects for upward mobility  all become part of an (extended) pro-growth policy.  These don’t come free. They  will require both a move away from pro-austerity fiscal policies, and (in time) some tax increases on higher-income earners  – with the latter dependent for their legitimacy  on the likely effectiveness with which the public sector implements the social agenda. (For more on this last,  see a second recent article in The Conversation – also elaborated in THIS upcoming companion blog piece).  

South Africa’s changing tolerance for inequality

April 3, 2021 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

South Africa, along with many other countries, is struggling to renew hope in the wake of a difficult downward spiral. This struggle  is the focus of our new, co-authored  paper, to be launched on April 7th at a virtual event featuring Trudi Makhaya (economic adviser to President Ramaphosa) and Harvard’s Dani Rodrik. (Here’s a link to the event.)  

South Africa’s recent experience illustrates powerfully the fragility of hope. In the 1990s, the country was an iconic case of democratization. The subsequent collision between strong institutions and massive inequality makes its experience potentially of relevance not only for other middle-income countries, but also for many higher-income countries wrestling with a combination of a declining tolerance for high or rising inequality and institutions that seemed strong in the past but find their legitimacy increasingly being questioned.  

In a benign scenario, ideas, institutions, and growth all reinforce a hopeful, virtuous spiral. Ideas offer hope, encouraging cooperation, the pursuit of opportunities for win-win gains.  Institutions provide credibility that the bargains underpinning cooperation will be monitored and enforced. Together, ideas and institutions provide credible commitment, fueling economic growth. However, the benign scenario does not reckon with the ways in which persistent high inequality, accompanied by unresolved tensions between the distribution of economic and political power can both put pressure on institutions and catalyze a lurch from hope to anger. The consequence can be a cascading set of pressures, and an accelerating downward spiral. Turnaround calls for going beyond ‘with the grain’ approaches, and embracing a far-reaching vision and strategy of renewal.

The new paper, “South Africa: When Strong Institutions and Massive Inequalities Collide”,  co-authored with Alan Hirsch, Vinothan Naidoo and Musa Nxele has been published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in collaboration with the University of Cape Town’s Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance. It will be launched on April 7th at 10am (US East Coast time), at an open virtual event to be co-hosted by the CEIP’s Tom Carothers and Zainab Usman, and Faizel Ismail of the Mandela School, with Trudi Makhaya and Dani Rodrik as discussants.  A  modified version of the paper’s executive summary follows below

***

For South Africa’s first fifteen years of democracy, the combination of a shared willingness among stakeholders to believe in the power of cooperation and effective institutions that helped make promises of co-operation seem credible enabled the country to move beyond counterproductive conflict and pursue win-win outcomes. Growth began to accelerate, providing the fiscal means for addressing absolute poverty (as per Table 1), and offering some new opportunities for expanding the middle class. There were, however, some stark limitations in what was achieved. The poorest four deciles remain largely unemployed or underemployed, and mostly live in rural areas (designated during the apartheid era as “reserves” or “homelands”) and informal settlements around towns or cities.

Table 1. Some gains in reducing poverty, 1996-2011

19962011
Absolute poverty, with daily hunger28%11%
Access to:
 – electricity
58%
85%
 – piped water56%91%
Immunization coverage68%98%
Secondary school enrollment50%75%
Access to social grants (old age, child support, disability)2.4 million15 million

South Africa’s political settlement was built around four distinct sub-bargains:

  • A deal between the established (overwhelmingly white) economic elite and the country’s new political leadership. This included commitments to sustain the rule of law (including protection of private property), and to gradual ongoing economic transformation (including an elaborate program to support black economic empowerment, BEE).
  • A deal among the new political elites within the majority political party, the African National Congress (ANC).  The ANC is a broad tent encompassing many ideological proclivities; degrees of public-spiritedness; and regional, ethnic, and economic interests. Its implicit promise was that its formal structures, plus the structures of government, would channel this diversity toward a shared national purpose.
  • A promise of upward mobility. One aspect was a commitment to protect the interests of new (predominantly black) middle class insiders. Another aspect was a promise that a combination of education, job creation, and an end to racial discrimination would open up readily accessible opportunities for those on the cusp of middle-class status.  
  • A promise to reduce extreme poverty. A post-minority-rule redirection of public resources and services would benefit the whole population.

All of these sub-bargains except for the last one, which was pursued at least into the 2010s, were built on shaky foundations. Many BEE transactions straddled the boundary between rules-based and more personalized deal-making; who should participate in BEE initiatives became part of the ANC’s inter-elite conflict. Adapting to a transformed political order created new pressures for the public sector. Had South Africa been able to enjoy a combination of visionary leadership and East Asian rates of rapid economic growth for a sustained period, the expansion of opportunity throughout society might have trumped the limitations of the aspirational commitments. In reality, the country only briefly reached an annual rate of 5 percent from 2005 to 2008.

In 2009 Jacob Zuma became president, having won a bitterly contested struggle for ANC leadership. He inherited an economy that, though buffeted by the 2007/2008 financial crisis, seemingly was fundamentally sound. Indeed, in the initial years of Zuma’s presidency—which included the wildly successful, celebratory atmosphere of South Africa’s June 2010 hosting of the soccer World Cup—it seemed likely that the country would continue its positive trajectory and might even begin a new phase of renewal. 

However, a hopeful scenario was overtaken by a combination of events, deep-seated ongoing challenges caused by South Africa’s continuing extreme inequality, and Jacob Zuma’s approach to leadership.  The events comprised a change in presidential leadership and South Africa’s undisciplined and uncoordinated response to the global financial crisis, which short-circuited a virtuous circle of an economy and society on the mend. Subsequent to the global crisis, South Africa  failed to build momentum and (contrary to other MICs) stagnated, signaling that the global shock is not sufficient to account for the subsequent reversal.

The deep-seated ongoing challenge was the country’s persistent inequality. As Table 2 details, as of the mid-2010s less than a quarter of the total population, including essentially all white South Africans, enjoyed a standard of living that was middle class or better. More than all other middle-income countries, South Africans are either affluent or poor, with limited opportunities to move up the economic ladder.  There was ample reason for the majority of South Africans to feel that, notwithstanding the promises of mutual benefit, the deck remained stacked against them. This increased the vulnerability of South Africa’s political settlement.

Table 2. South Africa’s 2014 Population Distribution, by Ethnicity and Class

 TotalAfricanOther blackWhite
Chronic poor49.5%46.9%2.5%0%
Transient poor121020.1
Vulnerable151320
Middle class209.546.5
Elite3.50.60.52.4
% population100%80%11%9%
Source: Schotte, Zizzamia and Leibbrandt (SALDRU, 2017)

Over the course of his nine years in office, Jacob Zuma governed in an increasingly personalized way, with increasing recourse to polarizing rhetoric. When Zuma took office, many who backed him hoped that he would bring an inclusive, coalition-building, popular touch to leadership—a contrast to Mbeki’s remote, technocratic, and somewhat imperious style. In the event, Zuma proved to be a cunning, ruthless, and charismatic tactician.

The paper describes in detail three successive turns that set in motion what looked to be  an accelerating downward spiral of decline:

  • Rising pressure on institutions, sparked by the continuing ambiguities and unresolved tensions in the bargains between economic and political elites, and among the various influential sub-groups within the ANC itself.
  • A rising tide of disillusion when per capita income growth entered and remained in negative territory. Zero-sum contestation over public positions and resources at the national, provincial and local levels became acute.  Those on the cusp of the formal economy found themselves unable to consolidate middle-class status;  unemployment steadily increased.
  • An ideational turn toward anger, catalyzed by both genuine grievance and political opportunism. In the face of thwarted opportunity, an increasing number of South Africa’s population came to see the privilege enjoyed by the mostly white economic elite—and the tide of apparent corruption that seemed to be the only way that new elites could share in that privilege—as a provocation. In turn, opportunistic ethno-populist political entrepreneurs sought to use the disillusion to strengthen their position within inter-elite political struggles.

All the elements seemed to be in place for a fourth turn – a  rapidly accelerating cumulative slide, with weakened economic performance, institutional decay, anger and ethno-populism feeding on one another. The December 2017 election of Cyril Ramaphosa as leader of the ANC and his subsequent accession to the country’s presidency signaled a pause to this slide. However, three years later, President Ramaphosa has not been able to move decisively beyond a promise to “stop the rot” and offer a renewed positive vision. Hard hit also by the Covid-19 pandemic, the country is not out of the woods.

What has been missing so far has been a vision capable of renewing hope across South African society. The path of least resistance for established elites would be to return to “the basics,” reembracing the trajectory of the Mandela and Mbeki presidencies. However, for reasons detailed in the paper, such a muddling-through scenario is unlikely to have the broad-based political support needed for it to be sustainable over the medium term.

The paper suggests  a credible promise of upward mobility for a wide spectrum of society as the centerpiece of a next-generation inclusive development strategy for South Africa.  In the first fifteen or so years of democracy, the elimination of racial barriers and the country’s accelerating growth were sufficient to usher in a season of hope. However, once the low-hanging fruit of the opportunity opened up by the end of apartheid’s racial privileges was gone, the limited economic prospects of those outside the elite became evident. A credible promise of upward mobility would offer a vision of hope and possibility for better lives across society as a whole, renewing perceptions as to the legitimacy of the social and economic order. (The paper details some aspects of a strategy along these lines.)

South Africa’s experience suggests four potentially useful propositions for the many countries struggling to maintain a positive social, political, and economic trajectory in the face of a declining tolerance for high or rising inequality.

  1. The trajectory of change is a knife-edge. There is the potential to set in motion virtuous circles of positive interactions among ideas, institutions, and economic growth. At the same time, there is a substantial risk that unaddressed distributional imbalances can set in motion a cumulative downward spiral of decline.
  • Ideas matter—a hopeful vision of change, when combined with a “good enough” responsiveness to distributional concerns, can be sufficient to launch a positive trajectory.
  • Both ideas and institutions can be shields against adversity—but only up to a point. Hopeful ideas can evoke positive agency and help mobilize for collective action. Institutions can function as shock absorbers. However, both need reinforcement, including ongoing attention to festering imbalances.
  • Initiating a new cycle of renewal requires a set of ideas and actions which address in a “good enough” way the imbalances which had resulted in derailment.

Leadership needs to risk of mobilizing new coalitions capable of overcoming the vested interests that stymie inclusive change. Can South Africa’s leadership—and can leadership in other countries, where a similar sense of disillusion has taken hold—summon the necessary boldness to rise to this challenge?

*****

For the authors’ presentation, and Trudi Makhaya and Dani Rodrik’s perspectives on the paper, join the co-sponsored Carnegie and Mandela School event, on April 7th or view the session (via this link) at some later time