Contributing to the African Renaissance vision: The role of South African higher education institutions

President Mbeki is emphasising the vision of an African Renaissance in many of his public addresses. Many multifaceted inputs are required to realise this vision, and human resources development is one of the cornerstones of this ideal. South African higher education institutions could play a major role in this quest by sharing their expertise to upgrade the scientific, economic and educational competencies of all people in Africa. Data analysis shows considerable potential for attracting students from Africa, especially from the Southern African Development Community, to study at South African institutions. Current initiatives for facilitating intellectual mobility across the country's borders lack vision, however. Academic exchange programmes in other countries could serve as models to kick-start the contributions of higher education institutions in South Africa in realising Mr Mbeki's vision for an African Renaissance.     

Strategic instruments: legal structure and political games in administrative law

This article presents models of strategic behavior by agenciesand courts where the ability to manipulate the instruments ofdecision making, rather than merely selecting policy choices,allows actors to insulate their policy choices from higher levelreview. The theory is based on the notion that decision instruments(for example, rulemaking and adjudication for agencies, statutoryinterpretation and reasoning process review for courts) posedifferential costs and payoffs for both the initiating and reviewingactors, each of whom have resource constraints. Because theinitiating actor has the choice among instruments to make adecision (and to which a higher level reviewing actor is tied),the initiating actor can manipulate decision costs in a strategicfashion (choosing high-cost instruments to discourage higherlevel review, in particular). This article adds new insightinto how judges and agencies engage in strategic decision making.     

GROWING AN ENVIRONMENTAL STRATEGY

Environmental management is becoming increasingly accepted as a key feature of business strategy. However, academic and practitioner publications on the subject develop few guides as to which processes to follow to integrate environmental concerns and strategy. A three-step strategic management process is proposed which incorporates concern for the natural environment throughout a firm's operations. This can result in the growth and nurturing of an organizational environmental strategy.     

An informational perspective on administrative procedures

A number of scholars have identified the important role administrativeprocedures have in 'structuring' the interest group environmentof government agencies: determining who can participate andin what manner. Using a formal model, we analyze the incentivesand outcomes that different procedural - and therefore interestgroup - environments generate. The model yields a number ofimportant conclusions. First, because elected officials areconcerned not only about distributional rents, but also informationalones, the use of procedures in some cases will result in worseoutcomes for political principals on the policy dimension. Officialswill be willing to bear the losses in exchange for informationalgains. Second, under certain conditions, a politician is betteroff with a biased group monitoring the agency rather than aneutral one, since biased groups will subsidize a portion ofthe monitoring cost. Third, having multiple interest groups,including one in opposition to the politician, makes the politicalprincipal strictly better off than any other constellation ofmonitors, since competing interest groups will provide the greatestinformation at the lowest cost to the elected official.