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Firoz Khan

Stellenbosch University, School of Public Leadership, Faculty Member

University of Delhi, Department of Political Science, Researcher

University of Stellenbosch, School of Public Leadership, Faculty Member

Observer Research Foundation, Public Policy, Research Fellow

University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, School of Economics and Business Science, Senior Research Fellow (2012 - 2014)

Getulio Vargas Foundation (Fundação Getulio Vargas), Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil, Post-Doc

Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, School of Public Policy, Visiting Professor

O.P. JINDAL UNIVERSITY, Jindal School of Government and Public Policy, Honorary Visiting Professor (July 2019)

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Academic expertise, research interests and publications span public policy, critical development studies, and development sociology, I have authored/contributed to numerous post-apartheid White Papers and strategy papers (local government, local economic development, municipal-community partnerships, public service education and training, housing (Breaking New Ground)). My teaching includes (and included) development studies, development planning, heterodox economics, comparative public policy, and research methodology.

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University of Delaware

József Böröcz

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Oliver P Richmond

The University of Manchester

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

University of York

University of the Basque Country, Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea

Rodrigo Luís Kanayama

Universidade Federal do Paraná

Andrew W Wilkins

Goldsmiths, University of London

SFS Qatar (Georgetown University)

Wageningen University

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Papers by Firoz Khan

State, governance and development in Africa

The inspiration for this book was a Summer School on State, Governance and Development presented ... more The inspiration for this book was a Summer School on State, Governance and Development presented by distinguished academics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Written by young African scholars, the chapters here focus on state, governance and development in Africa as seen from the authors’ vantage points and positions in different sectors of society. The book opens with three forewords by eminent African scholars – Ben Turok, Johan Burger and Mohamed Halfani. The chapters that follow examine rent-seeking, patronage, neopatrimonialism and bad governance. They engage with statehood, state-building and statecraft and challenge the mainstream opinions of donors, funders, development banks, international non-governmental organisations and development organisations. They include the role of China in Africa, Kenya’s changing demographics, state accountability in South Africa’s dominant party system, Somalia’s prospects for state-building, urban development and routine...

Comparative & Contemporary Public Management Innovation Strategies Elective

SPL Masters Elective Available in 2024

Saving or Seizing the City: Discursive Formations in Cape Town, South Africa

Sustainability, 2022

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more

Enactment and Enforcement of Anti-Corruption in India

Understanding Corruption, 2020

A critical review of Ndletyana'sAnatomy of the ANC in Power: Insights from Port Elizabeth, 1990–2019

Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 2021

Making the road while walking': Statecraft in contemporary times

State construction is messy and complex, brimming with contradictions, fraught with conflict and ... more State construction is messy and complex, brimming with contradictions, fraught with conflict and unpredictability. This article identifies a few hurdles likely to be encountered in the simultaneous making and walking of this road, underscoring (in particular) the need to work with clientelism and patronage as enablers and contributors to growth rather than pathology to be “corrected” by administrative reforms.

Critical perspectives on post-apartheid housing praxis through the developmental statecraft looking glass

Public Policy and Corruption in a Globalized World

Public Policymaking in a Globalized World

Public Policy and Corruption in a Globalised World: Case Studies from South Africa and Rwanda

The paper attempts to describe and elaborate on the relationship between policy analysis, plannin... more The paper attempts to describe and elaborate on the relationship between policy analysis, planning and implementation and its relationship to development and state construction in a globalised world. In this attempt, the hurdles encountered in the complex and contradictory nature of planning and implementation of public policy in the development of state construction are associated with the issues of global values, policy transfer, import of legislation, and restraining aspects of treaties and so forth. It is assumed that within this context the attempts of individual states to carry through and successfully deliver socially inclusive and empowering developmental programmes and projects hinges on understanding and negotiating social change and transformation that 'works with the grain of societies' rather than brushing against it. This means exposing and refraining from imposing external public models that more often than not treat local political dynamics as dysfunctional. ...

The Homeless People's Alliance: Purposive creation and ambiguated realities

Research report for the project on: …, 2004

The state…is the coldest of all monsters…(it) lies in languages of good and evil; and whatever it... more The state…is the coldest of all monsters…(it) lies in languages of good and evil; and whatever it says, it lies-and whatever it has, it has stolen…only there, where the state ceases, does the man who is not superfluous begin…(Nietzche, 1969 cited in Rose and Miller 1992:173) Nowadays the ambition to 'change the world' meets with cynicism-because of the questionable record of several development decades, doubts over social engineering and rationalist planning as exercises in authoritarianism, and over modernism and the utopian belief in the perfectability of society. Yet all this does not alter the necessity to 'change the world', nor does it alter the fact that development is about changing the world, with all the pitfalls that it involves, including the legacy of social engineering and Enlightenment confidence tricks (Nederveen Pieterse 2000:187). The South African Homeless People's Federation calls itself uMfelanda Wonye-'we die together'. It's because if you are poor, no matter how good you talk English, no matter how good you can walk, but at the end of day, you are poor. And then if you are alone at a certain corner, you will be [sic] never come up with the ideas of fighting poverty. But now with the Federation, it is said: For us to try and challenge this problem of poverty, homelessness and landlessness, it's for us to come together and form a family and then when we are a family, every problem that comes we will challenge it together. If somebody wants to kill us, he will kill us together. So it means forming ourselves into a family with a common understanding of what we want to achieve at the end of the day. So this is why we said we should call ourselves uMfelanda Wonye waBantu wesemijondolo-the Federation of the homeless people who are staying in the shacks around our country in South Africa. (Interview, Molokane 13.05.04).

Mumbo jumbo, 2010 and the masses: In a city shaped by the elite, reason is on the retreat

Corruption and its Repercussions on Employment, Poverty and Inequality: Rwanda and South Africa Compared

Journal of Reviews on Global Economics, 2019

Effective statecraft is founded on governance, planning and policy execution foundations that are... more Effective statecraft is founded on governance, planning and policy execution foundations that are historically derived and conditioned. In contemporary times, effective statecraft supposedly centres on 'sustainable' development paradigms and frameworks. This paper examines the connection between state construction and contemporary statecraft-refracted through anti-corruption policy and implementation-and their combined repercussions on employment, poverty and inequality. These include the challenges encountered by the proliferation of corruption, which many posit to be the 'key enemy' of good governance and, by extension, 'sustainable' development. Using Rwanda and South Africa as case studies, it is demonstrated that fighting corruption cannot be disconnected from power, political economy, the dynamics of public policy formulation, and the mechanics of policy implementation. This paper posits an association between specific types of patrimonialism, economic performance and service delivery with attendant consequences for employment generation, poverty eradication and reducing inequality.

Saving or Seizing the City: Discursive Formations in Cape Town, South Africa

Sustainability, 2022

‘Neoliberalism’ is the dominant theme pervading numerous studies of post-apartheid urban developm... more ‘Neoliberalism’ is the dominant theme pervading numerous studies of post-apartheid urban development in Cape Town. This often renders invisible the many nuances and complexities embedded within its transitions. Via critically examining the assumption of the neoliberal usurpation of urban governance in Cape Town’s policy formation, this paper highlights critical historical contingencies from 1994; contingencies framing a discursive formation as less the choreographies of global capitalism and more the committed and sincere mobilisation of a local, grassroots movement to ‘save’ the city from urban decline. Largely unacknowledged in the literature, its exploration is crucial to transiting from a putative and omnipotent neoliberalism as a bottomless well of explanation to admitting and appreciating subjective agency in the origins, evolution and trajectory of the city’s urban development. This, in turn, furnishes insights about the metamorphosis and mutation of the original—ostensibly sincere—discursive formation into the particularly powerful and potent form of market-led urban regeneration sponsored in Cape Town today.

Metropolitan Government and Local Restructuring

Developmental Local Government and Local Economic Development: Combining the Macro- and Micro- Institutional Foundations of Development

De ev ve el lo op pm me en nt ta al l L Lo oc ca al l G Go ov ve er rn nm me en nt t a an nd d L ... more De ev ve el lo op pm me en nt ta al l L Lo oc ca al l G Go ov ve er rn nm me en nt t a an nd d L Lo oc ca al l E Ec co on no om mi ic c D De ev ve el lo op pm me en nt t: : C Co om mb bi in ni in ng g t th he e M Ma ac cr ro o-a an nd d M Mi ic cr ro o-I In ns st ti it tu ut ti io on na al l F Fo ou un nd da at ti io on ns s o of f D De ev ve el lo op pm me en nt t F Fi ir ro oz z K Kh ha an n i i

Municipal-Community Partnerships

Development Update - Special Edition on the The City and its Future

Need for Effective Urban Development Plans (ORF/GIZ) Workshop

In India, the growth and pattern of development of towns and cities is guided by an urban develop... more In India, the growth and pattern of development of towns and cities is guided by an urban development plan. The plan contains proposals on controlled location of new facilities and activities, such as residential and work places, markets and commercial establishments, infrastructure and networks, recreational and green spaces, etc. It aims to ensure optimal utilisation of space and optimal distribution pattern of human activities. Once the plan is notified by the government, it is to be implemented. For this purpose, the broad policy directions for future urban development outlined in the plan are translated into action programmes/projects/schemes. In addition to such traditional urban planning practices, a series of parallel reform measures designed by the National Preparation of a town/city plan is a comprehensive exercise involving collection, tabulation and analysis of data on numerous urban development indicators, based on which projections are made and suggestions are given to guide future development. The enormous amount of time, labour and resources involved in this process usually go to waste as compliance to plan proposals is often quite minimal.

Linking local economic development and poverty alleviation

Continuities, ambiguities and contradictions: the past, present and (possible) future of housing policy and practice in South Africa

Housing Policy and Practice in Post-Apartheid South …, 2003

State, governance and development in Africa

The inspiration for this book was a Summer School on State, Governance and Development presented ... more The inspiration for this book was a Summer School on State, Governance and Development presented by distinguished academics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Written by young African scholars, the chapters here focus on state, governance and development in Africa as seen from the authors’ vantage points and positions in different sectors of society. The book opens with three forewords by eminent African scholars – Ben Turok, Johan Burger and Mohamed Halfani. The chapters that follow examine rent-seeking, patronage, neopatrimonialism and bad governance. They engage with statehood, state-building and statecraft and challenge the mainstream opinions of donors, funders, development banks, international non-governmental organisations and development organisations. They include the role of China in Africa, Kenya’s changing demographics, state accountability in South Africa’s dominant party system, Somalia’s prospects for state-building, urban development and routine...

Comparative & Contemporary Public Management Innovation Strategies Elective

SPL Masters Elective Available in 2024

Saving or Seizing the City: Discursive Formations in Cape Town, South Africa

Sustainability, 2022

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more

Enactment and Enforcement of Anti-Corruption in India

Understanding Corruption, 2020

A critical review of Ndletyana'sAnatomy of the ANC in Power: Insights from Port Elizabeth, 1990–2019

Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 2021

Making the road while walking': Statecraft in contemporary times

State construction is messy and complex, brimming with contradictions, fraught with conflict and ... more State construction is messy and complex, brimming with contradictions, fraught with conflict and unpredictability. This article identifies a few hurdles likely to be encountered in the simultaneous making and walking of this road, underscoring (in particular) the need to work with clientelism and patronage as enablers and contributors to growth rather than pathology to be “corrected” by administrative reforms.

Critical perspectives on post-apartheid housing praxis through the developmental statecraft looking glass

Public Policy and Corruption in a Globalized World

Public Policymaking in a Globalized World

Public Policy and Corruption in a Globalised World: Case Studies from South Africa and Rwanda

The paper attempts to describe and elaborate on the relationship between policy analysis, plannin... more The paper attempts to describe and elaborate on the relationship between policy analysis, planning and implementation and its relationship to development and state construction in a globalised world. In this attempt, the hurdles encountered in the complex and contradictory nature of planning and implementation of public policy in the development of state construction are associated with the issues of global values, policy transfer, import of legislation, and restraining aspects of treaties and so forth. It is assumed that within this context the attempts of individual states to carry through and successfully deliver socially inclusive and empowering developmental programmes and projects hinges on understanding and negotiating social change and transformation that 'works with the grain of societies' rather than brushing against it. This means exposing and refraining from imposing external public models that more often than not treat local political dynamics as dysfunctional. ...

The Homeless People's Alliance: Purposive creation and ambiguated realities

Research report for the project on: …, 2004

The state…is the coldest of all monsters…(it) lies in languages of good and evil; and whatever it... more The state…is the coldest of all monsters…(it) lies in languages of good and evil; and whatever it says, it lies-and whatever it has, it has stolen…only there, where the state ceases, does the man who is not superfluous begin…(Nietzche, 1969 cited in Rose and Miller 1992:173) Nowadays the ambition to 'change the world' meets with cynicism-because of the questionable record of several development decades, doubts over social engineering and rationalist planning as exercises in authoritarianism, and over modernism and the utopian belief in the perfectability of society. Yet all this does not alter the necessity to 'change the world', nor does it alter the fact that development is about changing the world, with all the pitfalls that it involves, including the legacy of social engineering and Enlightenment confidence tricks (Nederveen Pieterse 2000:187). The South African Homeless People's Federation calls itself uMfelanda Wonye-'we die together'. It's because if you are poor, no matter how good you talk English, no matter how good you can walk, but at the end of day, you are poor. And then if you are alone at a certain corner, you will be [sic] never come up with the ideas of fighting poverty. But now with the Federation, it is said: For us to try and challenge this problem of poverty, homelessness and landlessness, it's for us to come together and form a family and then when we are a family, every problem that comes we will challenge it together. If somebody wants to kill us, he will kill us together. So it means forming ourselves into a family with a common understanding of what we want to achieve at the end of the day. So this is why we said we should call ourselves uMfelanda Wonye waBantu wesemijondolo-the Federation of the homeless people who are staying in the shacks around our country in South Africa. (Interview, Molokane 13.05.04).

Mumbo jumbo, 2010 and the masses: In a city shaped by the elite, reason is on the retreat

Corruption and its Repercussions on Employment, Poverty and Inequality: Rwanda and South Africa Compared

Journal of Reviews on Global Economics, 2019

Effective statecraft is founded on governance, planning and policy execution foundations that are... more Effective statecraft is founded on governance, planning and policy execution foundations that are historically derived and conditioned. In contemporary times, effective statecraft supposedly centres on 'sustainable' development paradigms and frameworks. This paper examines the connection between state construction and contemporary statecraft-refracted through anti-corruption policy and implementation-and their combined repercussions on employment, poverty and inequality. These include the challenges encountered by the proliferation of corruption, which many posit to be the 'key enemy' of good governance and, by extension, 'sustainable' development. Using Rwanda and South Africa as case studies, it is demonstrated that fighting corruption cannot be disconnected from power, political economy, the dynamics of public policy formulation, and the mechanics of policy implementation. This paper posits an association between specific types of patrimonialism, economic performance and service delivery with attendant consequences for employment generation, poverty eradication and reducing inequality.

Saving or Seizing the City: Discursive Formations in Cape Town, South Africa

Sustainability, 2022

‘Neoliberalism’ is the dominant theme pervading numerous studies of post-apartheid urban developm... more ‘Neoliberalism’ is the dominant theme pervading numerous studies of post-apartheid urban development in Cape Town. This often renders invisible the many nuances and complexities embedded within its transitions. Via critically examining the assumption of the neoliberal usurpation of urban governance in Cape Town’s policy formation, this paper highlights critical historical contingencies from 1994; contingencies framing a discursive formation as less the choreographies of global capitalism and more the committed and sincere mobilisation of a local, grassroots movement to ‘save’ the city from urban decline. Largely unacknowledged in the literature, its exploration is crucial to transiting from a putative and omnipotent neoliberalism as a bottomless well of explanation to admitting and appreciating subjective agency in the origins, evolution and trajectory of the city’s urban development. This, in turn, furnishes insights about the metamorphosis and mutation of the original—ostensibly sincere—discursive formation into the particularly powerful and potent form of market-led urban regeneration sponsored in Cape Town today.

Metropolitan Government and Local Restructuring

Developmental Local Government and Local Economic Development: Combining the Macro- and Micro- Institutional Foundations of Development

De ev ve el lo op pm me en nt ta al l L Lo oc ca al l G Go ov ve er rn nm me en nt t a an nd d L ... more De ev ve el lo op pm me en nt ta al l L Lo oc ca al l G Go ov ve er rn nm me en nt t a an nd d L Lo oc ca al l E Ec co on no om mi ic c D De ev ve el lo op pm me en nt t: : C Co om mb bi in ni in ng g t th he e M Ma ac cr ro o-a an nd d M Mi ic cr ro o-I In ns st ti it tu ut ti io on na al l F Fo ou un nd da at ti io on ns s o of f D De ev ve el lo op pm me en nt t F Fi ir ro oz z K Kh ha an n i i

Municipal-Community Partnerships

Development Update - Special Edition on the The City and its Future

Need for Effective Urban Development Plans (ORF/GIZ) Workshop

In India, the growth and pattern of development of towns and cities is guided by an urban develop... more In India, the growth and pattern of development of towns and cities is guided by an urban development plan. The plan contains proposals on controlled location of new facilities and activities, such as residential and work places, markets and commercial establishments, infrastructure and networks, recreational and green spaces, etc. It aims to ensure optimal utilisation of space and optimal distribution pattern of human activities. Once the plan is notified by the government, it is to be implemented. For this purpose, the broad policy directions for future urban development outlined in the plan are translated into action programmes/projects/schemes. In addition to such traditional urban planning practices, a series of parallel reform measures designed by the National Preparation of a town/city plan is a comprehensive exercise involving collection, tabulation and analysis of data on numerous urban development indicators, based on which projections are made and suggestions are given to guide future development. The enormous amount of time, labour and resources involved in this process usually go to waste as compliance to plan proposals is often quite minimal.

Linking local economic development and poverty alleviation

Continuities, ambiguities and contradictions: the past, present and (possible) future of housing policy and practice in South Africa

Housing Policy and Practice in Post-Apartheid South …, 2003

Political economy of corruption

The '"what ifs…" of today' and the 'pregnant "time of the now"'

Global Urban Challenges: The Role of Research Universities Conference hosted by the Chicago Counc... more

Global Cities: Exclusion, Violence, Re- Appropriations and 'Real Utopias'

IDPPA 2013

The Political Economy of Corruption

Delhi University presentation - Aug 2019

Down the rabbit well in a yellow submarine: From sweet, ocean-warm nothings, to parallel calamity on a road to nowhere to ... what? Or rather, musings on our times and tides and new terra’s using Fredric Jameson’s concept of ‘cognitive mapping

SAPI 2010

An(O)ther Picture? : ‘We don’t have another set of pictures’

SAPI 2018

Making Great Places? Fiction, Fabrication and Fantasia -Power, Planning, Plans and Praxis

SAPI 2014

Homegrown Development: The Urban Question and Postcolonial 'Planning' 'We don't have another set of pictures'

IDPPA 2019

Beyond Economics: The Stockholm Statement and Setting Global Policy Priorities

IDPPA 2017

The Specificity of Indeterminacy and the Indeterminacy of Specificity

IDPPA 2016

Neo-Imperial Governance, Political Sovereignty, and the Conflict Management: Peace Building-State Reconstruction Nexus in the post-post Washington Consensus Era

IDPPA 2015 Paper

Pedagogy for Public Policy: Pedagogy of Public Policy, Deliberative Pedagogy in the Community, and Public Pedagogy

Critical perspectives on post-apartheid housing praxis through the developmental statecraft looking glass

The principal question this study aims to answer is why and how a left-of-centre government not h... more The principal question this study aims to answer is why and how a left-of-centre government not hobbled by heavy external leverage, with developmental state precedents, potentially positive macroeconomic fundamentals, and well-developed alternative policies for housing and urban reconstruction came to settle on a conservative housing policy founded on ‘precepts of the pre-democratic period’. Arguably, this policy is even more conservative than World Bank strictures and paradigms, whose advice the incoming democratic government ‘normally ignored’ and ‘tacitly rejected’. The study, which spans the period from the early 1990s to 2007, commences from the premise that housing is an expression and component of a society’s wider development agenda and is bound up with daily routines of the ordering and institutionalisation of social existence and social reproduction. It proposes an answer that resides in the mechanics and modalities of post-apartheid state construction and its associated techniques and technologies of societal penetration and regime legitimisation. The vagaries and vicissitudes of post-Cold War statecraft, the weight of history and legacy, strategic blundering, and the absence of a cognitive map and compass to guide post-apartheid statecraft, collectively contribute to past and present defects and deformities of our two decade-old developmentalism, writ large in our human settlements. Alternatives to the technocratic market developmentalism of our current housing praxis spotlight empowering shelter outcomes but were bastardised. This is not unrelated to the toxicity of mixing conservative governmentalities (neoliberal macroeconomic precepts, modernist planning orientations, supply-side citizenship and technocratic projections of state) with ‘ambiguated’ counter-governmentalities (self-empowerment, self-responsibilisation, the aestheticisation of poverty and heroic narratives about the poor). Underscored in the study is the contention that state developmentalism and civil society developmentalism rise and fall together, pivoting on (savvy) reconnection of economics and politics (the vertical axis of governance) and state and society (the horizontal axis). Without robust reconfiguration and recalibration of axes, the revamped or, more appropriately, reconditioned housing policy – Breaking New Ground – struggles to navigate the limitations of the First Decade settlement state shelter delivery regime and the Second Decade’s (weak) developmental state etho-politics. The prospects for success are contingent on structurally rewiring inherited and contemporary contacts and circuits of power, influence and money in order to tilt resource and institutional balances in favour of the poor. Present pasts and present futures, both here and abroad, offer resources for more transformative statecraft and sustainable human settlements, but only if we are prepared to challenge the underlying economic and political interests that to date have, and continue to, preclude such policies. History, experience and contemporary record show there are alternatives – another possible and necessary world – via small and large steps, millimetres and centimetres, trial and error.

State, governance and development in Africa

PRE PRINT

A strategic agenda for the promotion of municipal-community partnerships

Th emergence and endurance of an evolving human settlements imaginary

Consolidating Developmental Local Government

Housing policy and practice in post apartheid south africa

Housing Policy and Practice in Post Apartheid South Africa

Perspectives on Energy Security and Renewable Energies in Sub-Saharan Africa Practical Opportunities and Regulatory Challenges Second Revised and Expanded Edition

by Firoz Khan and manisha gulati

REGIONAL ENERGY: INTEGRATING ENERGY FLOWS WITH GOVERNANCE by Manisha Gulati, Louise Scholtz & Fi... more

Book Review Ndletyana preprint 2021

Anatomy of the ANC in power: Insights from Port Elizabeth, 1990 - 2019

Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 2021

Review of Ndletyana's 2020 publication - published by HSRC Press