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Many of the chapters in this volume – Attwell, Fig, Skinner – highlight the continued existence and importance of well-resourced and organised NGOs and other civil society formations in holding the state and private institutions accountable to citizens and in helping to shape and implement policy in certain areas. In cases like that of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), described in the chapter by Kate Skinner, the establishment of an independent campaign, Save Our SABC (SOS), worked to ensure the continued functioning of the public broadcaster in the interests of the general public during a period of tremendous crisis and contestation.

South Africa also boasts one of the highest rates of protest in the world, with the Incident Registration Information Service (Iris) recording a total of 10 437 protests for the period 2005–2006; 9 166 for the period 2006–2007; and 7 003 for 2007–2008. Between 2003 and 2008, 34 610 protests were recorded (Alexander, 2010: 26). With a strong and mobilised trade union movement, a well-resourced and organised civil society, and a number of social and community movements, post-apartheid South Africa has seen a number of constituencies mobilise to change their situations or to fight for particular processes of transformation to unfold in particular ways. This has also meant that the ANC government has not always been able to push ahead with the implementation of policies that are seen to have negative effects on the lives of people – and that mobilisation in support of demands that are not always attainable through existing frameworks for engagement, is still possible. This would suggest that the possibilities for ‘Zanufication’ put forward by James Hamill and John Hoffmann in this volume are rather slim in South Africa. It would also suggest that possibilities exist for the imagination of doing politics differently – that is, in more participatory ways that are not relegated to the realm of the rules, regulations, and constraints of the state.

Imraan Buccus and Janine Hicks present a review of participatory alternatives to democracy that attempts to think beyond the dominance of representative forms of politics in the post-apartheid South African electoral democracy. While they highlight the value of participatory and deliberative models of democracy, other experiences shared in this volume (such as that of cooperatives, the CWP in Bokfontein, and struggles around the bio-fuels debate) also potentially offer ways of thinking about the structuring of decision making, leadership, organisational management, and so on that could shape alternative imaginings of democracy – and indeed of politics.

The chapters by Raji Matshedisho, and by Leslie Bank and Clifford Mabhena offer experiences of attempts at law enforcement and engagements around the law that suggest that issues of governance, the law and democracy are not as simple as contemporary debates make them out to be. In Matshedisho’s presentation of his experiences as a participant observer amongst student police officers in a Johannesburg township, the law is given meaning, affect and effect in the everyday interactions between individual police officers and members of the community, with the street-level resolution of conflicts and disputes occurring according to a moral economy and culture of the police and of the community that does not always conform with the law.

Through these experiences, one is given a very clear sense of just how complex are the implementation of policies and the enforcement of laws, especially when one begins to consider particular subjective experiences (past and present) of authority and the law (and life generally) shared by individuals belonging to different groups in post-apartheid society. Matshedisho argues that ‘transforming the relationship between the police and communities in South African townships should not just be left to the formal application of democratic law’. Instead, ‘we need to understand the tensions and informalities in everyday policing’ and ‘the hidden transcripts’ that are at play if we are to see any positive changes in relations between police and communities. At a broader level, Matshedisho’s chapter raises important questions about the ways in which the police and its function in society are viewed by citizens, and about the role of the police in postapartheid society.

Bank and Mabhena show how the successful opposition to the Communal Land Rights Act (CLRA) by civil society lobby groups and academics on behalf of certain groups of rural communities (in particular from Mpumalanga and North West province) has worked against the interests of similar communities in the Eastern Cape. Highlighting the continued control exercised by traditional authorities over land allocation and administration of communal areas in the Eastern Cape, they argue, based on findings from interviews in thirty-five traditional authorities areas, that the CLRA, it was generally felt by people, would be ‘a positive development’ because it would: ‘(1) reduce the power that chiefs, headmen and their advisers have over land allocation, (2) allow families and households to confirm household or family title to land in communal areas, (3) create a framework for better cooperation and interaction between municipalities and traditional authorities, and (4) force government to start to develop meaningful land use and development plans for rural areas’. While people felt that the CLRA was by no means without flaws, it was an important and necessary first step towards establishing clear practices and principles with regard to the powers of traditional authorities over land allocation. With the CLRA gone, Bank and Mabhena argue, there is no legal framework to govern the decisions, actions, and powers of traditional authorities in the allocation of land.

As many of the chapters in this volume argue, when laws and policies are in place to transform institutions and processes, the state repeatedly demonstrates a lack of capacity for implementing them successfully. Haroon Saloojee offers the experience of the crisis in child care in public hospitals as a way of understanding some of the problems being confronted (and sometimes perpetuated from past practices, or created anew) in the public sector. He describes the convergence of the difficulties of resource constraints (as a result of national choices made with regard to the delivery of health care), poor integration between different levels of policy making and sectors involved in delivery, lack of staff, incompetent and/or inappropriately trained managers, and the lack of proper norms and standards for monitoring systems, in the crisis in child care that has come to light in South Africa’s public hospitals.

While, as Eddie Webster’s chapter points out, the NGP might, then, look like a good plan for the progressive realisation of decent work, the capacity of the state to deliver the processes, institutions, human resources and finances necessary for the plan to work, is lacking and has to be addressed first.

What many of the chapters in this volume point to is a much more complex terrain comprising relations between community, state and civil society than that captured in newspaper reports, one in which the plans of government constantly come up against the critiques and demands of civil society and community organisations, movements and individuals, the differences of context with regard to culture, tradition and custom demand, and the difficulties of the process of governing itself.