The August issue of Heinrich Böll Stiftung’s Perspectives includes contributions from Dr Tracy Ledger and Crispian Olver.
In the opening article, Tracy Ledger provocatively asks whether a different version of state capture could be a good idea in South Africa. She argues that the allocation of public resources is never a neutral affair and motivates for a bias towards social justice and economic equity. Here, the state-capture framework draws attention to the nature of the democratic state, its powers and its relationship with private interests and dominant groups, as well as to the need to understand and utilise these to serve the people, particularly those who are most marginalised.[…]
Crispian Olver describes the web of corruption that captured the city of Port Elizabeth, demonstrating that state capture in South Africa is a much more decentralised phenomenon than most believe. Systemic features, including unregulated party political funding, allow patterns of capture to emerge at varied locations and levels of state power.
