SARChi Chair
SUSTAINABLE LOCAL(RURAL) LIVELIHOODS

Pulane Mahase doctoral research focuses on examining Governance Networks amid co-optation. Her study concedes that networks are not necessarily a break of dawn in Public Administration, they have only morphed to encompass other sectors in their bid to effectively deliver public policies. The field of Public Administration is manifestly on an unremitting trajectory that seeks to institutionalize good governance and effective service delivery. In this drive it has bowed to the call of rolling back the state as propounded by the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), to Osborne’s motivation to reinvent the government, to New Public Management (NPM), and many other trends which also incorporate networking.

The modern government implements public policies through networks which comprise state and non-state since it was confronted with the reality that it is impossible to fully function in the absence of concerted efforts to combine resources due to the extant and prevalent resource dependency between all policy actors. Inescapably, the government can no longer embark on public policies implementation unilaterally, hence the prevalence of these networks that seek to solve policy problems. Nevertheless, like any other collaborative effort and by virtue of comprising actors from varying sectors which harbour dissimilar goals, and varying resource concentration, governance networks do not fall short of “bottlenecks” and challenges in their governance pursuit. A salient one being that, as a property, they are characterized by feeble citizen representativeness and an accountability that is confined to network actors thereby breeding recentralization of decision-making, and unavoidably, degeneration in a democratic society.

 Against this background Pulane’s study seeks to examine the governance network of Lesotho’s water supply amid the country’s incessant struggles to effectively and efficiently supply Basotho in the Lowlands area of the country with potable water while ensuring coordination among all stakeholders. It will ascertain whether inclusion and/or exclusion of affected and relevant stakeholders in the network may affect its work and consequently policy outputs; how making governance networks accountable to the public may improve their work and their democratic orientation; and also how co-optation of non-state actors into the bureaucracy affects policy outputs.