Thesis (M.A.) --University of Limpopo, 2012 / The study was undertaken because the researcher was concerned about the denial of poor learners the right to education, as their parents could not afford to pay School Fees due to high unemployment and poverty in rural schools. The researcher noticed that schools sent learners home to collect school fees and also withheld learner reports until the required amount was paid. As a result, “Fee Exemption policy” was available to exempt poor parents from paying School Fees, but it was not effective because schools did not inform them to apply for this policy. As a result, poor learners decide to dropout. The government introduced “no-fee-schools” policy to end marginalisation of poor learners. Further, it appeared that School Allocations are little because rural schools have a shortage of school facilities and some of the facilities are too expensive.A purposive sampling strategy was used to select 3 public secondary schools as research sites and 26 respondents as a sample of the target population. Respondents consisted of 8 members; the principal, SGB member and 6 educators from School A; Nine (9) respondents; the principal, 2 SGB members and 6 educators from School B; the principal, 2 SGB members and 6 educators from School C. Twenty-six respondents were considered to be sufficient because my focus was not on representation. The respondents were considered to be key informants with required data. Interviews and document analysis were used as data collection methods. The researcher used semi-structured interviews because they are interactive, and they also give the respondents a voice associated with their perspectives and experiences. Document analysis was used to supplement data collected through interviews. The interviewees discovered that learners were denied the right to education, despite the departmental policies formulated to help poor learners and theirparents. Furthermore, “no-fee-schools” policy was formulated to enable poor students to access education, but it is problematic because School Allocation is not deposited to school accounts on time and does not cover all the school costs. The study recommends that poor learners should not be denied the right to education and that the departmental policy (viz., Fee Exemption Policy) should be monitored to ensure that marginalised learners benefit from this scheme. This policy should also be budgeted for so as to enable poor schools to purchase modern facilities to improve the quality of teaching and learning and employ extra educators so as to reduce the educator-learner ratios and so on.

Doctor of Philosophy / This thesis is concerned with the role of the United States investment insurance agency, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), in enforcing property and contract rights on behalf of United States (U.S.) infrastructure investors, pursuant to the deregulation of infrastructure markets across the developing world. Drawing on evidence from two recent high profile breach of regulatory contract disputes between OPIC insured U.S. energy companies and Indonesia and India respectively, the thesis finds that while legalized modes of dispute settlement have proliferated, the ‘rules of the game’— their efficacy in delimiting outcomes—emerge as a function of state power and interests, as states undertake to enforce or resist legal obligations. Second, and contrary to the image of U.S. foreign economic policy-makers as beholden to corporate interests, the thesis finds that the agency’s transformation from ‘aid to trade’ as underpinned the expansion of U.S. infrastructure investors to the developing world during the 1990s was driven by state officials consistent with evolving conceptions of U.S. national interests, central to which was the desire to expand markets for U.S. foreign investors and capital goods exporters. In this regard, the transformation of developing country infrastructure markets and the shift in the modes of resolving investor-state expropriation disputes as but one element of economic globalization and the ‘legalization’ of dispute settlement respectively are revealed as a function of U.S. material interests and power at the point of enforcement. The thesis contends, however, that the changes observed reflect not only U.S. power and interests but a specifically American conception of private property and contract rights so as to reveal OPIC investment insurance as a conduit for the diffusion of shifting property norms concerning regulatory taking (expropriation) from the United States to the world economy at large.

This document outlines how organizational action was mobilized in examing and improving current organizational practices. The study was conducted in a technical task-based research organization in the Philippines and was triggered by a concern for the seeming unfavorable feedback the organization receives from the external environment. An analysis of the organizational situation showed among other factors, the apparent lack of a mechanism that relates the organization's research findings to policy making. Through action researching and using the Soft Systems Methodology as a framewrok, an action plan was developed which is designed to improve the situation. The document also discusses insights and lessons learnt in the conduct of action research. Particular focus was placed on key issues that affect individual participation and organizational actions; and how action research fares as a potential framework for organic and systemic change. From the examination of the action research experience, it became apparent that in order to fully harness the potentials of action researching, opportunities for individual participation must be well distributed and taken by the action research members. The factors affecting individual participation in group processes such as group needs, group culture and power issues in and out of the group, must likewise be addressed. This is to promote coordination, commitment and critical consciousness among group members which are essential in effecting organic and systemic change. As the research was conducted within the broad setting of agricultural research, where efforts are placed to enhance agricultural development, this document likewise discusses the potential of action research as an alternative framewrok for Research and Development (R and D) activities. It presents how action research can mobilize grassroots initiatives and actions which are crucial to a sustainable agricultural development. / Master of Science (Research) Systems Agriculture

This thesis reports the results of a single site case study conducted in Barracks High School, a comprehensive High School in metropolitan Sydney. The focus of the study was the relationship between student participation and school context in Barracks High. Underpinning the study is the notion of 'meaningful' participation: that is, participation by students that has real meaning to them, to teachers, and for the real work of the school. This notion is explored in the review of related literature, and in the results of the study as they are presented in the thesis. The study involved persistent researcher engagement in school life, leading at times to forms of 'intervention research'.A highlight of the research was the identification and dissemination by the researcher of participant 'voices' within Barracks High as a means of drawing attention to participation issues in the school. The study found that contextual dimensions at Barracks High operated at a ratio of two to one against the achievement of meaningful forms of student participation. The thesis concludes by suggesting that complex problems require holistic solutions, and suggests a framework of principles and strategies for building meaningful participation in schools / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Consensus conferences evolved as a response to the public's increasing dissatisfaction with technocratic decision-making processes that are judged to have repeatedly failed to serve its interests. The staging of the first Australian consensus conference at Old Parliament House in Canberra in March 1999 therefore presented an ideal opportunity to analyse the evolution of this new kind of policy input from its conception through to its implementation and subsequent evaluation. This thesis set out to provide an analysis of that trajectory using elements of the theoretical approach known as actor-network theory (ANT). Previous analyses of consensus conferences have generally provided only limited evaluations of single aspects of the entire process of setting up, implementing and evaluating such a conference. Furthermore, many of the early evaluations were conducted by reviewers or units which were themselves internal to the consensus conference under scrutiny. My own analysis has tried to offer broader, although inevitably less detailed, coverage, using a perspective from contemporary social theory that offers particular advantages in analysing the creation of short-term networks designed for specific purposes. By describing and analysing the role of this relatively new policy-making instrument, I have explored the different sub-networks that operate within the consensus conference process by focussing on the ways in which the conference was organised and how the relationships between the organisers and the participants helped to shape the outcomes. Thus the entire consensus conference sequence from idea to outcome can be thought of as a construction of a network to achieve at least one immediate goal. That goal was a single potential policy input, a consensus position embodied in the report of the lay panel. To realise that goal, the network needed to be recruited and stabilised and its members made to converge on that collective statement. But how is it that a range of disparate actors, including lay and expert, are mobilised to achieve that particular goal and what are the stabilisation devices which enable, or fail to enable this goal to be reached? In the context of the first Australian consensus conference, three key alignment devices emerged: texts, money and people. Yet it is clear from the evidence that some of these network stabilisation devices functioned poorly or not at all. This thesis has drawn attention to the areas in which they were weak and what importance that weakness had for the kind of policy outcome the consensus conference achieved. The role and extent of these powerful stabilisation devices in networks was therefore a vital issue for analysis. If one of the criteria to evaluate the success of a consensus conference is that it provides the stimulus to hold another, then the Australian conference must be deemed so far a failure. No further Australian consensus conference is planned. However, Australia stands to forfeit a number of advantages if no further consensus conferences or similar occasions are organised. Policy formation in contemporary democracies has had to accommodate an increasing array of new participants in order to track more effectively the diversity of potentially significant opinions on complex policy issues. This process requires new and transparent ways to educate and inform the public on policy issues and to ensure that policy makers are better informed about the needs and concerns of their community. As the evidence presented in thesis for the Australian example and its predecessors overseas suggests, consensus conferences have the potential to play a role in the contemporary policy-making context. But the realisation of that potential will vary according to their institutional contexts and the capacity of the actors to create the temporarily most stable and productive network out of the heterogeneous human and material resources to hand.

The purpose of this study is to explain how Australia has bargained for improved outcomes in its trade with the United States over the 1980s and into the early 1990s. This explanation is sought by means of an analysis of the forces which have shaped Australia's trade policy-making towards the U.S. in the five trading sectors of wheat, sugar, beef, steel and international air passenger transport. The study adopts a theoretical framework which postulates that state actors and institutions are principally responsible for trade policy-making and the concomitant bargaining strategies adopted to improve trade outcomes. However, a state-centred approach needs to be qualified by state actors' accomodation of societal-actor demands for policy action. While exogenous to this domestic bargaining process, influences emanating from the international political economy must also be taken into account. The relationship within and between state and societal actors, influenced as they are by international institutions and ideas, are critical to understanding the bargaining approaches made by one state towards another. It is argued that sectoral trading outcomes between Australia and the U.S. can be understood by reference to a bilateral bargaining process within each trading sector. Within each such bargaining process, Australia has, within broad bilateral and multilateral approaches, devised strategies by which it could mobilize sectorally-specific resources to seek to exploit opportunities and minimise problems so as to improve its trading outcomes. The nature of these sectoral strategies has been influenced by first, the nature of the U.S. policy and policy-making process; second, the Australian domestic bargaining process between state and societal actors; and third, and to a lesser extent, prevailing ideas and the perceptions of the negotiating parties.

This thesis investigates the use of scientific evidence in the process of making public health policy. A case study located within a food regulation setting is used. The aim is to test theory against this case study. The outcome is a theoretical understanding of the use of scientific evidence in the policy-making process in a food regulation setting. Food regulation can influence food composition and food labelling and thereby affect the population's dietary intake. Frequently there are contested values, beliefs, ideologies and interests among stakeholders regarding the use of food regulation as a policy instrument to effect public health outcomes. The protection of public health and safety, taking into account evidence based practice, is generally employed by food regulators as the priority objective during the policy-making process to adjudicate among the competing expectations of stakeholders. However, this policy objective has not been clearly defined and is vulnerable to interpretation and application. The process by which folate fortification policy was made in Australia, in response to epidemiological evidence of a relationship between folate intake during the periconceptional period and reduced risk of neural tube defects, was analysed as a case study of the policy-making process. The folate fortification policy created a precedent for both food fortification and subsequently health claims policy in Australia. A social constructivist method was used to analyse the case study. The method involved deconstructing the food regulatory system into three levels; decision-making process; procedural; and political environment. Data aligned with each level of analysis was collected from 22 key informant interviews, documentary sources, field notes and surveys of both a random sample of the Australian population's knowledge of folate and use of folic acid-containing supplements (n = 5422), and the implementation of folate fortified food products into stores (n = 60). The insights that emerged from each of the three levels of analysis were assessed iteratively to identify a pattern of interrelationships associated with the policy-making process within the food regulatory system. The identified pattern was interpreted against existing theory to gain a theoretical understanding of the public health policy-making process in this political setting. The central argument of this thesis extends Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith's Advocacy Coalition Framework theory to a food regulation setting. The argument is that within the contemporary political climates of neoliberalism and globalisation, a coalition between corporate interests and the values of scientists with a positivist-reductionist approach to public health research is privileged so as to invoke certain scientific evidence to, in turn, legitimise food regulation policy decisions. The theory will help to inform policy-makers about how and why the public health policy objective in a food regulation setting is interpreted and applied. This will contribute to improving policy practice intended to effect public health outcomes. It is concluded that irrespective of the quantity and quality of the scientific evidence that is being made available, scientific evidence cannot be assumed to speak for itself Policy-making is an inherently political and value-laden process and the potential for politically motivated interpretation and application of otherwise value-neutral scientific evidence can undermine the investment in its generation. From this perspective, evidence based practice, far from liberating policy-making from political influence, can itself become part of the problem rather than the solution. Nevertheless, rational evidence based practice is an ideal to strive for and a series of recommendations is proposed to help make the use of evidence in current food regulation policy processes more transparent and democratic.

We live in the Anthropocene – an age where humans dominate natural systems – and there is ample evidence that our current practices degrade the capacity of natural systems to provide us with natural resources. How we, as humans, organize and learn, in communities and among state and other societal actors, constitute a decisive factor for both local management of natural resources and the functioning of the planet Earth. In other words, the outcome of learning has become a matter of governance across multiple levels. This thesis studies the role of social learning in governance of natural resources, asking the following three overarching questions: i) What are the institutional barriers limiting better environmental governance at different scales? ii) Is there a causal connection between social learning and better environmental governance? iii) What are the normative challenges with better environmental governance or social-ecological resilience being linked to the adaptive capacity of actors to learn socially? The primary method is semi-structured in-depth interviews. Papers provide results on institutional barriers such as competency traps and show how customs and current practices and collaborations limit better environmental governance. It is found that social learning might, and might not, lead to better environmental governance, and the causal connection between social learning and better environmental governance is found to be rather weak, with both variables depending on other factors. Enabling policy, a mandate to make broad assessments, or an engaged leader facilitating social learning, are examples of factors that explain the existence of both social learning and outcomes in terms of better environmental governance. It is concluded that since conditions for, and facilitation of, social learning are so important, research should focus more on what initiates social learning and how social learning can be mainstreamed across multiple levels of governance / At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Submitted: Paper 4: Submitted; Paper 5: Submitted.

This research examines how childcare policy in Ontario, Canada assists and constrains low-income urban women’s strategies of provisioning for their children. Childcare policy refers to the range of programs that assist families in reconciling paid work and parenthood. In Ontario, Canada, these programs include childcare fee subsidies, tax deductions, parental leave policies, child benefits/allowances and a program regulating live-in caregivers. Provisioning is used to capture an array of daily work-related activities (e.g. paid, unpaid and caring labour) that mothers perform to ensure their children’s survival and well-being. The qualitative study, based on individual semi-structured interviews with 20 low-income mothers living in an urban community, found that women carry out various activities in provisioning for their children. Some of these are familiar and visible activities such as providing domestic caring labour, engaging in the labour market, and undertaking volunteer work in the community. Others are less visible tasks such as sustaining their health and that of their children, making claims/asserting their rights, and ensuring safety. Low-income urban mothers provision under numerous constraints. A continuous shortage of money and childcare issues are at the core of these constraints. The study also found that the mothers encounter a variety of barriers in the community, such as a limited availability of social and community services and a high level of violence/criminal activity in their neighbourhoods. Issues related to poor health, an inadequate diet, or the necessity of caring for children with special needs further constrain women’s lives. Limited English language skills, racial barriers, and the struggles of adapting to a new country add to the multi-dimensional barriers facing low-income urban mothers. The research indicates that mothers use a variety of strategies to counter these barriers; however, these strategies cost women in terms of their time as well as their physical, mental and emotional energy. Childcare policy assists to a certain extent by providing some support to low-income mothers. Enhancements to the existing policies have potential benefits; however, they are like patches on a leaky bucket. Ultimately, the bucket needs to be replaced with a new way of envisioning family responsibilities, work and childcare.

This research examines how childcare policy in Ontario, Canada assists and constrains low-income urban women’s strategies of provisioning for their children. Childcare policy refers to the range of programs that assist families in reconciling paid work and parenthood. In Ontario, Canada, these programs include childcare fee subsidies, tax deductions, parental leave policies, child benefits/allowances and a program regulating live-in caregivers. Provisioning is used to capture an array of daily work-related activities (e.g. paid, unpaid and caring labour) that mothers perform to ensure their children’s survival and well-being. The qualitative study, based on individual semi-structured interviews with 20 low-income mothers living in an urban community, found that women carry out various activities in provisioning for their children. Some of these are familiar and visible activities such as providing domestic caring labour, engaging in the labour market, and undertaking volunteer work in the community. Others are less visible tasks such as sustaining their health and that of their children, making claims/asserting their rights, and ensuring safety. Low-income urban mothers provision under numerous constraints. A continuous shortage of money and childcare issues are at the core of these constraints. The study also found that the mothers encounter a variety of barriers in the community, such as a limited availability of social and community services and a high level of violence/criminal activity in their neighbourhoods. Issues related to poor health, an inadequate diet, or the necessity of caring for children with special needs further constrain women’s lives. Limited English language skills, racial barriers, and the struggles of adapting to a new country add to the multi-dimensional barriers facing low-income urban mothers. The research indicates that mothers use a variety of strategies to counter these barriers; however, these strategies cost women in terms of their time as well as their physical, mental and emotional energy. Childcare policy assists to a certain extent by providing some support to low-income mothers. Enhancements to the existing policies have potential benefits; however, they are like patches on a leaky bucket. Ultimately, the bucket needs to be replaced with a new way of envisioning family responsibilities, work and childcare.