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Highlights • The Constitution in South Africa ensures poverty is a central concern in public policy. • In a contested policy environment, cash transfers are likely to thrive. • Gender is a good lens to establish whether social and economic policy are integrated and coherent. • Social compacts between the state, labour and capital are struggling, and new models are emerging. • The role of the South African mining sector in social development is changing, but still disputed. Abstract This paper reflects on the trajectory of social policy in South Africa (1994–2017) and on which policy levers present opportunities for cross-country policy transfer, in order to address current social development challenges. The current direction of social policy is described as the result of a compromise between two distinct alternative paradigms whereby the statist transformative and market-oriented residual paradigms are held in tension. On the one hand, a transformative policy perspective draws on human rights and views redistribution as a necessary premise for and means of economic growth. On the other hand in the residual framework, redistribution is envisaged as a secondary function that is dependent on economic growth. Several instances are outlined in which this tension is evident, together with the implications for social policy across the policy cycle: in legislation; in social compact formation; in the selection of social programmes and in their implementation; in gender-mainstreaming and in the engagement of the private sector in social policy. Overall we highlight areas of hybrid policy overlap between these bifurcated ideological, political and institutional frameworks, for example around social transfers and corporate social investment. We also describe instances of conflicting and at times unexpected outcomes, such as the National Health Insurance. Several factors are concluded to be of relevance to the Global South more generally: the importance of constitutionally-legislated rights as a basis for advancing socio-economic claims; the emergence of new social compacts in contexts where there are significant levels of informal employment and unemployment and lastly, the influence of fiscal and institutional capability factors in shaping the direction of social policy and its implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Johannesburg's mining land has defined the city's geography, yet remains unevenly developed and liminal in urban policy. Rather than a planning failure, I argue this is a product of state-sanctioned corporate hegemony over mining land. Through the case of Johannesburg's biggest mining-turned-property company, the paper problematises binaries of 'state' and 'market' by drawing out the deeply historical, spatialised, political and always-more-than-human vicissitudes of this mining-urban regime. These include the mapping and unmapping that render mining land terra incognita to the state while shoring up corporate power; the multiple visions and contestations over what is to be done with the land, and finally, how different and contingent temporalities shape and limit those visions in practise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented on the history of asbestos and gold mining in Southern Africa and Australia. It expresses the view that mining effects the health of miners, national archives impacted by Southern Africa's constitution, and miners are diagnosed with the asbestos disease and there's court case on energy services company Cape PLC.

In June 2012 at its policy conference, the African National Congress (ANC) rejected nationalisation of the country's ailing mining industry. The ANC proposed an alternative plan comprised of the imposition of higher taxes and penalties on mining houses, local beneficiation of minerals and a greater role for the state in new mining ventures. More recently the idea of a ‘super tax’ on profits has been mooted by the Minister for Energy and Minerals, Susan Shabangu. Although the details of these proposals are yet to be finalised and the nationalisation debate is still not off the table, this brought some clarity after months of uncertainty and placated the fears of shareholders, potential investors and the mining houses themselves. Implicit in many debates and statements about the industry's future, however, is the idea that local or near-mine communities should benefit (through royalties, joint ventures, share transactions or employment) from mining on land they own or occupy. The recent violence and death of over 50 people at Marikana, mostly mineworkers, and the consequent prolonged bout of worker unrest and crisis in the South African mining industry, loom large in the public consciousness and have overshadowed other sources of social discontent and division among the region's residents. This article explores how the payment of royalties and the profits from investments, from the time of the platinum boom in the mid-1990s, have affected three local ethnic groups who occupy mineral-rich lands in the Rustenburg region of the Province. It reveals a pattern of financial mismanagement, inter-ethnic competition between the ruling elites and between traditional power holders and commoners, ineffectual government intervention and a series of legal and political challenges mounted by the contending parties. Clearly the practice is fraught with complexities and has accentuated ethnic sentiments while complicating and slowing the conclusion of contractual agreements to exploit the mineral potential of the region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the minds of its victims and critics, South African mine migrancy epitomized everything that was worst about capitalism and apartheid. The system and its associated institutions remain very much intact but do not look particularly comfortable in the new political and human rights-based dispensation of postapartheid South Africa. Historically, the mines enjoyed privileged access to foreign labor, a "right" denied by the state to most other employers. The continued exclusion of other employers from accessing similar rights has led, perhaps inevitably, to greatly increased usage of undocumented or "illegal" foreign labor by South African employers in other sectors. Logically, the state has two options: open up the system to all or close it down once and for all. To date, it has done neither, as we show. This paper traces the postapartheid South African policy debate on regional migration and foreign contract labor to demonstrate how the mining industry has headed off any challenge to the status quo. The result is that the prospects for a fundamental transformation of the contract labor system remain as elusive as ever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]