Suchergebnisse

An analysis of state-labour relations in Malawi over a period of four decades reveals, like in other countries in Southern Africa, tendencies towards continuities and discontinuities in labour controls. While Malawi's political system has undergone a major transformation to democracy in the 1990s after three decades of dictatorship which was hostile to trade unions through administrative, political and legal apparatuses, the democratic state has been marked by 'diplomatic' hostility through divide-and-rule and hide-and-seek tactics. Using different means the state has succeeded in curtailing freedom of association in varying degrees during the one-party and multiparty periods. Thus, while labour control as an objective of the state has not changed, the means have changed dramatically. The desire to achieve political stability and economic development, against a changed international political order demanding human rights and good governance in the 1990s, explains the current 'diplomatic' hostility in Malawi's industrial relations. The role of the international donor community in exporting democratic structures and values to societies that do not have an in-built culture of democracy similar to western societies is viewed as a further explanation for the creation of significant degrees of discrepancies between labour policy and practice in Malawi. (Afr Dev/GIGA)

In his 18-page paper entitled 'The Challenges of Governance, Public Sector Reform and Public Administration in Africa: Some Research Issues', Guy Mhone made central to public sector reforms the need to promote procedural rationality in the operation of the public sector and instrumental rationality in terms of economic, social and political outcomes. The present paper contributes to the debate on procedural rationality by focusing attention on performance manage- ment systems (PMS), which has emerged with the advent of New Public Man- agement (NPM). It starts by providing the context of the changing role of the state since the 1980s as a background to public sector reforms in Africa. The paper further clarifies NPM and PMS as applied to the public sector before going on to discuss the experience of Botswana in public sector reforms, with particular emphasis on its performance management system. How PMS emerged, its implementation, its monitoring and evaluation are examined in this paper, along with an analysis of challenges and lessons learnt.

An analysis of state-labour relations in Malawi over a period of four decades reveals, like in other countries in Southern Africa, tendencies towards continui ties and discontinuities in labour controls. While Malawi's political system has undergone a major transformation to democracy in the 1990s after three dec ades of dictatorship which was hostile to trade unions through administrative, political and legal apparatuses, the democratic state has been marked by 'diplo matic' hostility through divide-and-rule and hide-and-seek tactics. Using differ ent means the state has succeeded in curtailing freedom of association in varying degrees during the one-party and multiparty periods. Thus, while labour control as an objective of the state has not changed, the means have changed dramatically. The desire to achieve political stability and economic develop ment, against a changed international political order demanding human rights and good governance in the 1990s, explains the current 'diplomatic' hostility in Malawi's industrial relations. The role of the international donor community in exporting democratic structures and values to societies that do not have an in built culture of democracy similar to western societies is viewed as a further explanation for the creation of significant degrees of discrepancies between la bour policy and practice in Malawi.