Difficult but Not Impossible: The ANC's Decentralization Strategy in South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract As the neo‐liberal project has spread across the globe, decentralization has been a key component of it. In South Africa, the neo‐liberal macro‐economic strategy of the African National Congress (ANC) involves support for fiscal and administrative decentralization partly as a way to bring the private sector into basic service delivery and supposedly to make local government more efficient and effective. However, the ANC also sees decentralization as a way to empower the historically disadvantaged black population. Community‐based public–private partnerships have been one of the chief initiatives in this regard. In the metropolitan municipality of Port Elizabeth, small black contracting companies have been hired and trained to dispose of waste, construct roads and build houses. While not free of tensions and problems, this approach to decentralization has fostered a form of democratic development. This article uses examples from the Port Elizabeth experience to test and reflect upon a number of issues which are raised in the literature on decentralization.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".