1,720,973 research outputs found
Negotiating temporalities of accountability in communities in conflict in Africa
No full textThis chapter focuses on how war survivors and their offspring negotiate temporalities of accountability in communities in conflict in Mozambique. Ethnographic records from numerous communities in Africa and around the world show how spirits are regarded as disembodied figures but also as persons with volition of their own and capable of influencing the lives of the living. Gorongosa is a rural district featuring political, legal and religious pluralism. Community and state institutions and actors diversely shape everyday life. The developments of formal legal mechanisms of accountability for serious violations perpetrated in contexts of mass political violence have boosted the practice of witnessing in the past decades. Regrettably the beginning of new military confrontations between the Frelimo government's army and Renamo did not allow to conduct follow-ups to further determine the struggles for accountability that might have arisen in the case of Tungadza offspring
South African NGOs and the Public Sphere: Between Popular Movements and Partnerships for Development
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South African NGOs and the Public Sphere: Between Popular Movements and Partnerships for Development
No full textCorporate social responsibility and development in South Africa: socio-economic contexts and contemporary issues.
Full text linkThis chapter will discuss historical contexts and contemporary issues in Corporate Social Responsibility in South Africa. Here, the private sector has been forced to adopt socially responsible policies that are more advanced than those in many of the richer economies; spending in Corporate Social Investment (CSI) far exceeds that of wealthier countries. This is due to the adoption of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) legislation, the set of affirmative action policies adopted by the post-apartheid government to give historically disadvantaged groups economic opportunity. Relationships between business and society in South Africa are thus significantly shaped by the country's divided history of colonialism and apartheid, as well as by its present developmental challenges. Indeed, given that big business was one of the main beneficiaries of the Apartheid regime, it was ironically apartheid and the social unrest that it brought about that first stimulated corporate social responsibility practices in the country. Today, any South African company's performance is rated on a number of BEE scorecards, with companies collecting points for Corporate Social Responsibility. Although corporate involvement in development is usually portrayed as diametrically opposed to the state's involvement, the South Africa government has a very active role in defining and motivating CSR. At the same time, CSR funding is becoming ever more vital for the non-profit sector, with NGOs receiving an average of 20 % of their income from corporations. Moreover, CSI spending in 2012 by the top 200 South African companies alone amounted to a total of R7 billion, of which over a third was channelled through non-profit organisations. These complex intersectoral relationships under the banner of CSR have led to a maturing and professionalisation of companies' CSR strategies and practices in recent years, which this chapter will outline with reference to recent scholarship and to original research by the author
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Walking the tightrope: the funding of South African NGOs and the governance of community development.
Full text linkThis chapter examines the role of intermediary NGOs in community development in Post-Apartheid South Africa, specifically exploring how these organisations have been shaped by changing funding modalities. The South African non-profit sector is very large and diverse, encompassing a great variety of organisations that differ in size, scope, activities, political orientation and location. Habib's (2003) typology remains useful in making sense of Post-Apartheid civil society, which he argues is made up of three blocs: 'formal' NGOs, 'survivalist' community-based organisations (CBOs) and social movements. In this chapter, community development is understood as essentially contested, enabling empowering and less empowering practices and policies to emerge from, and for, communities. Importantly, the chapter resists a vertical understanding of power in which communities or civil society 'at the bottom' are contrasted with the state 'at the top'. Rather, communities are elements in the transnational and multi-scalar governance of development; community development is also a discourse that corporations, NGOs and the state all employ to gain legitimacy. The following section summarises the socio-historical developments that have enabled NGOs to become such significant actors in community development. The chapter will then examine partnerships as a specific neoliberal mode of funding that has shaped the role of NGOs in community development. It is argued that partnerships provide a context within which shared values, practices and techniques appropriate to particular, often neoliberal, forms of community development, can be developed in NGOs. Partnerships link intermediary NGOs with corporations, the state and communities and are shown to enable claims of legitimacy, build consensus building through homogenisation, and necessitate particular auditing techniques and capabilities
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