INTRODUCTION AND CONCEPTUAL POSITIONING

This chapter assesses complex forms of public policymaking in South Africa. It utilises three case studies that show how opposition formations took charge of controversial policy issues and prevented government from making or implementing its preferred policies, fast-forwarding policy implementation or, alternately, pushing government into making policy that it had not envisaged. The study covers three specific policy cases in the period 2011 to 2018: opposition to legislation that impacts freedom of speech; subverting the implementation of e-tolling; and the fast-forwarding of free access to post-secondary education that was linked to the #FeesMustFall protest against financial and cultural exclusion in South African universities.

The analysis uses the phrase ‘opposition network policymaking’ to denote the cumulative actions through which civil society – along with select opposition parties and some governing party structures and state institutions – used primarily legal process and civil society mobilisation to subdue, delay or defeat undesired policy actions of government and the African National Congress (ANC) as the predominant governing party; or, in some cases, to elevate policy action in ways government had not planned. To the extent that the pressures of these networks imposed new, de facto but enduring public policy regimes in specific policy areas, the analysis uses the notion of adversarial network governance. The notion involves collaboration in the sense of the begrudging confluence of pro- and anti-forces, pushing original ‘policy decisions’ to become non-decisions (which are recognised as de facto policy decisions). Alternatively, it involved cooperation by pushing government into policy decisions that are stronger than the original government intentions had been. These forms of collaboration prevail in particular policy areas, rather than across government.

‘Network governance’ is conceptualised in the conventional (not adversarial) sense as describing a particular mode of organisation that contrasts with hierarchies (see Klijn and Skelcher 2007: 589). It comprises a patterned relationship between state and society which links public and private or citizen sector agencies into a set of relationships. The term ‘networks’ denotes a relatively stable, tightly knit group of relationships, with greater insulation from other institutions that may be known as policy communities (Hajer and Wagenaar 2003).