In South Africa, both the number of people entering prison, and the number of people infected with HIV, are steadily increasing. While reliable statistics are not available on the number of HIV+ prisoners, the characteristics of the typical prisoner are those of a demographic group at high risk for HIV infection. As a result, many prisoners will already be HIV positive upon entering the prison. Additionally, the prison environment creates many situations of high risk behaviour for HIV transmission, which means there is also an as yet undetermined portion of inmates who will contract HIV while incarcerated. The current government policy is to provide HIV testing and condoms in conjunction with counselling, although poor design and implementation of this policy has limited its impact. In addition to issues of HIV infection and transmission, the government must address the needs of prisoners who have developed full-blown AlDS and will likely die as a result while imprisoned. AIDS is already the leading cause of death for prisoners in many countries, as well as in South Africa Adequate medical care, proper nutrition, and early release for those in the late stages of AIDS, are the international standards for minimum humane treatment of these prisoners. Today, crippling bureaucracy prevents the humanitarian release of dying· prisoners from South African prisons. Reliable data on the nature and extent of HIV/AIDS infection in South African prisons has yet to be obtained, owing to the closed nature of the prison administration. In order to design and implement effective policies, the secrecy surrounding the prison system must be eliminated so that further research and study may take place. Unlinked, anonymous HIV testing should be undertaken on a sample of the prison population so that accurate information and projections about HIV/AIDS in prison may become available. Until the government allows the issue to be quantified, the design and implementation of better policies will not be possible. The best HIV/AIDS policies are those which recognise the impact of prisoners' health on public health in general. Because the prisoner population consists of a core transmitter group, the pnson provides a critical intervention opponunity for the prevention of HIV infection in the greater community Further research on this issue should therefore focus on the evaluation, design, and implementation of intervention programs Intervention in the prison environment should include targeted education and use of existing gang structures to engender behavioural change The issues of HIV/AIDS in prison are compounded by issues of prison reform in general. The conditions in South Africa prisons are unconsitutional, and exacerbate the problems presented by HIV/AlDS. The most pressing problem in South African prisons is overcrowding; a problem which the Department of Correctional Services is all but powerless to address. Just as HIV/AIDS in the general community requires a multi-sectoral solution, so too does HIV/AIDS in the correctional setting. The Department of Correctional Services must re-evaluate both its policies and its entire policy making process in order to address HIV/AIDS in South African prisons. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal,Durban, 2001.

The main purpose of this study was to assess the negative external impact of water pollution upon water resources and the users thereof within urban areas.

Are South Africa's water service delivery policies and strategies equitable, accessible, affordable, efficient, effective and sustainable for Msunduzi low-income households? The primary objective of this study was to elicit the community experience of South Africa's water service delivery policies and strategies and link these experiences to a broader analysis of policy and strategy to locate water service delivery contraventions, inconsistencies and inadequacies. The secondary objective was to initiate community-based platforms for engagement with water-related issues and build capacity within local community task teams to initiate lobbying and advocacy strategies to support community-suggested and research-outcome reforms thereby returning popular control to the locus of communities. The study was conducted in KwaZulu-Natal, within the Msunduzi municipal jurisdiction, under the uMgungundlovu district municipality (DC22) in the period from October 2002-April 2003. Households in five low-income urban areas were included in the study: Imbali (units 1 and 2), Sobantu, Haniville and Thembalihle. The study employed a community action research design using non-probability sampling. Surveys, conducted by community researchers, were complemented by broad community engagement approaches, informal interviews with external stakeholders and the initiation of platforms for information sharing and fundamental debate. The study revealed two significant findings. The first finding found that South Africa's water service delivery policies, strategies and implementation mechanisms were inconsistent with the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry's sector goals of equity, affordability, efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability. They contained serious scientific and social inadequacies, inequitably promoted economic considerations above social and environmental considerations; lacked regulation and monitoring systems to identify and address implementation contraventions; were not receptive to the socioeconomic situations of low-income households and should be fundamentally re-worked. Policies and strategies purported to ensure that the basic water service requirements of low-income households were met, essentially compounded socio-economic constraints and compromised human rights, justice and equity. The second finding was related to popular involvement and engagement. Community consultative processes for input into local and national policies and strategies were inadequate and often pseudoparticipatory; political platforms (local and national) for communities to engage and influence decision-makers were inadequate or lacking; and the community control, ownership and acceptance of the Msunduzi water service delivery institution and its mechanisms were low. Recommendations for the reform of policy, strategy and implementation of such reforms were advocated through the vehicle of reviews, evaluations and audits, to inform the necessary amendments, adjustments and intensification of local and national regulation and monitoring mechanisms. Lobbying and advocacy strategies, to support the implementation of reforms, were promoted through community-based approaches of popular engagement with water-related issues, information dissemination; community mobilisation and popular control of public processes. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2003.

This dissertation is an examination of presidential communication, focusing primarily on how Mbeki promoted a fringe group of researchers (the Virodene researchers) and a discredited scientific position (the AIDS dissidents). It employs aspects of critical discourse analysis in order to examine Mbeki's speeches, articles, interviews and letters dealing with HIV/AIDS from 1998 to 2003 in order to identify how his views and beliefs on the epidemic changed from the orthodox position that HIV causes AIDS to a dissident view, which led to him asserting that it was impossible for one virus to be the single cause of a wide range of illnesses defined as AIDS. In addition, it examines briefly how civil society, particularly the TAC, responded to Mbeki's unconventional approach to HIV/AIDS, and how Mbeki reacted to criticism of his views on HIV/AIDS. By using the relations of antithesis, entailment and equivalence, this dissertation finds that, although Mbeki moved from an orthodox to a dissident position on HIV/AIDS, there are common threads running through all his discourse. These threads include an intense interest in science and a concern with the plight of the "underdogs", namely those that he feels have been discriminated against by the scientific establishment particularly the pharmaceutical industry. Mbeki's dissident views were not a crude assertion that HIV does not cause AIDS, as has been suggested by other researchers, or those of a sophist seeking excuses for his government's inability to deploy adequate resources to HIV/AIDS. His interest in dissident theory is considered and he has clearly engaged with the scientific arguments of the dissidents. However, this is not the case when Mbeki deals with his critics. It is a matter of concern that Mbeki used the power of the Office of the President to undermine and discredit his opponents by accusing them of being racists or "Uncle Toms" for opposing his dissident views on HIV/AIDS. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2003.

Since it assumed power in 1994, the government of South Africa had to meet the challenges of changing an education system that was established along racial lines. OBE and Curriculum 2005 were adopted into the school system. In the Further Education and Training Band Report 550 which was a 'cleansed' curriculum was introduced. The Framework for the Transformation of Further Education and Training in South Africa was published and promoted equality, economic competitiveness, redress, productivity and quality learning. On 28 October 2002 the draft National Curriculum Statements were published. The purpose of this study was to examine some of the policy intentions, influences and dominant ideologies in the FET policy documents. The study also examines the policy process and the recontextualization of policy discourses. A qualitative approach was used. Data was collected from questionnaires and interviews. The data obtained from the completed questionnaires and interviews was processed. The dominant ideology in the policy documents for English, Life Sciences, Mathematics and Physical Science were identified. The findings of the study shows that policy makers, designers and trainers adopted particular discourses that were at times aligned to the official policy discourse and at times they drew on new discourses based on their own histories, biographies and experiences of teaching in South African schools. Finally recommendations were made concerning the policy process in the form of three propositions: (i)Timing determined what was possible for the NCS: the policy development process was driven by a political need to deliver on a new curriculum; (ii) In a system that is not currently functioning efficiently, new policy initiatives exacerbate rather than reform the conditions on the ground; (iii) Government rationality was driven by a transformative agenda yet constrained by technicist management theories. / Thesis (M.Ed.) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2006.

Cultural policy studies, or studies in the relations of government and culture (Mercer, 1994) were initiated in Australia in the 1980s, where cultural studies have been reinterpreted into a dialogue of policy-making and cooperation between the government and academia (Cunningham, 1994; Hunter, 1993/1994; Molloy, 1994; Santamaria, 1994). This Australian-pioneered "cultural policy moment" (Cunningham 1994; Hawkins, 1994) thus provides an epistemological starting point for an analysis of cultural policy developments in South Africa, especially after 1994. Early South African cultural policy studies tend to draw from the Australian experience (Tomaselli and Shepperson, 1996). It must be noted that in terms of South African film policy analysis, there have been two cultural policy moments, one that addresses film post World War II to 1991, a period that is generally characterised as a "cinema of apartheid" (Tomaselli, 1989). This period is indebted to the seminal work of Keyan Tomaselli and Martin Botha. The second cultural policy moment begins in 1991 and continues to the present. It is this "moment" that informs the research and critical focus of the ways in which cultural studies in South Africa have modified the foundation of its critical position towards the state in response to developments since 1990. The aim of this thesis is to critically examine the ways in which South African cultural studies have responded to the Australian "cultural policy moment" in terms of academic-state relations, and the impact of discussions that were engaged in by various film organisations on film policy after 1990, and which resulted in the written proposals on film submitted to the Arts and Culture Task Group in 1994 and 1995. The Arts and Culture Task Group was the case study within which the notion of cultural policy was studied, along with the White Paper on Film. This thesis draws on and applies a variety of methods: firstly, there is the participatory research: I was employed by ACTAG to undertake research into film policy. My own experience of the process in which I worked very closely with the film sub-committee provides an "insider" account of assumptions, conflicts, practices and how outcomes were reached. I was also designated, along with Professor Tomaselli and Dr Botha, as one of the co-authors of the White Paper, and was thus part of the process of revising the ACTAG recommendations into draft legislation. Secondly, there is the method of comparative study: this thesis initially draws on the Australian cultural studies and film policy on the one hand, and South African cultural studies and film policy on the other. It then evolves into a critique of the "cultural policy moment" (Cunningham, 1994; Hawkins, 1994) as it related to the development of South African film policy between 1991 and 1997. Lastly, there was the empirical investigation: ACTAG, which was established to counsel Dr Ben Ngubane on the formulation of policy for the newly established government (see Chapter Four of this thesis, and see Karam, 1996), served as a case study. The final ACTAG document resulted in a reformulated arts and culture dispensation consistent with the new Constitution. This process in turn led to the origination and publication of the Government of National Unity's White Paper on Film in May 1996. Incorporated into this analysis was an "information trawl" (Given, 1994; Mercer, 1994 and Santamaria, 1994) of prior and extant policy frameworks and assumptions of various film, cultural and media organizations formulated during the period under review. The link between film and culture, and hence film and cultural policy, emerges from the following two commonplace associations: firstly, that film as a form of visual creation is therefore a form of art; and secondly, that the concepts of art and culture are inextricably connected. What drives the present debate is the Australian appropriations of Raymond Williams's description of culture as "a whole way of life". This, while validly dissolving the early-twentieth century identification of culture with "high" or "canonical" forms of traditional literature, sculpture, or painting, none the less leaves theorists with a "distinct fuzziness" (Johnson, 1979) as to what the term "culture" actually denotes. Australian policy studies' approaches tend to focus on culture as personifying a structure of "livability" under terms of employment, environmental concerns, and urban planning (Cunningham, 1994; Hawkins, 1994). In general, however, the focus has only attained any concrete outcomes when research has resuscitated precisely the link between culture and the arts, thereby drawing on the old polemics of "high" versus "low" and "popular" culture. The individual chapters cover the following topics: the Introductory Chapter provides a general historical overview of the South African film subsidization system, a crucial element of the analytical framework, from its inception in 1956 to it's dissolvement in the 1980s; Chapter Two, "Cultural Policy" deals with the origination and development of the concept of "cultural policy"; Chapter Three focuses on the Australian "cultural policy moment" and it's application to film; Chapters Four and Five deal with the ACTAG Film Sub-committee and the White Paper on Film respectively; and the last chapter, Chapter Six critiques these processes and their resulting documents, as case studies, from a cultural policy standpoint. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1997.

Land degradation is a national concern that needs to be redressed and prevented by the government and its agencies as it has a significant impact on agricultural productivity and food security. The National Department of Agriculture is in the process of reforming the sustainable resource use policy to deal with the causes of land degradation and to promote the sustainable use of natural resources, particularly in poverty stricken areas. Prior to 1994, this policy was only applied in areas where commercial agriculture was practised. The researcher has explored the struggles encountered during the implementation of the sustainable resource use policy through a case study approach within the Enkumane region of KwaZulu-Natal. The research followed a cross-sectional approach drawing from methods such as typology techniques, semi-structured interviews and questionnaires, which were employed at various stages in the policy process, from the levels of policy-makers to the intended beneficiaries. A literature review emphasized the importance of applying integrated and participatory approaches in implementing a public policy. The results highlighted significant differences of opinion concerning the implementation of the sustainable resource use policy within and between the different stages of the process from policy to implementation. This was partly attributed to the inadequacy in terms of clear roles, direction and guidelines, and also in terms of the institutionalisation of experience, knowledge and skills. It was recommended that a more co-ordinated and integrated effort is required to reform the policy. This calls for the establishment of mechanisms to ensure that people at all stages in the policy process are involved in a participatory manner, towards the continual improvement of the sustainable resource use policy. The significance of this study is twofold, firstly the financial burden of ineffective policies is unacceptable to our society. Secondly, the research has a potential to enhance the policy to implementation process, which may provide a platform for improving the sustainable resource use policy. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2004.

The provision of a basic water supply and sanitation service to the 12 million South Africans without an adequate water supply and the 21 million without basic sanitation is a mammoth task that is currently being undertaken by the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry. Billions of rands have been spent on, and committed to, water and sanitation projects that involve national, provincial and local spheres of government, as well as parastatals, non-government organisations and private developers. It is acknowledged that important successes have been achieved in the water and sanitation sector. However, despite the provisions provided in national and local legislation, internationally lauded policy directives, the numerous studies undertaken and recommendations made by institutions such as the Water Research Commission, problems have continued to emerge in the sustainable delivery of water and sanitation projects, particularly in the peri-urban and rural areas. It is clear that the installation of physical structures such as pipes, taps and ventilated improved pit latrines in these areas have created a sense of 'delivery' however, little thought seems to have gone into how these projects are to be sustained. International experience has shown that the concept of 'community ownership' is very important in providing sustainable water and sanitation services. The most important principles in achieving sustainability are community participation and community decision-making throughout both the development of the project as well as the further operation and maintenance of the system. International experience has also shown that financial contributions towards the scheme from the community (in cash, labour or materials), also assists in obtaining community ownership. Over the past decade emphasis in South Africa has shifted towards community participation and the empowerment of previously disadvantaged communities where communities play an active role in determining the level of service provided and the manner in which these services are delivered. However, current government policy advocates that water must be treated as an economic resource to achieve sustainability and this does not always lie comfortably with the policy of delivering free basic water. As a result of these two often-juxtaposed concepts, the delivery of sustainable water and sanitation services, a function performed by local government, is thus made more difficult. This study assesses the importance of delivering a potable water supply and adequate sanitation service to enhance the quality of lives of people. It also considers the key issues that contribute towards sustainable water and sanitation service delivery, with particular reference to the concept of 'community ownership'. The complex nature of the policy, legislative and institutional framework for water supply and sanitation is considered along with an analysis of the Msunduzi Municipality's water supply and sanitation policy and objectives. The study then focuses on the delivery of water and sanitation services to one such project, Edendale Unit RR (commonly known as Newtown), as an in-situ upgrade case study. A Provincial Housing Board funded project has, over the last five years, provided housing units, roads, stormwater drains, and water and sanitation infrastructure to this community. This initial research is undertaken with the intention of providing an evaluation of the installation of the water supply and sanitation service to the in-situ upgrade of Newtown. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2003.

The thesis explores the nature of public management of environmental impact assessments in South Africa. As concern for the environment and for the attainment of sustainable development has grown globally, so too has the adoption of environmental management systems in line with this goal. The environmental impact assessment (EIA) is regarded by many, as being an effective tool that, when used within and supported by these management systems, will advance the attainment of sustainable development. While the environmental impact assessment is an important tool, experience with it illustrates how its effectiveness is constrained by a number of factors. These range from shortcomings with the technical design of the procedure to shortcomings of an institutional nature. Research has shown that the technical soundness of design will be of little consequence to the effectiveness of the procedure if the political structures and decision-making processes are not taken into account. The technical constraints on EIA do not reflect a weakness of science rather they reflect the reality that environmental impact assessment has evolved as an ongoing political process within development planning. These issues will be explored in this thesis with particular reference to experience with the implementation of EIA in the United States under the National Environmental Protection Act of 1969. The issue of public management is considered by looking at South Africa's environmental management strategy in the Environmental Conservation Act 73 of 1989, and the provisions in the Constitution that directly impact on the three spheres of government's responsibilities towards the environment are highlighted. A case study ofthe provinces of Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal is also undertaken in an endeavour to illustrate the 'practical reality' versus the 'procedural ideal' of policy implementation. Provinces are constrained in their ability to effectively implement EIAs by financial and capacity constraints. The manner in which these two provinces have attempted to overcome these constraints in order to implement EIAs will be considered in this thesis. As research undertaken has shown and in conclusions drawn in this thesis, EIAs can be considered an important tool in the world move to sustainable development. But the are simply a tool and cannot be expected to operate in isolation if they are to be effective. They need to be supported by strong national policy, co-operative governance and the necessary budget allocation if they are to operate in the manner they were designed to and if they are to achieve sustainable development. / Thesis (M.Env.Dev.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1999.

The main purpose of this study was to assess the negative external impact of water pollution upon water resources and the users thereof within urban areas.