Browsing by Author "Froestad, Jan"

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    City of Cape Town Solar Water Heater By-law: Barriers to Implementation
    (Earthscan, London, 2012) Froestad, Jan; Shearing, Clifford; Herbstein, Tom; Grimwood, Sakina
    The study of implementation has had tremendous importance for the study of policy. It opened up the black box of ‘after-a-formal-decision’ politics and demonstrated, among other things, that the political process continues all the way through to the final output of the policy process (Bardach 1977). It addressed the complexity of achieving policy goals, offered new insights into the importance of lower-level actors in policy, and attended to the effects that clients and extra-government groups had on the policy result (Schofield 2001). It became one of the most important sources for the development of new perspectives that tried to capture how policy processes cross the public-private divide, as evidenced by the new focus on governance (Rhodes 1997) or networks (Marin and Mayntz 1991). Implementation research has been particularly valuable in two somewhat contradictory ways.
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    Energy transitions: the case of South African electric security
    (2018) Van Der Merwe, Melani; Shearing, Clifford D; Froestad, Jan
    Modern civilizations have evolved to be highly dependent on electrical energy. The exponentially growing renewables market has signaled transitions in electricity sectors that have traditionally been dominated by fossil fuel electricity. Various theoretical debates have recently emerged surrounding the processes of socio-technical transition, focusing on the pathways of transition, the levers for radical change and path-dependencies within these systems. The Multi-Level Perspective on Socio-technical Transitions is one such theory. This perspective views socio-technical change as a factor of interdependent shifts between three analytical levels observed within the system: the socio-technical regime, the socio-technical niche and the landscape. In accordance with this theory, radical change is generally observed as originating at niche level. Irregularities within the dominant regime and landscape pressures allow for niche innovations to break through into the dominant regime in processes of socio-technical transition. Toward understanding actor influences on energy transitions, considerable attention has been paid to actor's impact on governance processes through: patterns of consumption, the shaping of legislation and technical innovations, by socio-technical transitions theories. However less attention has been paid to the ways in which actors in renewable electricity markets are: forming networks toward the establishment of new regimes and governing processes at niche level, and consequently how actor governance has impacted the established perceptions and available pathways for realizing electric security. This thesis, builds on the Multi-Level Perspective, through an exploration of how actors govern socio-technical systems at niche level, paying careful attention to the modalities of power giving and power taking that allow for the development of networks of people and things toward the stabilization of novel socio-technical practices, innovations and developmental trajectories. It does this through a networked analysis of how different actors with different interests cooperate to open up innovative social and technological pathways.
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    Meditative Reflections on Nils Christie’s "Words on Words" - through an African lens
    (Taylor & Francis, 2013) Froestad, Jan; Shearing, Clifford
    Like so much else that comes from the pen of Nils Christie, his "Words on Words" that have inspired this special issue, and with which it begins, have, as they so often do, inspired us to engage in a meditative reflection on his words and their implications for our thinking and practice. We have sought, through these reflections on the wisdom of Christie’s words, to better understand the security governance practices we have been studying, developing and, sometimes, promoting.
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    The politics of leadership organizing in informal settlements: ambiguities of speaking publicly and mediating conflicting institutional logics
    (2014) Drivdal, Laura Elisabet; Shearing, Clifford D., 1942-; Froestad, Jan
    This thesis examines the politics of leadership organizing in three informal settlements in Cape Town. Building on the facts that internal informal settlement politics is tense and leadership organizing fragmented and fluid, I focus on the politics of leadership organizing as internal negotiations of how leadership should be organized and what institutional logics should be adapted. The main argument is that the politics of leadership organizing consist of balancing bureaucratic and democratic logics, which are not an act of mimicking or decoupling, but have evolved through historical and context specific discursive practises. The tensions and political negotiations around how to balance these essentially conflicting logics concern to what degree the committees and leaders should engage in bureaucratic and administrative efforts securing order and development, or focus on internal mediation and democratic procedures to keep conflicts at bay. By analysing leadership, organizing and politics at the informal settlement scale, the thesis is not only covering an empirical gap but also making a contribution to a niche of urban studies grappling with neighbourhood politics in South Africa. In order to contribute to these attempts and explore the politics of organizing, I suggest moving beyond instrumental and outcome descriptions of 'politics of the belly', leaders as heroes or villains, and organizations as rational. Instead seeing politics as a means-to-an-end and as arena specific, inspired by a mixture of new-institutionalism and Arendt's philosophy, I frame politics as a human process of defining common concerns and negotiations over how these should be dealt with through specific ways of organizing. Interlinked with this, a social constructive process approach to organizations and leadership enables an analysis of the grounded symbolical sides of organizing practices and models. Further, within the framework of institutional pluralism, leadership politics entails the acts of balancing conflicting institutional logics by adapting and mediating different organizational models and practices. Applied to analyse empirical insight from following leadership processes in three informal settlements over three years, the thesis provides insight into how the specific urban conditions of South African informal settlements impact on the politics of forming organizations and leadership. Despite differences between the settlements, leadership practises and ideals displayed a similar focus on bureaucratic and democratic practises and models, indicating that these practises are institutionalised in relation to specific historic and pragmatic needs of urban informal settlements. Also, context specific behavioural norms restrict the conditions for speaking publicly and increase the need to adhere to bureaucratic and democratic logics. However, these logics are essentially conflicting. Hence, as the leadership committees are hybrid organizations in a setting of institutional plurality, leadership politics consist of balancing and adapting these different logics when tensions emerges both between leaders and between residents and leaders.