ABSTRACT

Policy processes in contemporary South Africa draw attention to a phenomenon that is both common in policymaking and under-theorised in the anthropology of policy: the tendency for policy to be made both through legislative and administrative fora, and through litigation and the threat of litigation, often concurrently. Given South Africa’s robust legal frameworks mandating public participation in policymaking, there is an unexpectedly productive dialectical relationship between administrative and legal processes, where failures of participation create openings for court challenges that may limit the scope for top-down policymaking. These legal actions likewise reflect responses to the country’s apartheid history: they rely upon legal oppositional strategies developed to challenge the apartheid state, often by the same actors and organisations, and they rely upon legal institutions that have been deliberately structured to prevent past injustices from being repeated.

This paper illustrates these points with two cases from South Africa: first, a local policy implementation process concerned with the issuing of permits for subsistence fishing in the Dwesa-Cwebe Marine Protected Area (MPA) in the Eastern Cape and, second, a national process concerned with the re-opening of claims under South Africa's land restitution programme.

摘要

当代南非的政策过程引起了人们对政策制定中普遍存在且政策人类学理论不足的现象的关注：通过立法和行政论坛以及通过诉讼和诉讼威胁制定政策的趋势，经常同时发生。鉴于南非强大的法律框架要求公众参与决策，行政和法律程序之间存在出乎意料的富有成效的辩证关系，参与的失败为法院挑战创造了机会，这可能会限制自上而下的决策范围。这些法律行动同样反映了对该国种族隔离历史的回应：它们依赖于合法的反对策略为挑战种族隔离国家而发展起来的，通常由相同的行为者和组织进行，并且它们依赖于精心构建的法律机构，以防止过去的不公正现象重演。

本文通过南非的两个案例说明了这些要点：首先，与在东开普省 Dwesa-Cwebe 海洋保护区 (MPA) 发放生存捕鱼许可证有关的地方政策实施过程，以及第二个国家过程关注根据南非的土地归还计划重新提出索赔。