The Labour Studies Seminar Series, in partnership with Zed Books, has launched "Development planning in South Africa: Provincial policy and state power in the Eastern Cape," by Dr John Reynolds.
Speaker: Dr John Reynolds
Date: Wednesday, 25th July 2018
Time: 4:15pm
Venue: Eden Grove Seminar Room 2
The series is run by the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) and the Departments of Sociology, History, and Economics & Economic History.
THE BOOK: Celebrated as a beacon of democracy and reconciliation, many people in South Africa continue to live in severe poverty. Backed by the United Nations Development Programme, the Eastern Cape’s provincial government consequently launched an historically ambitious effort – the Provincial Growth and Development Plan 2004-2014 – aimed at tackling the region’s poverty, unemployment and inequality over a ten-year period in a radical policy overhaul. Drawing on the author’s first-hand engagement with the planning process, this book is an empirically rich study which utilises a strategic-relational approach to explore the ways in which this unprecedented challenge was negotiated and eventually undermined by the South African state. The first work of its kind, the book provides an indispensable micro-level study with profound implications for how state power is understood to be organised and expressed in state policy.
THE AUTHOR: Dr John Reynolds is the founding head of the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) at Rhodes University. His extensive experience in the Eastern Cape has included work for the United Nations Development Programme, the Eastern Cape Provincial Government, and on development programmes financed by the European Union. He is also the lead editor of a forthcoming book entitled "Race, class and the post-apartheid democratic state".